Talkin' About Talk Date Archives

Should we teach languages in elementary schools?

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I recently got a note from a mother whose daughter's school had a program of teaching Chinese and Spanish to grade schoolers. Will it result in linguistic confusion, she asked? It's a good question, but it's not a worry. Children under the age of 10 are absolutely hardwired to learn languages. In many other countries they learn three or four, often at the same time -- with no ill effects. Our tradition in America, even with all the languages spoken here, has been not to start language study until high school -- and our kids are poorer for it. Now, though, we're recognizing what a joyous thing language learning is for children, and early language programs are gaining momentum. The language profession calls them FLES programs, Foreign Language in the Elementary School.

The theoretical underpinning for FLES comes from studies of the brain. Researchers who have seen the brain in action, say it's most receptive to foreign language before the age of ten, after which receptivity starts to decline. If you wait until middle or high school to start, you have to work harder to learn a language, because the brain doesn't have the plasticity it had in childhood.

There's also a good deal of value in exposing children to the sounds and rhythms of other tongues. Part of learning languages is getting past the notion that English is the "right" or only way to talk and other languages are "funny." Children who take FLES don't have the inhibitions that teenagers often have when they start a language. Kids love to imitate new sounds -- and they're good at it. So if you start a language before the age of ten, chances are improved that you’ll speak it later without a noticeable accent. There's also the benefit that FLES can open children's minds to other cultures, since culture goes along with language study, especially in the early grades where songs, games, and the arts are part of class.

So what else can you expect of a FLES program? Above all, if a student sticks with it, the long-term gain is higher proficiency in the language. We know that students who started early achieve higher scores on Advanced Placement tests in language than those who started in their teens. There's also been a great deal of study about what produces high achievement in languages. You may be surprised to hear that it isn't high IQ, musical aptitude, ability in math or chess -- or most of the other things you might try to correlate with success. It really boils down to two things: time on task and motivation. Both flow from starting a foreign language early. If our kids start young and pursue a language through college, they'll have enough time on task. And because it's fun in elementary school, they're likely to look forward to studying languages later. They'll be more motivated. And emerging research shows that students who started languages early did better than those who didn't on tests in Reading, Language Arts, Social Studies and Math. So there are benefits beyond learning the language itself.

But even if all that's true, isn't the grade school day already full? How can we squeeze in another subject, even if it's worthwhile?

Part of the answer is that FLES teachers reinforce other subjects, while teaching the language. We see that again and again. When a FLES teacher works on days of the week, weather, maps, shopping, and other real-life topics in the language class, she or he is reviewing what is taught by other teachers about numbers, dates, temperature, colors, and money. When teaching map reading skills, the language teacher reinforces social studies work on geography. In short, FLES can be integrated into the curriculum, making the rest of a child's learning stronger.

So, should we teach foreign languages in the elementary school? The answer is unequivocally: YES!

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Gladys Lipton, Director, of the National FLESTAR Institute in 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 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.

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Posted by: Ron Wolf at June 16, 2005 06:07 AM

Where did writing come from?

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There are dozens of writing systems in the world, in a bewildering variety. They're written from left to right or right to left and even from top to bottom. Their symbols come in all shapes and sizes. Unlike spoken language, which started many thousands of years before writing and whose origins are cloudy, we have a very good idea of how and when writing began. Because fragments of some of the earliest writing still exist, carved on rocks, we can trace its evolution through time.

The discovery of writing was almost inevitable when a society grew complex enough to need it. As long as people are in small groups, everyone knows who did what for whom. But when people settle in towns, commerce becomes more complicated. A potter makes pots, a weaver makes cloth, an administration collects taxes. At some point, there's a need to keep track of everyone's contributions. Records might be kept with knots in string, or with notched sticks. And everywhere, people draw pictures to represent things. In Stone Age caverns, we drew pictures of prey animals. In modern times, we make pictures of things we want people to buy.

A second condition for discovering writing is a certain kind of language, ones in which words are likely to consist of only one syllable. It happened at least three times that we know of, and probably more: it happened over 5000 years ago in ancient Mesopotamia, now southern Iraq, with a language known as Sumerian. And in ancient China over four thousand years ago. And in Middle America, with the Mayan languages. The Mayan writing system, which seems to have originated around the fourth century A.D., died with the Mayan empire. So all the writing systems in the world today can be traced back to just two places: China and Ancient Iraq.

Writing turns out to be a pretty useful thing to have. And once it's discovered, nearby peoples tend to adopt it too. Japan adopted Chinese characters and started writing Japanese words with them. On the other side of the world, Sumerian writing was adopted for many languages between about 2500 and 1000 BC -- and it gradually moved away from being pictures. Sumerian inspired the Egyptian hieroglyphs we know from temples and tombs. And hieroglyphs became the raw material for Phoenician writing that gave the world its alphabets.

There are dozens of alphabets in use today. In addition to Europe and the western hemisphere, they're used across southern and southeastern Asia and on into Oceania. Most of them use 20-30 symbols. But they range in size from a language of the Solomon Islands with 11 letters, to the Khmer alphabet of Cambodia, with 74. They look as different as English, Russian or Hebrew, but it's fairly easy to show that every alphabet—the ones I named and many more—have a common origin: ancient Phoenicia on the eastern shores of the Mediterranean.

The Phoenicians brought their alphabet to the Greeks, who passed it to the Romans, who gave our letters the shapes they have to this day. Greek was also the model for alphabets in Eastern Europe, such as the Cyrillic alphabet of Russian and other tongues. Another descendant of Phoenician was the Aramaic alphabet, from which came writing as different-looking as Hebrew and Arabic -- and all the writings of India and beyond.

Writing originated from some pretty basic characteristics of human beings and human society. And yet, it is not found everywhere. Did you know that, despite its obvious uses, fewer than half of the world's languages even have a writing system? Most languages are only spoken. But that's changing. And as more languages become written, it's the Roman alphabet, brought to the less-developed world by missionaries and linguists, that's spreading writing across the globe.

Where would we be without writing? It's an extraordinary part of language -- and of human history. Without writing, you could reasonably ask, would history even exist?

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Peter T. Daniels, author of The World's Writing Systems. 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 languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

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Posted by: Ron Wolf at June 16, 2005 06:04 AM

Posted by: Webmaster at June 16, 2005 09:13 AM

What causes foreign accents?

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Foreign accents have been around for a long time. The Old Testament tells us how the Gileadites destroyed the infiltrating army of their enemy: They set up roadblocks and made each man who approached them say the Gileadite word "Shibboleth". The Ephraimites couldn't pronounce the "s-h" sound. And when they said "sibboleth" -- the Gileadites killed them on the spot.

The consequences aren't often that dramatic, but we're all experts at detecting things about people from the way they talk. Even on the phone we know a person's sex, approximate age -- even whether he or she is smiling. And like the Gileadites, we usually know right away whether the person is a native speaker of our language. For example, listen to these two voices. Each speaker is reading the phrase:

Please call Stella. Ask her to bring these things with her from the store:

[French accent]

[Sicilian accent]

You should be able to tell right away that one of these people is female and young, and the other is male and somewhat older. You can also tell, just from those few words, that neither is a native English speaker. The first is a native of France; the second is from Sicily. Let's call them "Dominique" and "Marcello".

What is it about their speech that lets us immediately recognize them as non-native English speakers? And what makes their accents different from each other? Well, linguists talk about something they call "language transfer". When you first learn a new language, you'd like to sound like a native, but you unavoidably carry over, or transfer, some of the characteristics of your own language to it. Dominique, for example, wants to say these, but French doesn't have the "t-h" sound of English, so she uses something from her inventory of French sounds that's close to the "t-h." The result sounds something like "zeese". Marcello doesn't have the "t-h" sound either; so he substitutes Sicilian "t" or "d" for it (he says "deese tings" for "these things"). You may have noticed that he also tacks vowels onto the ends of English words (as in "aska her to bringa deze tings"). This happens because most words in Sicilian end in vowels, and it doesn't feel right to him to end words in consonants. He's transferring not just sounds but his Sicilian language habits to English.

These are exactly the things that actors pay attention to when they want to sound like foreign speakers of English. Here's Mel Blanc portraying the amorous French skunk, Pepe Le Pew. Notice how he modifies his "t-h" sounds, and how he stresses English words on their last syllable, as though they were French.

[Pepe Le Pew clip]

So when Dominique and Marcello speak English -- and when we try to speak foreign languages -- are we doomed to sound like cartoon characters forever? Of course not. We can't help starting out that way. But what Mel Blanc does to his English to give it a French flavor, we can do to our French, Russian, or Arabic to give it a French, Russian, or Arabic flavor.

Can that make us sound like native speakers? Well, yes and no. Professional linguists say that people who start learning a new language after puberty can never completely get rid of traces of their original tongue. Sensitive instruments in a linguistics lab can spot them. But we don't live in a lab. And most of us know someone who speaks a second language so well they don't sound foreign at all. With hard work and uninhibited imitation of sounds -- maybe inspired by Pepe Le Pew -- we can gradually get an accent that sounds very close to that of a native. And that's a pretty good goal to shoot for.

That linguistic thought comes from Dr. Steven Weinberger, director of the linguistics program, and the Speech Accent Archive at George Mason University. 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, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.

How do you keep languages in a museum?

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Yes, America, as of 1997 there is such a place, located in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. It's not yet open to the public, but the National Museum of Language is gradually taking shape. What a unique institution! A museum dedicated entirely to the subject of language. Everyone visits museums -- to see (and sometimes touch) physical objects like airplanes, paintings, bleached bones and antique coins. But language? Language is mainly sounds, and words and books, and they're in libraries. What'll you do in a language museum? And why?

Most of us want to know more about language: how it developed, how languages differ, how the body works as a language machine. The Museum's purpose is to demonstrate what we know about language, how we know it, why it's important -- and give you a chance to explore it. Enjoyably.

So what will the museum look like? What's in it?

Well, there will be a library, one that pulls together the nation's most comprehensive collection of information on language. Some will be in the form of books and journals; much of it will be on-line -- accessible wherever you are on the planet. A unique feature of the library will be its collection of speech samples: samples from hundreds of languages and many dialects -- with the eventual goal of having a sample of every language in the world. It'll be an extraordinary resource for language research.

Of course the Museum will also have things on display, and displays will be multimedia and interactive.

You'll see and hear how the science of speech analysis evolved from the use of gas flames to voiceprint technology. You can take home an image of your own speech from a sound spectrogram. Or learn how speech synthesizers work -- from those annoying telephone voices to important devices that allow physically challenged people like Steven Hawking to speak. You'll be able to talk with a computer and see how well it does in understanding and creating speech.

And you'll get answers -- in plain talk -- to questions such as why human beings have the gift of speech but animals don't.

There'll be an interactive wall-sized map to show where each of the world’s languages are spoken. You'll see how languages develop and change. How they differ. How they spread over space and time. And how they die.

There'll be an interactive display that shows the linguistic heritage of America. It will look at language diversity in the U.S. -- including our aboriginal tongues -- with sound bytes and video clips that show the dialects of American English -- and where your own dialect fits in.

There'll be an animated model of the human speech apparatus, such as lungs, vocal cords, lips, teeth and tongue. It'll show how they work to create vowels, consonants, pitch and volume -- the infinite variety of sounds in thousands of languages and dialects.

And you'll see what we know about how language is acquired. How babies learn language. How second languages are learned.

Exhibits will explore the role of language in society, how it relates to law, commerce, technology, and the world's great religions -- rich subjects, reaching back to the beginning of civilization.

An important subject is the preservation of endangered languages. U.S. universities, linguistic organizations, communities -- and people and institutions in other countries, as well as the U.N. -- are collecting information on threatened languages. But there's need for a central place where the information is brought together. The Museum sees itself potentially as a national repository for preserving ethnic cultures through preservation of their languages.

There will be much, much more. This is only a peek at what the Museum eventually will become. As it grows, the National Museum welcomes your ideas for its future -- and your participation in its work. Why don't you become a member?

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes from Dr. Amelia C. Murdoch, President of the National Museum of Language, co-sponsor of this series. And this is the Five-Minute Linguist at the College of Charleston. If you have a question or comment, or want to join the Museum, 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.

How many native American languages are there?

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A surprising number of people think there's just one language native to the U.S.: "Indian". Nothing could be further from the truth.

[Mohawk sound clip]

You've just heard a greeting in a language spoken here for centuries before the Pilgrims landed on the continent: It's Mohawk, one of nearly 300 languages that we know were spoken north of Mexico before the arrival of Europeans. Many have disappeared, but there are still about 180 of them. They're not demonstrably related to Indo-European, or any other large language family. They constitute between 50 and 60 different families of their own -- and the languages are as different from each other as English is from Arabic or Japanese.

Some of the language families are quite large. The Athabaskan-Eyak-Tlingit family, for example, contains 39 different languages, spoken from Alaska through western Canada into Oregon, California, and the Southwest. It includes Navajo, with about 80,000 speakers, the most of any indigenous language in the country.

A family called Algic is best known for its largest branch: Algonquian, spoken along the Atlantic seaboard from Labrador to Virginia. It was Algonquian speakers who met the Pilgrims and Sir Walter Raleigh, and gave us words such as caribou, skunk, moccasin, hominy, and raccoon. Algonquian languages are also spoken across most of Canada and down to the Plains in the U.S Midwest: languages like Shawnee, Fox, Potawatomi, Cree, Cheyenne, and Blackfoot.

Mohawk, the language you heard earlier, is a member of the Iroquoian family. It's still spoken in Quebec, Ontario, and New York State. One of its relatives is Cherokee, which in the 17th century, was spoken in the southern Appalachians. Like several other indigenous peoples, the Cherokee were forced to march westward in 1838-9 along the so-called "Trail of Tears," so the largest Cherokee community is now in Oklahoma. Iroquoian languages gave us place names like Schenectady, Ontario, Ohio, and Kentucky, as well as Canada.

These languages are so diverse, it's hard to make generalizations about them. But they're far from being simple, or "primitive." In fact, their grammars are very complex. If you saw the movie Windtalkers, for example, you know that speakers of Navajo used their language as a secret code to baffle the Japanese in World War II.

Some of the languages have sounds that are unusual to English speakers, such as popping sounds in the back of the throat. Some have distinctive tone, so that the pitch of the voice on a syllable can completely change the meaning of a word. Navajo has both of these.

And words can sometimes be very long, carrying as much meaning as a complete sentence in English.

Each of the languages shows us a unique way of looking at the world, of packaging experience into words, of making subtle distinctions. If you speak an Eskimoan language, for example, and you want to say 'that caribou', there's no single word equivalent to English 'that'. You first have to notice whether the caribou is standing or moving. If it's stationary, you have to specify whether it's visible or out of sight. If you can see it, you must specify whether it's near you, near the person you're talking to, or far away. Or that it's above or below you. Or that it's approaching, or that it's the same caribou you were talking about earlier. Each of these ideas is packaged in just one word -- translated simply 'that' in English.

Unfortunately, we're losing the melodies and the unique perspective of our aboriginal tongues. The languages are dying. Some disappeared because their speakers perished in warfare or epidemics. Others because their speakers chose to use other languages instead. It's likely that no more than a dozen of the languages will survive this century. And like an environmental disaster, it will be a great loss. Our lives are richer because we have them.

That's the linguistic thought for today, which comes to us from Dr. Marianne Mithun, Professor of Linguistics at the University of California, Santa Barbara. 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 languages, go to our website at www.cofc.edu/linguist. And keep in mind that wherever you are, and whatever you do... language makes a difference.