Superlinguo

There’s been some good media about Light Warlpiri a “new” contact language in the Northern Territory. Speakers of Light Warlpiri are from the Lajamanu area, and they’re almost all under 35. The language is a complex mix of English, Kriol and Warlpiri and it doesn’t necessarily have the patterns that are found in most Creoles - for example the nominal system has a structure like Warlpiri but the verbal system is closer to Kriol/English.

You can read all about it at The Conversation, Red Orbit, Sci-News, Live Science and Language Log. I’m sure there will be more links that I’ve missed (feel free to add them in the comments!).

The reason I’ve scare-quoted “new” is that Carmel O’Shannessy has been publishing about Light Warlpiri since 2005. Some, including Glossographia’s Stephen Chrisomalis, have suggested that something that has been published about for 8 years is not new (and, in fact, it’s just being publicised because there’s an article in Language). In the scheme of the worlds language, I’m inclined to say that this still counts as new, given that this language didn’t exist in any way 30 years ago.

Update: You can add Huffington Post, and Endangered Languages and Cultures blog to the list!

In Poland, as in many other Christian European and Latin American countries, there is a tradition of celebrating your Name Day. This is the feast day of the saint after whom you were named (because names are predominantly taken from a roster of saints names). On a child’s name day (Imieniny in Polish) they will take chocolates to school to share with their friends. While some people are named for the day they were born on, many others celebrate their name day on a different day to their birthday.

The list changes from country to country, as they all have their own take on the names of saints. Today is the day I celebrate as my name day in Poland, because Laura was the closest we could find to Lauren in Polish (and the name I most often introduce myself with to save confusion).

The Polish name days are listed here, and there are lists for other countries as well. You may find your name on there, albeit in its Polish equivalent. I really love local naming practices, because they tell a really nice part of the story about people and their cultural practices.

Three things of note from this week’s class:

Compound words!

We learned our first compound word. The word for tomato in Auslan (well, the one that we learnt) is actually made up for the signs for ‘red’ and ‘ball’. 

Some words don’t have signs!

There are some words that just don’t have their own sign. The word ham just uses the finger spelling for H-A-M (as you can probably tell from this, and ‘tomato’, we did a bit of stuff about making sandwhiches in class this week). I’m guessing that it’s possibly shorter words that this happens for.

Ummmmm

We learnt how to sign ummm! Very useful, I can start using it now for when I can’t remember a sign. I always find it’s these kinds of hesitations and fillers that make you sound more proficient than you really are!

Last class next week, already planning to do Auslan 2!

A recent discussion with my friend Annie, who is a speech pathologist, reminded me of something that I had not given a thought to since I was five. We were talking about the kind of things she does when working with children who have articulation problems (they know the word, but might have trouble with a particular sound). She was talking about repeating words with children, and then while saying the letter ‘p’ she put her hand next to her mouth and made a short opening:

I realised that when I was in my first year of primary school I had learnt a hand sign to correspond to the the sounds as I was learning the alphabet. Annie informed me that it is a language training method known as cued articulation (or cued speech). Each sound corresponds to a hand sign - even after almost 25 years I can still remember a few.

The cool thing now is that I realise the relationship between them that I never noticed before - to make a ‘b’ you use the same handshape as ‘p’, but with two fingers on the top, because it’s the voiced equivalent. It’s the same for s/z, k/g and f/v if I remember correctly. Unfortunately I can’t find a decent chart on the internet to show them all to you.

Cued articulation is different to sign language finger spelling, but it has been used to help deaf children develop spoken language. I’m not sure it would have been particularly useful for a classroom full of normal development kids, but I remember it was a lot of fun (maybe I’ve always been a language nerd!).   

On the other side of the half-way mark for my Auslan short-course we’ve had a subtle shift in focus away from acquiring new signs, to using them correctly. 

We’re beginning to encounter content-dependent signs. Some signs, like ‘boy’ or ‘run’ mean more or less the same thing regardless of where they’re used. But in a story someone might use a sign, and you’ll think “ah! That sign means put-a-glass-on-the-table” but it only really means that in the context of that story. It’s a bit like with any other language where I might make a gesture to put down a glass during a story. It doesn’t mean it will always indicate that, in another story it might mean pulling something down.

In English it’s easy to make the distinction, because words usually come out of your mouth, and gestures are made with your hands, but it feels like a complete mystery to me where the boundary is in Auslan (and, in fact, I imagine that the boundary is rather fuzzy). Perhaps I’m more interested in this than the other people in my class, given that studying gesture use is one of my areas of interest.

The first real post-austerity Eurovision may have been heavy on backing singers in black and light on pyrotechnics, but it still had most of the pageantry and and passion we’ve come to expect year after year. With the rise of the Eurosceptics and the Eurozone banking collapse, as well as the continuing strength of Central Asian entries like Azerbaijan, the very fabric and identity of Europe could be under threat. While many like to judge Eurovision entries on the dance moves, technical effects or general shirtlessness of the participants (some strange people even like to base their opinion on the quality of the songs), as always the choice of language is where it’s at.

It’s almost too dull to point out that English is the dominant language of pop in Europe. This year was actually a rather strong year for national-language entries in the grand final - 8 of the 26 choosing to sing in a language other than English. Of course Spain, France and Italy all had entries in their national language. More interestingly so did Estonia and Hungary - neither Hungarian or Estonian have an international pop market, but they are both language that are very distinct from their neighbours, so perhaps there is an element of national pride there.Moldova again chose a national-language song - and I learnt Modovan is a dialect of Romanian, proving the educational worth of Eurovision. Also, when you look as much like a viking as Eythor Ingi does, it only makes sense that you sing in your native Icelandic.

Greece was the only country to use the strategy of having a song in the national language, but resorting to English in the chorus for general cross-over appeal. This was a popular strategy last year, and with the lyrics of the chorus consisting of “alcohol is free” (repeat) it wasn’t entirely clear that this wasn’t sponsored by the Greek tourism board. 3 of the 8 non-English songs made it into the top 10 (Greece 6th, Italy 7th, Hungary 10th), indicating that it’s still possible to make it into the top 10 without English.

There was a disappointing lack of minority language representation this year - after the Udmurt singers from Russia last year, and France’s Corsican entry in 2011. It appears that the risk of the exotic entrant may only be a luxury for more prosperous times.

Of course, when it comes to Eurovision, the singing is only half the fun. When it comes to language politics, the voting gives a whole new perspective. Of the 39 countries participating in the voting all but three chose to give their votes in English - Belguim, France and Switzerland all showed Francophone pride. While English and French may be the two official language of Eurovision, it’s clear that English is not just the international language of pop, but of media more generally.

Interestingly, host Petra showed her multilingual flair by greeting the voters from several countries in their home language. Pleasantries in Italian, Spanish, French and German from our Swedish host (correlating with those countries’ general preference for singing in their national language) shows that there is still cachet in the Eurozone for speaking the ‘classy’ Western European languages. More encouragingly, hosts from Israel, Estonia and FYR Macedonia all gave extended thanks to the host country in Swedish - showing some acknowledgement of the national language. I also give props to Slovenia and Croatia for giving their thanks in their own languages (before switching to English to give their results).

So we’ll be hopping across the boarder in 2014 to Denmark. Despite the supposed threat from Eastern Europe, it appears that the Scandinavians are working their English pop nous and shaggy hair  too well to be stopped.

[This post also appeared on Fully (Sic)]