This post is partly inspired by International Mother Language Day, which was on Tuesday, Georgia’s recent holiday to Cambodia where she got chatting with the locals, and my current field work in Nepal, which involves me spending my days talking a second language (Nepali) to try and document a third (Yolmo).

Today’s area of improvement for English is more something to do with the kind of English I grew up speaking, and the attitude of those English speakers. There are certainly parts of the world where English speakers are at home with linguistic diversity (Singapore and South Africa are two that come to mind) and of course there are many people for whom English is their second (or third, or fourth) language and inherently part of people’s multilingual lives.

I grew up in an Anglo middle-class suburb where speaking English was the norm. In fact, ‘norm’ understates it - I couldn’t name a single friend from primary school who I knew spoke a language other than English at home. Like many people in Australia I have a migrant background, but even though my grandmother was a native Polish (and German) speaker it never occurred to me that I should learn Polish - she speaks more than competent English and never spoke her own language with my mum.

We ‘learned’ language at school. In fact, if you look at my school records I apparently have ten years worth of Italian education, but you’d never know given that all I have to show for it is some arbitrary vocabulary and the ability to break out the occasional verse of a nursery rhyme. When I changed schools halfway though high school there was never any serious discussion that I should try and keep up my Italian, or try and catch up on their German or Japanese.

I certainly had friends in high school who had a greater love of language than I did - but it’s because I’d never been shown the intrinsic worth of learning another language. It wasn’t until living in Poland, and finally learning my grand-maternal language that it clicked. The thrill of learning to say things in the past tense, the realisation of patterns in your own language, and most formative thing for me on that trip was the ability to communicate with elderly and distant relatives who had never learned English.

Sure, I didn’t rush home and double major in Mordern language, but it gave me a much greater appreciation of the linguistic convenience of my monolinguistic lifestyle. Since my adventures my sister spent half a year living in China and learning Mandarin, and my parents are celebrating their mid-life crisis learning French. I’ve lived in Poland and Nepal and when travelling in other countries I’m much more aware of how convenient it is more me that I happen to be a native speaker of the language that so many use.

I’m going to cut this short before I steer into the usual platitudes about language broadening the mind - but sometimes the mind needs to be broadened before the language learning can start.

I hope you’re all having a great day and get the change to speak your own language at some point today!

If, like me, you’re an English native speaker it’s hard not to feel a little bit guilty on a day like today. I’ve never had to think about my future prospects being linked to a language test, rarely had to worry about whether people will speak my language when I travel and never had to face schooling in a foreign language.

There’s a great post over at Fully (Sic) today about Mother Language in Australia if you’re interested.

When I’m in Kathmandu I pass this sign nearly every day when I want to make a foray into the tourist wonderland that is Thamel:

I had been doing so for over six months until Andrew came for a visit and sniggered every time we walked past this sign. Perhaps you’ve already had a snigger too?

See, what I didn’t know, and what the people of Nepal clearly don’t know, is that in some online communities ‘cyber’ is short for ‘cyber sex’ - and so every time Andrew saw this sign and the many like it he found it to be hilarious and inappropriate. It certainly brings a new sense to my favourite internet cafe ‘Meeting Point Cyber.’

If you’re literate in any language with a Latin script then you’ve learned your ABCs. Good job, considering it’s a completely random ordering of elements. The English alphabet is taken from the Roman script, which itself was taken from earlier Greek scripts that go back a good 3000 years to the Phoenicians. No one has a half-way plausable theory as to why that order was decided upon, but it’s hardly changed since the earliest records, except for when a language added, modified or removed a character.

Although it has a venerable history there isn’t much of a system about it. In this respect the Devanagari alphabet is a much more elegant system. This alphabet was set up in the 11th century by Sanskrit grammarians who based it on phonetic principles. Check out the chart below from Ancient Scripts:

We start off with the vowels, but it’s the consonants where the fun is. We start with the velar position, and move through voiceless (aspirated and not), voiced (breathy and not) then nasal. Move your way though the mouth from back to front as you go down the alphabet - you’ve got your alveo-palatal affricates, then your retroflexed, alveolar and bilabial stops before your grab-bag of approximents and fricatives.

Devanagari script and modifications of it are used throughout India, Nepal and Tibet. Even if you don’t use the script you can’t help but admire it.

A friend and I were catching up, and working our way though our list of mutual acquaintances.

“How’s your sister?” I asked.

“Same as ever, she’s the penultimate gossip.”

“Who,” I asked “is the ultimate gossip?” I asked, presuming that after such an in depth catch up either of us were likely nominees.

My friend look flummoxed, and conceded that she assumed penultimate to be an intensified form of ultimate. It’s a relatively easy thing to misanalyse; it’s not as though the pen- prefix makes the meaning particularly clear. It’s from the Latin paene ‘almost,’ but that doesn’t really help.

It’s not a word that gets thrown around a lot in daily conversation. I remember distinctly learning the meaning of this word - it was while I was studying Polish, of all things. In Polish the stress of a word is always on the second last syllable - but it sounds much classier to say “the penultimate syllable.” Unless you learnt the word in Polish lessons, or through competitive sporting finals then it’s not likely you’ve come across this word much in your life.

Stories like this are good to share because the more we all acknowledge that even the most educated people have gaps in their linguistic knowledge then the less we can be stressed about occasionally getting things a bit wrong.

A lot of my day-to-day conversational competency in Nepali comes from stubbornly refusing to talk to cafe staff and cab drivers in English. While it was a slog at the start is means that at places where I’m a regular they now use Nepali with me all the time.

I was sitting in one of these cafes the other day and met some Australians who had been volunteering here for a month. The waiter confirmed my order with an ‘ok didi’ - which literally translates into ‘ok older sister.’ In Nepal everyone is integrated into social relationships that are the extension of a family dynamic. As he walked away the Australians were impressed that I’d been referred to in Nepali, but then one of them asked ‘wouldn’t it be more flattering if he said ‘bahini’ (lit. younger sister).’

I was so shocked at such a suggestion that it took me a moment to figure out why she had mentioned it. The extension of kin terminology is based on a system where age is correlated with respect - to be older is to garner more respect, and indeed I’ve been called ‘didi’ by people much older than me who are trying to be polite or flattering. In a Western mindset though the flattery comes from being thought younger than you are, hence my acquaintance’s feelings on the matter being somewhat opposed to my own.

This is one of those great/frustrating things about learning another languages. It’s one thing to learn the words, and it’s another thing to learn the social niceties behind their use. 

I’m not sure how this phonological feature has so far escaped a TwwEh post, especially considering it’s something that I deal with every day when working on Yolmo!

English speakers use pitch, but we use it at the ‘supra-segmental’ level, for things such as making questions but raising the pitch at the end of a sentence. Tone is where you use pitch quality of to make a lexical or grammatical distinction.

Tone is something that English and most Indo-European language speakers think of as exotic because it’s not a prominent feature of their language family, but tone is relatively common world-wide (and in Indo-European there’s some tonal distinctions in Swedish and Norwegian). Of the 527 languages surveyed on WALS 220 have tone.

So what you end up with are words that have exactly the same consonants and vowels but the change in pitch makes completely different words. To give you an example from Mandarin Chinese because it’s one of the most well known tone languages, and because it has an impressive-looking five way contrast:

1. mā “mom”
2. má “hemp”
3. mǎ “horse”
4. mà “scold”
5. ma (an interrogative particle)

The only thing to distinguish these words is the way the register rises, falls or stays level.

But not all tone languages are the same, there are lots of different ways tone can be expressed. Some languages like Chinese use the pitch height, but more importantly it also uses the contour of the pitch as well - it’s relatively easy to hear the rise or fall of these tones in context. Other languages, like Yolmo, make a different between high and low tone by the height of the pitch. This is fine, but often means that in one context a high tone might be lower than a low tone in another context which can make it hard to tune it. For some of these languages the high or low tone might correlate with something like creaky voice or certain initial consonants to make identification easier. For example, Yolmo low tone correlates with breathy voice and if a stop is affricated the tone will always be high.

Some languages have tone marked on the initial syllable of a word, while other languages mark tone on each syllable. The number of tonal distinctions also vary - as you saw above Mandarin has five tones while Yolmo only has two. Pitch accent tend to have more tone; Cantonese has seven tones, and there are possibly languages with more.

On a geeky level I like tone because of its ability to create more information density. Even if you only have a two tone system you automatically double the number of single syllable items you have. A friend once told me he read a paper that there is a higher density of people with ‘perfect pitch’ in languages with pitch heigh, but I didn’t get a reference. If anyone knows this study, do share!

This week we got some friendly mail from Superlinguo reader Tiger:

“I’m studying linguistics at university for my undergrad and was essentially just wondering what pathways you guys took, academically or career-wise, to get to where you are! Compiling dictionaries of/doing fieldwork in minority languages is an area that definitely piques my interest, so I thought I’d just ask.”

Thanks for the question! These days Georgia has a full time job doing something that’s not linguistics (but still pretty cool, so we can forgive her) - but she still finds the kind of training that she got while studying linguistics useful in other things that she does (including hanging out here!) so perhaps I’ll leave it to her to tell you what she found useful about linguistics. Today I’ll tell you my story - I’m sorry it’s a bit of a ramble.

I started off taking undergraduate linguistics as part of my bachelors degree. It was on a whim that I decided to take the introductory class, having lived with someone who was studying linguistics the year before, I thought I’d see what she actually studied. I was taken with it immediately, and I’m sure many other people have similar stories. The thing that drew me in was that linguistics combined so many areas that interested me, it had lots of process-driven analysis like science but also tackled issues of history, politics and social interaction.

By the end of my Arts degree I was rounding out my majors in Art History and Linguistics. I was all set on doing an Honours year in Art History with a longer term goal of working in art education at a gallery… no story is worth telling without a little sidetracking. Clearly that was not a career plan that went anywhere, and for that you can blame my third-year lecturer who filled my head full of puzzles about the relationship between language and gesture that only a few weeks before I was set to finish my degree I found myself enrolling in another year of linguistics and that lecturer has not been able to get rid of me since.

For those not in Australia or a similar system, an Honours year is an additional year on a 3 year Bachelor degree. It involves higher level course work and a smallish thesis (10 000 to 20 000 words depending on the institution). I wrote mine about the way people think about gestures. It’s a pretty intense 8 or 9 months of study and definitely gives you a feel for whether academia is set at your pace or not. At the end of that year I was ready to take some time off, had a go at a desk job and then ran away and travelled for a bit.

When I realised that I much preferred the high-stress but personal satisfaction that came with research I caught up with my Honours year supervisor. She suggested I apply for a PhD doing language documentation work (an Honours year gives you the option to bypass Masters). Although completely unrelated to my Honours topic I had shown that I was capable of managing a research task and I had studied most of the basic domains of linguistics in undergraduate courses.

In these last three years I feel like I’ve learned more about linguistics than I could have imagined. My thesis is intended to outline some of the grammatical features of Yolmo, so work like the dictionary, learning Nepali to speak to Yolmo speakers, making an archive of what I’ve done and hanging out here at Superlinguo are all things I do on top of that because I like to.

I’ll hopefully be finishing up my PhD this year - after that I have lots of things I’d like to do but we’ll see how it goes. I’d like to continue my work with Yolmo speakers, but also with related languages in Nepal and further afield. This would involve getting a Post Doctorate position, which basically means finding somewhere to continue working.

Although I have kind of fallen into this work I care passionately about documenting and helping people appreciate the languages they speak. We are losing more languages than we are training people who are willing to document them, and there is relatively scant funding available (considering how little capital is needed to document a language in comparison to, say, try and prevent baldness). Linguistic diversity is important in the way animal and plant diversity are important, each language is a unique variation on the cognitive skills of the human brain, and that is why I’m proud to do the work that I do, even if it means that I will be more than ten years out of high school before I earn something equivalent to a real wage.

So that’s me, and each person finds their own way into these things. I know people who have gone off and worked in language centres, or other jobs, and come back to do this kind of research in their 40s and 50s, and people who have managed to string together small amounts of work and grants to let them keep working outside of getting a PhD. I know people who got into language documentation because their father-in-law spoke an interesting language, because they happened to work on a language for a university project and it spiraled into something bigger, or because they married a linguist and discovered they also liked the work. If you want to do this kind of thing here are some vague bullet points as to how you might make it happen, but I’m sure you’ll find your own way. Don’t worry too much though - you might think you want to make dictionaries and end up working in a gallery!

• If you’re in high school do the Linguistics Olympiad.

• If your university offers an undergraduate linguistics course, take it! Just about every part of a linguistics degree is helpful in language documentation, but make sure you definitely cover things like phonetics, phonology, syntax and morphology.

• If you don’t have undergraduate linguistics do things like modern languages, ancient languages, history, psychology, literature, computer science - anything that involves language, cognition and/or critical thinking.

• If you’re thinking of doing a Masters or PhD make sure the university you want to attend has a good reputation for language documentation.

• Talk to your lecturers, they’re generally excited by the enthusiasm of students.

• When you’re near the end of your undergraduate degree definitely go and talk to lecturers, get a feeling for whether they’re the kind of person you’d like to work with on an Honours or Masters project, and see if they like you too!

• While you’ve worked up the courage to talk to them, as if they have any work for a research assistant. They may say no, but you’ve got nothing to lose. Pick their brains about what type of voluntary work might be around.

• See if there are any language centres or refugee English teaching programs around.

• Read some pop linguistics, and keep dropping by Superlinguo!