What shall we talk about?

By Simon

Language exchange is a great way to practise languages you’re learning and to learn more. In my experience, it works best if those involved have reached a similar level in the language(s) they’re studying – ideally at least an intermediate level.

Sometimes the conversation flows, other times it limps along like an ostrich trying to walk through treacle. To avoid the treacle, you could agree on topics in advance and prepare them by learning relevant vocabulary. This works quite well, though after a while, thinking up new topics can be quite a challenge.

One topic I thought up today was cultural differences, particularly as they apply to the workplace. For example, the kinds of things people do when they or someone else in the office has a birthday, or when they leave the company.

What do you talk about with your language exchange partners?

Languages online

By Simon

According to Internet World Stats, there’s still a majority of English speakers online – currently 327 million or just under 30% of total web users. The number of Chinese-speaking web users is catching up fast though – there are currently 153 million of them, or 14% of the total, a number that has grown 374% since 2000. If this kind of growth continues, maybe Chinese speakers will one day outnumber English speakers online, as they already do offline. The numbers of Spanish, French, Portuguese and Arabic speakers on the web have also been increasing rapidly.

Stats like this are perhaps one of the reasons why an increasing number of people are studying Chinese, and also why many companies are having their websites translated into Chinese.

I came across the stats site via the Global Language Monitor, which “documents, analyzes and tracks trends in language the world over, with a particular emphasis upon Global English.” – looks interesting.

Number learning Chinese soars

By Simon

According to an article on the BBC, the number of people outside China learning Mandarin Chinese has soared to 30 million over the past five years. The report mentions that in London the majority of kids learning Mandarin have parents who work in finance industry – they perceive that a knowledge of Mandarin will be very useful for their offspring in the future.

In 1998, 6,000 students were studying Mandarin in the USA; there are now 50,000. The report goes on to claim that “It’s self-evident that children will be much better off economically and in job seeking if Chinese programmes are adopted.” I’m not convinced of this – knowledge of Chinese can be useful but isn’t necessarily sufficient to secure you a good job. Other skills and qualifications are needed as well.

The article speculates that Mandarin may replace English as the global language, and concludes that this probably won’t happen just yet, but could do within 100 years or so.

What do you think – could Mandarin take over from English as the most widely spoken language?

Podcast language courses

By Simon

I came across an interesting article today about using podcasts to learn languages. It lists a number of useful sites for languages such as Spanish, French and Russian, and mentions that numerous similar podcasts are available on iTunes. I just had a search in iTunes and have found quite a few free podcasts for various languages, including Greek, Tibetan, Chinese and French, and I’ve subscribed to some Irish and Scottish Gaelic ones. All I need to do now is find time to listen to them.

There are also links to podcasts in many languages here, and to some language learning podcasts here, where alongside such popular languages as Spanish and Japanese, you can find lessons in Mohawk and Osaka dialect.

Talking for Britain

By Simon

At the moment I’m reading a fascinating book about the English language in the UK called Talking for Britain – A Journey Through the Nation’s Dialects, by Simon Elmes. It draws on the BBC’s Voices survey and shows that regional English is very much alive and well, and constantly changing. Although many of the old rural dialects are disappearing, new urban ones are evolving.

One of the things the book discusses is terms of affection or greeting, which include me ‘ansum (my handsome) in Cornwall; my lover, in Bristol and the West Country (Wess Vinglun); mi duck, loov (love), yowth (youth) or cock in the Midlands; and chuck in Lancashire. These are generally used by anyone to anyone, though can lead to misunderstanding when used to people from other areas.

Other interesting words I’ve come across include tiddy oggy, a potato pie or pasty in Cornwall and Devon; ferniggle, to play truant in the West of England; agger-jaggers, sea mist in Kent; obzocky, unattractive – from Trinidad; mollycrosh, to hit – from Wigan; gennel, snicket or twitchel, an alley in different parts of the Midlands; and skopadiddle/skopadiggle – a mischievous child in Sheffield.

There are more examples here, and there are clips of interviews with people from all over the UK on the Voices site. I found some of the Cornish people most difficult to understand.

Benefits of bilingualism

By Simon

According to a report on ScienceDaily, speaking two languages may help stave off dementia by up four years compared to people who are monolingual. Being bilingual, along with physical activity, education and social engagement help to build “cognitive reserve”, which includes enhanced neural plasticity (the ability of nerve cells in the brain to change their function and to make new connections), compensatory use of alternative brain regions, and enriched brain blood supply, all of which are thought to delay the onset of dementia.

The study, which is published in the February 2007 issue of Neuropsychologia, compared the records of 184 patients at a clinic in Toronto, Canada. About half the patients studied were bilingual while the rest were monolingual. The researchers found that the mean age of onset of dementia symptoms in the monolingual group was 71.4 years, while the bilingual group was 75.5 years.

A similar study carried out a few years ago at York University in the UK demonstrated similar results.

Attitudes to languages

By Simon

I came across an interesting article today which discusses, among other things, attitudes to Irish in Ireland. The writer is a native speaker of Irish from Connemara who bemoans the feelings of inferiority about their language felt by many people in the Gaeltachtaí (the areas where Irish is, in theory, the main language).

Here are a few extracts:

In Ireland Irish is more of an emotional question than a linguistic one. The sound of Irish seems to be lodged in the sub-conscious mind of our people. That might explain why discussions about Irish are more of an emotional nature than about the intricacies of the language itself.

Never is there as much emotion expressed in relation to the other languages they failed to learn at school or didn’t enjoy. And even less knowledge about them. The sounds that I made as a child are still ringing in our ears and pounding in our hearts waiting to be released.

I’ve witnessed many people in the Galltacht expressing the belief that Gaeltacht people have a real sense of pride about their language and would prefer to keep the ‘blow-ins’ out. This may be true of some but the truth is that a feeling of inferiority is rampant among native Irish speakers and has been for centuries.

English is felt to be the ‘better’ language by many in the Gaeltacht.

The effect of losing our language is a subtle shift in our harmony with ourselves. It will not make headlines but its survival is necessary for our fundamental feeling of belonging and our understanding of who we really are.

Similar sentiments and attitudes are unfortunately true for many other minority languages, and indeed ‘non-standard’ dialects. The situation isn’t entirely gloomy in Ireland though – many pupils at the increasingly popular gaelscoileanna (schools that teach everything through the medium of Irish), seem to be proud to speak Irish.

Kacab genals

By Simon

During the mid-19th century, London’s costermongers (sellers of fruit and veg) and butchers invented a form of slang known as back slang or kacab genals in order to talk amongst themselves without their customers understanding. They reversed words and pronounced them as far as possible according to their spelling. Extra vowels were inserted where necessary, and initial h’s were often pronounced ch /tʃ/ (tS) or sh /ʃ/ (S), as in dee-aitch for head, esroch for horse, eemosh for home, and vatch for have. The only back slang word that passed into common usage was yob, which original just meant boy and had no negative connotations.

Back slang is still used to some extent, according to a report on Word of Mouth on the BBC, which is where I got the inspiration for this post. More details of back slang can be found here and here.

A variant of back slang is Pig Latin or Igpay Atinlay, which usually involves moving the initial consonant or consonant cluster from the beginning of a word to the end and adding ay, or just adding ay if a word starts with a vowels. For example, Ymay overcrafthay isway ullfay ofway eelsway.

Verlan is a form of back slang used in France that reverses the syllables rather than the letters. For example, flic (cop) = keuf, mec (man) = keum, and bizarre (weird) = zarb/zarbi. The name Verlan comes from l’envers (inverse).

Mobile novels

By Simon

Recently the first Mobile Phone Novel Awards were held in Japan. The winner was a woman from Osaka, whose novel concerns a love affair between a schoolgirl and a gigolo. You can see a Japanese version of the report here. The Japanese have apparently been reading novels and manga on their phones for a few years, though this is the first time I’ve heard of this phenomenon. Some of the authors of these novels apparently write them entirely or partly on their phones as well, which must lead to very sore thumbs!

I think such novels are quite popular in China, but do you know if they have caught on elsewhere?

Have any of you read a mobile novel like this? Are they written in a different style to printed books?