Talkin' About Talk Date Archives

Why Should Americans Learn Languages?

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I've been astonished to hear what people as far apart as Denmark and Hong Kong have told me as a joke that seems to span the world. It goes like this: What do you call someone who speaks lots of languages? Answer: multilingual. And someone who speaks two languages: bilingual. And some who speaks just one language? An American. Not funny. But it has a ring of truth. The monolingual American is notorious for gaffes that are made as companies try to sell burgers in India where beef isn't eaten or "finger lickin' good" is translated into Chinese as "eat your fingers off." While gaffes like that have cost us in economic terms, the lack of language skills in a post 9/11 world have more serious repercussions. It is not a joking matter.

We can't afford not to understand foreign languages and cultures at a time when national security depends more than ever on clear communication with allies and potential adversaries.

Do you know we're the only industrialized nation that routinely graduates kids from high school knowing only one language? The only major country. And the latest enrollment survey tells us only 33% of them study a language. Two-thirds of our kids... don't. Meanwhile, the government has great backlogs in materials waiting for translation, a shortage of language specialists everywhere, and a readiness level of only 30% in the most critical languages.

So that's why a U. S. Senate resolution proposed 2005 as the Year of Languages in the U.S. It's a national celebration to call attention to the importance -- and the benefits -- of language learning. Throughout the year you'll see activities across the country aimed at jump-starting a sense of urgency about language. There'll be poster contests in schools and billboards on the roads; statewide competitions and essay contests; folk festivals and cultural programs and national roundtables -- and even a radio program called Talkin' About Talk.

Part of the effort is to encourage state and local school officials to look at their priorities. Here in South Carolina, for example, we had an innovative program in Japanese for elementary middle and high schools kids. It did extremely well for 12 years and reached over 4,500 students. Then came a budget crunch. And one of the first things to go was Japanese. We have to get rid of the notion that language is some kind of "extra" in the curriculum, a frill that can easily be cut.

The paradigm has changed. 70% of Americans interact every day with someone whose native language is not English. In a global society, no matter what job a student seeks, he or she will be just as likely to do business with South Korea as with South Carolina. And who would deny that learning another language helps you understand the structure and workings of your own language better? Not to mention the understanding you gain of other people's world view. Understanding what other people think, and why, helps us be better friends and better negotiators worldwide. And if administrators need another reason, the Senate resolution points out that students with four or more years in a foreign language scored higher on the verbal section of the SAT than students who didn't.

We need to give language learning opportunities to all students, especially in elementary school. That's really the place to start -- early in a child's education when language learning is a joyous thing for a 6-year-old. And to build the country's language capacity, we have to build a pipeline of students who get language skills early in life and continue all the way through college.

A recent poll indicated that 96% of Americans think students should learn languages in school. So we understand the problem. We just need to attack it.

So the attack is under way, led by the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages, with an Honorary Committee co-chaired by Senators Dodd of Connecticut and Cochran of Mississippi. People like prize-winning poet Maya Angelou, Governor Mark Warner of Virginia and other leaders in business, academia, and government are helping. You can be a part of the effort too, and I hope you will. Changing perceptions about the importance of languages won't be easy, which is why the Year of Languages is really just the first year of a long-term campaign. First, find out more about the whole thing at www.yearoflanguages.org. Then find out how your community and schools are going to celebrate. And volunteer to help make the year a success.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from the American Council on the Teaching of Foreign Languages. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Where did English Come From?

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Well, English did come from the same ancestor as German, but there's a lot more to the story. In the fifth century, Celts lived in the British Isles. But warfare among them became so fierce that one local king asked for help from Germanic tribes living in southern Denmark and northern Germany. He got more than he bargained for: the tribes came as allies, but they liked the island so much they decided to take it over.

Two of the main tribes in this migration came from regions called Angeln and Saxony. Which is why we call the language they brought to Britain "Anglo-Saxon". The speech of the tribes who stayed on the Continent eventually became modern German, Dutch, and Scandinavian languages; and Anglo-Saxon, also known as "Old English", grew into the English we speak today.

On their new turf the Anglo-Saxons started to talk in new ways. The tribes they drove to the fringes of Britain left them some Celtic place names. But more important, the Anglo-Saxons were converted to Christianity, so a good deal of Latin crept into their language. Another influence showed up in the ninth and tenth centuries as Britain -- which by then was called Angle-land, or England -- was invaded again, this time by Scandinavian cousins of the Anglo-Saxons. Viking raiders ruled all of England for a couple of decades. Their contact with the Anglo-Saxons was so close that they've given us some of our most everyday words -- like sister, sky, law, take, window, and the pronouns they, them, and their.

The greatest additions to English resulted from another invasion we all know about: "1066 and all that." England was conquered by descendants of another group of Vikings -- the "Normans", men of the North -- who had settled in the tenth century along the coast of France that still bears their name -- Normandy. They spoke French. And when they took over, the Normans made French the government language of England, which soon became a trilingual country: officials used Norman French, the church used Latin, and the common people spoke a version of English we call "Middle English".

The common people were by far the majority, and by the late fourteenth century, their English reasserted itself over French as the language of Britain. But it was a different English than the Anglo-Saxon spoken before the Conquest. Over the years it absorbed an enormous number of French words for legal, governmental, military, and cultural matters: words like judge, royal, soldier, and a host of food terms like fruit and beef.

English vocabulary wasn't the only thing that was changing. Even before the Norman Conquest, a major overhaul of Old English grammar had begun. In modern English we use word order to distinguish "dog bites man" from "man bites dog". Old English, like Latin, showed who was the biter and who was the bitee by a system of word endings instead. But in Old English, people stressed the first syllables of words so strongly that they began to skip over word endings. Think of how some of us reduce "probably" to "probly", dropping a syllable. This process drove English in the direction of the word-order-based grammar we have today.

What we call "Modern English" grew out of Middle English in response to several developments: at the end of the fifteenth century, printing was introduced into England, which helped standardize the language. And in the sixteenth century Englishmen began to explore the globe. They encountered new things that needed to be talked about with new words. They settled in North America, the Caribbean, Africa, South Asia, Australia, and the South Seas. And the language was enriched by words from everywhere.

As it became a global language, English absorbed many new words. Most of our core vocabulary comes directly from Old English: words like mother, love, cow, and glad. But we have borrowed words from scores of other languages: from Afrikaans to Zend. Most of the words in a large dictionary -- maybe 85 or 90 percent of them -- are either loanwords from other languages or words invented in English using elements borrowed from other languages.

So did English come from German? No-- it's closely related to German, but what began as the tongue of a small tribe in northwestern Europe, morphed over time into something very different -- and something really remarkable.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from John Algeo, linguist and professor emeritus at the University of Georgia. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you'd like to ask a question about language -- go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And if we use your question on the air, we'll send you a membership in the Museum of Language. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

Whatever Happened to Esperanto?

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Have you ever thought to yourself 'wouldn't it be wonderful if everyone in the world spoke the same language?' or wouldn't it be almost as good if everyone could speak their own language at home but agreee to learn the same second language for international communication? What if there were languages that did not belong to any one country; a language so easy you could learn it quickly, like a few weeks or months.

Well, if you like that idea, you're in good company. Starting as early as the 17-th century, there have been hundreds of proposals for an international language and they still keep coming. But for a variety of reasons only one of them had much success, and that was Esperanto.

It was invented in Poland in the late 19-th century by a man named Ludwig Zamenhof. He wasn't actually a linguist or a language teacher, only a man that dreamed of a universal language. And he created a pretty good one. I have friends who have heard of Esperanto, but have never heard it spoken, say to me 'Isn't it mostly Spanish?' Well, no. The name Esperanto has a Spanish flavor, but the vocabulary of the language is a mix of words from Eastern and Central Europe. Some of it comes from Latin, and the romance languages. Some of it comes from Germanic languages like English. And it has a sprinkling of Slavic. It uses a Latin alphabet like ours, slightly modified with phonetic spelling and very simple grammar. It's beauty above all is that it's deliciously predictable. There are no irregularities, none of those pesky exceptions that make natural languages so slippery and so natural.

To me, Esperanto has kind of an eerie sound. Let's listen to a few lines from the 1965 classic film "Incubus", the only feature lengtth film ever made in Esperanto. Here's the young William Shatner, shortly before he became Captain Kirk of Star Trek. I am told that his pronunciation could be improved, but here he is, talking Esperanto with a beautiful and innocent-looking succubus who, unknown to him, has come to seduce him and steal his soul.

[ Sound clip from movie ]

So let's go back to the question of what happened to Esperanto. It was created in 1887. It got a big boost in popularity from the war weariness of the 1920's but then seems to have faded away. But it didn't die out. Though it had ups and downs in the 20-th century, the language is now alive and well and gaining in popularity, in part, because of the internet. Esperanto speakers are dispersed so it's hard to get an exact count on them, but most estimates put the number at more than a million speakers world-wide. There are Esperanto novels and magazines, a translation of the Bible, and the Lord of the Rings. There is Esperanto poetry, an International Esperanto Museum, and, best of all, there are online chat rooms where you can talk to people all over the world. And you can hear broadcasts in Esperanto on over twenty radio stations, like Radio Beijing or even Vatican Radio. There's an internet station that plays nothing but music with vocals in Esperanto twenty-four hours a day. And the language has moved into places it was never heard before; places like Mongolia, Indonesia, and the Congo. And how about hungary? Esperanto is the third most popular foreign language in Hungarian high schools. And I should add that there are Esperanto clubs popping up on college campuses all over the US, including here at the College of Charleston.

The year of languages is a time to reach out beyond the English-speaking world. So let me challenge you. Why not learn Esperanto? It's quick, it's easy, and thanks to the internet, you can use it worldwide. Talk to someone in Shanghai or Romosabiersk? If you want to learn more about it, check the website of my colleague, Donald Harland, one the the country's leading Esperantists and contributor to this program. Go to www.esperanto.net.

That's the linguistic thought for today. And this is the Five Minute Lingust at the College of Charleston in cooperation with the National Museum of Languages. If you would like to ask a question about languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. In the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do, Language makes a difference.

Comments

Posted by: Jack Wilkerson at March 16, 2005 08:20 PM

Posted by: Henry V. Janoski at March 26, 2005 01:37 AM

Posted by: Linguist at March 26, 2005 11:40 AM

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Is British English Superior to Ours?

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Suppose you had the chance to record a sample of human language for aliens to listen to. What language would you choose? You don't have to make that choice, because someone has already done it: when the Voyager Space Probes were launched in 1977, they carried recordings of short greetings in 55 human languages -- including English -- for the benefit of otherworldly beings. But what sort of English did they record?

You may be thinking. Surely English today is one language: we all understand the written form of English, and the core of its grammar and vocabulary are commonly understood. But like any language, English comes in a number of flavors, and a couple of flavors dominate the rest: American and British. These two titans of English vie for world domination, and the coming decades will be crucial in determining which of the dialects is going to come out on top.

In a sense, American English already has the upper hand, and it got it by might, rather than right. Great Britain gets the credit for successfully spreading English around the world during its glorious days of empire. But the cultural and economic empire of the U.S. has pushed our own dialect to the forefront. We read of people lining up on the docks in 19th century New York to read the latest installments in the serialized novels of Charles Dickens. Today the situation is reversed: if you happen to be on the other side of the Atlantic you'll see a line (or rather, a queue) of people waiting for the premiere of the latest Hollywood blockbuster in London's Leicester Square.

American English has pretty much won the numbers game, but Brits are inclined to think that their strain of the language is the purer one: in other words, we may have won on quantity, but they're holding all the aces on quality. Is there anything to this argument? Let's look at the canon: the Brits do have things you can never take away from them: the King James Bible, Shakespeare, the romantic and metaphysical poets, the great tradition of 19th century novelists. But despite British English's impressive credentials, Americans have never shown any sign of subservience to it. American English has gone its own way from the beginning. As one 20th-century American writer observed, "Why should we permit the survival of the curious notion that our language is a mere loan from England, like a copper kettle that we must keep scoured and return without a dent?"

The Brits, of course, take a different view of American linguistic independence and innovation. As one of their writers put it: "The Americans are determined to hack their way through the language, as their ancestors did through the forests, regardless of the valuable growths that may be sacrificed in blazing the trail."

Leaving aside the questions of quality and quantity — the question that remains is this: what's the future of these two dialects of English? It turns out that the wild card in the future of English is held not by the Brits or the Yanks, but rather by those who will speak it as a second or foreign language. In a few years, native speakers of English will be outnumbered by those for whom it is a second language. And it turns out that those folks may not want any branded variety of English; they just want the kind that you can use. Consider this: in 2000, a Chinese program for steel engineers chose neither Americans nor Brits, but rather Belgians to teach them English: the Chinese saw it as an advantage that the Belgians, like the Chinese themselves, were not native speakers. The Belgians, they thought, would have a feel both for the difficulties of learning the language in adulthood, and for using it with other nonnative speakers.

Imagine, then, a conversation between a Belgian teacher of English and a Chinese engineer: if a pronoun fails to decline and there is no native speaker there to hear it, does it make a difference? The heyday of the big-brand dialects of English are probably over. In this century, the chief demand placed on English will be its ability to adapt to the needs of the millions of speakers who use it as a second language.

And what about that clip recorded for the denizens of outer space? Well, here it is — the voice of English that will greet aliens lucky enough to hear it: "Greetings from the children of Earth."

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from lexicographer Orin Hargraves in Carroll County, Maryland. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston, in cooperation with the National Museum of Language. If you have a question about language or would like to read more about "Who Owns English," go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And in the meantime, keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.