Posts tagged languages

Today I’d like to share a great project that aims to reflect the linguistic diversity of our modern world. Language Landscape aims to offer a taste of what languages are spoken where, and what they sound like. With a simple interface it’s possible to wander a map looking at recordings that people have uploaded from all over the place. So it might be no surprise that there’s German in German, but there’s also Mekeo (from PNG) in The United States, Swedish in Australia and I got to find out about Tundra Nenets language, spoken in Northern Russia.

The site is still currently in beta-mode, but it will hopefully grow as more people get on board. The reason that I like this project is that it really reflects where languages are spoken. So often we get caught up on the fact that Irish is spoken in Ireland, Polish is from Poland and Dinka is a language of South Sudan. But the other week in London I heard more Polish than I’ve heard in a long time, there’s a solid enclave of Irish speakers in New York, and Melbourne has a sizable population of Dinka speakers. Although a language may have its origins in one place, the world is a wonderful landscape of migration.

You can participate too! No matter what language you (or your friend, grandfather or mother-in-law) speak, and where you live, you can help build a dynamic picture of the linguistic diversity in your neighbourhood. There are even some great tips for making recordings if you’re a novice.

One of the most fascinating things about the spread of English as a global language is the way each place develops its own quirky take on the language. I’ve now lived in Nepal for long enough to not be alarmed by restaurants touting ‘hygienic food,’ to know that the 14 hours a day we’re currently without electricity is ‘load shedding’ and to know that when people offer you a ‘plastic’ they’re just giving you a bag to put your shopping in.

But there’s a new phenomenon that has found its way into Kathmandu in my 11 month absence:



This is one of about four such ‘lounges’ that I’ve noticed since returning, none of which were there a year ago. Indeed, this one is where the Bakery Cafe used to be, with its terrible food and awesome deaf staff.

An ATM lounge is a facility where one can walk into a room and have the option of multiple ATMS. Most interestingly they are all offered by different banking institutions - easily done with the plethora of small banking concerns here. There are no chairs, and there is no lounging area at all - just a bank of bank machines.

Such facilities show the growing interest Nepalis have in economic development - but the name is such a striking and innovative use of ‘lounge’ that I find it fascinating. Is this just an isolated quirk of English or have you come across it before? 

Every year linguists from across Australia gather to share their work and catch up at the Australian Linguistics Society (ALS) conference. I’ve got some of my highlights here, but please don’t think that everything else was a lull.

A bunch of us decided to be frugal and drive from Melbourne to Canberra. That meant that the day before the conference was our own mini-linguistics fest on wheels. One geeky highlight was definitely “linguistics 20 questions” - for those of you wishing to play in the future we can attest that circumfix, gavagai (Quine), split infinitive, reference grammar, voiced alveolar nasal and wild children all work well - but the slight differences in our education showed when we were stumped by the Rhenish Fan and clearly some of us didn’t have such an anthropological linguistic background, failing to remember the name of Boas’s theory of The Psychic Unity of Mankind.

The first evening of the conference was the first Linguistics in the Pub event outside of Melbourne. LIP is an event where lingustics get together every month and discuss an issue that is of importance to the field. This meeting was a chance to try and convince people in other states to set up their own events - but it was also a good chance for people to meet in a relaxed location.  

The plenary speakers for the week were all excellent and engaging (if you thought this was a necessary condition for a plenary speaker than you thought wrong). Diana Eades captivated the room on the first day, talking about how the use of language in the law courts of Australia radically discriminates against the Indigenous community. Diane has been working in this area for many years, and has found that although many Indigenous people now speak a variety of English, this style is still radically different to standard Australian English. Aboriginal English involves features like extended silence, and doesn’t encourage the asking of direct questions. These features ultimately work to make Aboriginal English speakers appear to be evasive or uncooperative in a legal setting - and the fundamental misunderstanding of this within the system means that there is still constant inequality of treatment in the legal system, as everyone presumes that the similarities of the two types of English make them exactly the same. 

For me another stand-out was Birgit Hellwig. Her plenary was a chance to talk about how difficult it is to get meaning differences while documenting another language. Often we just go with an English translation, but this misses some of the subtle differences in meaning between words in different languages. Birgit showed some strategies she used during her documentation of the Goemai, spoken in Nigeria. It was great to see just how much work she put into this; it was both terrifying and inspiring at the same time.

There were so many other great talks - I saw people present their research on languages from Africa, Europe and Asia (unfortunately I missed out on the session on Spanish in the Americas) - and people looking at phonetics, syntax, child language acquisition and sign language. This year ALS was part of a larger program called Lang Fest, which also included conference from the Australian Applied Linguistics Association, The Australian Lexicographers Society, Australian Society for French Studies and the Australian Languages Technology Workshop (and I’ve probably forgotten others). So when it came to language and linguistics events in Canberra last week I only just got to a small part of what was on offer.

It’s been a big month!

Where would you guess is the world’s most linguistically diverse place? The Economist has a great article about the Endangered Languages Alliance who claim New York has that title with over 800 languages represented (that’s over 10% of the word’s current linguistic diversity).

Believer Mag had an excellent article about Master Palindromist Barry Duncan (HT to Steph from @readinasitting for this one).

Bees have their own language! At least according to this paper, bees do more than just the wiggle dance.

Stack Exchange have opened up a Linguistics Beta so that you can ask all those linguisti-y questions and get them answered - you’ll find me pottering around on there as LaurenG.

Researchers in Exeter found out something that we all figured out in late primary school - that if you make grammar fun kids will learn better. On the topic of child literacy The Age reported on recent research from the University of Tasmania that showed text speak isn’t hindering childrens’ language skills - but it’s not all good news in text-land, with Johnston reporting on a poll that showed kids are likely to use highly offensive language like “retard” and “nigger” in text-speak, but also ask what this really show us about kids?

Monday the 17th was “International Talk Like a Pirate Day” and K Internationak celebrated with a bit of a lesson, and some links to some every-day pirate language use. Wordnik gave us the origins of some of our contemporary pirate vocabulary, but even they didn’t tell us what a thromborax is.

In word news, Jan from Throw Grammar From The Train discusses the origins of the word toilet, Language Log look at the word fulsome and Ben Zimmer looks at the origin of nerd. Johnson discuss whether the residents of Afghanistan are Afghans, Afghanis or Afghanistanis and Ben Trawick-Smith over at Dialect Blog complains about the English words “boyfriend” and girlfriend” (and on the topic of partnerships we congratulate Ben on his recent marriage!). The Virtual Linguist introduced us to the new and slightly grotesque art of “hauling” (where one videoblogs about recent purchases) and Janet Gough over at the MacMillan Dictionary blog discusses words and gender.

All our dictionary news this month comes from tomes other than your typical English dictionary. The Virtual Linguist informed us that “bye bye” has made it into the Xinhua Chinese dictionary while Language Hat gives his opinion of Green’s Dictionary of Slang.

In punctuation news, Wordnik discuss the names of various punctuation types, Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus discusses the linguistic issue of our times - the self-deprecating use of the hashtag, and an oldie, but a goodie - the name for the @ symbol in different languages (HT to Stan Carey).

We’ll leave you for this month with this linguistics joke over at The Diacritics.

[I wrote this for Crikey’s Fully (Sic) but I thought I’d share it with you lovely people too.]

Jacqueline Maley’s recent opinion piece in the Sydney Morning Herald takes Julia Gillard to task. Not for any of the policies of her government, nor for her failing to invite Jacqueline to her upcoming 50th birthday party, but because of the way she speaks.

The Prime Minister seems to have a profoundly uneasy relationship with the English language.

Gillard obfuscates when she should illuminate, uses many words when a few would do, and confuses messages so badly that voters would be forgiven for thinking she’s deliberately trying to mess with their heads.

Here’s Jacqueline’s assessment of Julia Gillard’s use of some elements of English.

[Gillard] ends sentences with prepositions (”I explained that we had a High Court case that we were working through our response to,” she told journalists last week), speaks in the passive voice and uses multiple subjunctive clauses, which tend to bloat her speech.
She has a habit of doubling her adverbs – using two when one, or none, would do.

There are four accusations here – ending sentences with prepositions, speaking in the passive voice, using subjunctives and using too many adverbs – so let’s work through them one by one.

First of all, prepositions. Let’s start by looking at the specific example given:

I explained that we had a High Court case that we were working through our response to.

Yup, that’s got a preposition at the end. But what would be a better alternative?

I explained that we had a High Court case to which we were working through our response

or

I explained that we have a High Court case, our response to which we are still working through

or even worse

I explained that we have a High Court case, through our response to which we are still working

All three are still very hard to parse, and also leave clunky elements. These kinds of sentences are hard to string together on the fly, and on the whole I think Gillard’s sentence is certainly not the worst. Even it it were, a preposition hanging out at the end of the sentence isn’t the end of the world. It’s only a crime if you believe in the kind of copy editing rules that were started 400 years ago when people like John Dryden took Latin as a benchmark. English speakers have been leaving prepositions at the ends of sentences, especially spoken ones, for time immemorial, and on the whole will continue to do so.

Next, Maley accuses Gillard of “passive voice”. This sounds like a terrible, terrible linguistic faux pas— if only we knew exactly what the accusation meant. In linguistics, passive voice means that you take a sentence with both a subject and an object, and you move the object into the subject position. The subject can be expressed in a ‘by’ phrase, or just left out altogether. So to give an example, ‘I ate the cake’ becomes ‘the cake was eaten (by me)’. Politicians are accused of using these structures to side-step their role in something not nice – ‘the asylum seekers were detained’ rather than ‘we detained the asylum seekers’ – but the rest of us use these structures all the time too, and I’m willing to wager money that Julia Gillard uses this type of passive to about the same degree as every other pollie, and they all probably use it to about the same degree as the rest of us. There’s no use moaning too much about passives; as has been pointed out on Language Log many times (see here for an excellent overview), those who criticise the use of passive voice tend to use it the most.

Having said that, I think it’s unlikely that grammatical passives are what Maley is referring to. There are a few other things people like to throw under the broad category of passive – usually hedging by saying things like ‘It has been suggested that’ and ‘the polls have indicated that’. First of all, these aren’t technically passives, and secondly, hedging is a natural part of human discourse and when you’re cooperatively and delicately working on something as complex as a major policy then you have a lot of toes to avoid stepping on.

Third, the subjunctive. Again, this sounds very grammatical, and therefore very serious, but actually it’s kind of trivial. The subjunctive is a type of sentence where you talk about something that may happen but hasn’t happened yet. Sometimes you’ll notice it because people will say ‘If I were going on holiday, I would send you a postcard’ but some people just say ‘If I was going on holiday, I would send you a postcard’ like any other sentence. In fact, the majority of people would never use the subjunctive, and if they did it’s likely that they do so because they think “were” sounds more fancy that “was” in contexts like above, or just because they think of themselves as more educated than others who don’t use the subjunctive. The subjunctive therefore is more like a modern shibboleth.

Besides, I would like to think that even the least proactive leaders would talk a lot about future things that haven’t happened yet, so they should use the subjunctive quite a bit. Of course, that’s what I mean by subjunctive, and that’s more or less the definition any linguist will give you. But since Maley doesn’t give any examples of Gillard’s use of the subjunctive, one can never really be sure if this is what she means. Maybe for Maley it’s just another synonym for waffle.

Finally, adverbs. Those pesky adverbs. They’re those hard to pin down ones from when you learned grammar and don’t they sound scary! I personally don’t have a problem with doubled adverbs, especially when they both give different shades of meaning. When Gillard says she will examine something ‘appropriately and carefully’ (Maley’s example) I take great comfort in knowing that she will do it carefully, but it’d be terrible for the Prime Minister to waste her time examining things with care if it was done inappropriately. Doubling is a common rhetorical device; it’s good for adding emphasis and a bit of drama – it’s generally there to clarify and to provide more specific information, not to obfuscate as Maley claims.

Maley also accuses Gillard of being dull and waffly while talking policy, which she thinks is a terrible thing as Julia has shown at other times that she’s got a great speaking style. Sure, Julia might have a razor-sharp wit perfect to keep people from nodding off at a glitzy function on the Hill, but no one wants to hear the leader of their country being “witty and tinder-dry” (Maley’s words) when discussing the status of refugees or carbon tax. There is a reason political rhetoric so often falls into seriousness, and that is because these matters are serious. No one wants Julia’s policy on obesity and health-care to be ‘don’t eat crap’; it was flippancy after all that killed Alexander Downer’s prime ministerial aspirations.

Gillard’s use of rhetoric to avoid giving direct answers to questions is right in line with all politicians – in fact, quite a few of them probably do it a lot less subtly. Any use of particular grammatical and syntactic constructions or word choice and failure to abide by fictitious stylistic guidelines of English oratory are irrelevant to this; if a politician wants to obfuscate the truth in an issue or avoid answering a question, they’ll do so.

If Maley can judiciously quote from Julia Gillard to show her to be a bad communicator, let’s look at Tony Abbot in an interview with Tom Elliott on 3AW on the 14th of September. Sure, he doesn’t use subjunctives, adverbs, dangling prepositions or any of the constructions Maley accuses Gillard of using, but this doesn’t prevent him from side-stepping the actual question with delightful finesse:

Tom Elliott: Now, we know that the Government with the support of the Greens and the independents probably has the numbers just to pass all this [carbon tax] legislation. Do you think there’s any chance over the next week or so someone might cross the floor or change their mind?
Tony Abbott: Well, let’s wait and see, Tom. All I know is that this is going to be very bad for jobs in manufacturing.

We could selectively quote people and hurl around unsubstantiated claims all day – or we could actually just pay attention to what the message is. People should stop being so scared of grammar – in this post alone I’ve used all of the constructions Maley criticises Gillard for using, and the fact that you’re still reading probably means it didn’t bother you much.

Poor Julia; she copped it from all sides at the start because she didn’t speak enough like a politician, or at least enough like a female politician should (see here for a discussion) – and now she’s being accused of sounding too much like a pollie. In a world where every speech of every politician can now be analysed ad nauseam some people just can’t catch a break.

We all blinked and suddenly the month is over! Although August flew by there was still plenty of time for lots of great stuff about linguistics written this month!

In the world of words, dictionaries and general lexicographic larking there is never a dull month. The Oxford English Dictionary showed us how a word makes it into the pages of one of their publication. At the other end of the word life-cycle the Virtual Linguist looked at some words recently declared “obsolete“  by Collins’ dictionaries. Speaking of obsolete words, Dialect Blog had a neat little post about “thou.” We’re glad that Johnston and Fritinancy introduced us to Samosapedia, a great dictionary of Indian English slang. Ben Zimmer at Visual Thesaurus talked about the word tremblor in related to the US earth-quakes. Wordnik comes to our rescue to sort out some commonly confused words.

There’s been lots of stuff happening in the wider linguistics world this month. A National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) grant in the USA will pour 3.9USD million into a program for documenting endangered languages. There is a big push to digitise records from the Library of New South Wales, but the fact that much of the funding is coming from mining giants RioTinto has Nick T over at the Endangered Languages and Cultures blog concerned. Linguistic politics got messy in Vietnam when several government departments wanted the alphabet expanded to include F, J, W, and Z - the attempt failed. Our favourite power-to-the-people project is the Oxford team who are using crowd sourcing techniques to translate thousands of ancient Greek texts.

And in quick bites: The Virtual Linguist talked about the use of 101, Fritinancy explored Cheez and other wacky food spellings, and Arnold Zwicky explores whatever. LanguageHat has a link to a list of bad words according to Google. Johnston gets riled up about the euphemistic use of the phrase “courtesy call” and, finally, my favourite this month, Stan Carey shows some of differences in words used on Twitter based on gender (omg sooo awesome!).

Next week I’m giving my first lecture to undergrads. It’s extra exciting because I get to spend the whole hour talking about some of my favourite topics - including the topic of evidentiality.

Evidentiality is when you use the grammar of your language to show the source of your information for what you’ve said. One of my favourite examples is from the language Tuyaca in South America: 

diiga ape-wi     He played soccer (I saw him play)

diiga ape-ti       “     “         “     (I heard, but did not see, him)

diiga ape-yigi     “     “         “    (Someone else told me)

diiga ape-yi        “     “         “    (I see evidence for it)

diiga ape-hiyi      “     “         “    (It’s reasonable to assume so)

About 25% of the world’s languages have some kind of grammatical evidentiality - It’s just that because so few of them are Indo-European it took a long time for them to be noticed and talked about a lot.

Of course, English can already show the source of information - by using extra words like “I heard that…” and “I saw…” - but this is optional, and not often used. For many languages with grammatical evidentiality this feature is obligatory - if you don’t say the source of your information it’s not a grammatical sentence.

It would be a useful feature for all those friends and colleagues you have who always appear to have excellent information, but then you realise that most of it is speculative or second-hand. Of course, it’d be nice if it did work so neatly - but humans can lie to manipulate the true value of evidentials. Jilll de Villiers and her team reported that speakers of Tibetan (which has an evidential system) would use the “I saw it” type evidential if they didn’t see something but wanted to appear more certain about it.

Although it’s not perfect, it’s a fairly useful grammatical feature!

This post goes out to my friend who always worries about getting lost.

When you use English to give directions you use a relative/intrinsic system. We use relative terms like left and right - which are hard to get your head around sometimes (If it’s my left then you need to turn right etc.). We also use intrinsic terms too, where we describe things spatially in relation to objects other than ourselves. These are things like “it’s the cafe in front of the museum” or “the house next to the park.”

This isn’t the only way to do things. One of my favourite ways of talking about space is to use an absolute spatial system. This is where everything is described in relation to some kind of absolute reference, such as the cardinal points.We do this sometimes with the cardinal directions, but it’s a secondary way of talking about stuff.

Languages that have this kind of system include Guugu Yimithirr in Australia and the Tzeltal languages of Mexico. In these languages you would have to say things like “move a little to the north” or “I think that picture would look a little better hung a bit further west along the wall.” It means that speakers need to be constantly attuned to what direction is what, and in learning their language their brains learn to deal with that requirement. You can take a Guugu Yimithirr speaker somewhere completely new with no visuals of the sun and they can tell you what direction is North with much higher than chance accurancy.

Since I learned about absolute spatial reference language I’ve tried really hard to cultivate my absolute reference skills, but one I get outside of the conveniently designed inner north of Melbourne I’m as hopeless as the next person. This is one linguistic feature I’m always very jealous of!

For all of you in Australia, tonight is the once-every-five-years stat-fest that is the National Census! We thought we’d get into the spirit of things with some Census and Language stats!

We’re obviously quite excited about questions 16-19 which are all about finding out what languages people speak. These questions ask what language people speak at home, and if they speak English as a second language, what is their proficiency. These questions are important for English language program and translating and interpreting services planning and funding.

From what I can gather, it is only possible to write one language for your home language, which seems unfortunate for bilinguals who have two home languages.

The ABS have help available in 34 languages, which give a nice snapshot of the current most common native tongues in Australia, after English. From Dinka to Kirundi to Samoan and Erdu there’s information available. Of course, this doesn’t reflect the most commonly spoken first languages in Australia, but the ones where speakers are less likely to have high levels of English proficiency.

Seeking to know what languages other than English are spoken in Australia is a relatively new question on the census. It wasn’t until the 1991 census only a decade ago that people were asked to name their main language. For a decade before that people were only asked if they spoke English at home, and how well. Apart from the year 1976 no census between 1981 and 1933 asked any questions about language, all the way through some of our biggest migration waves. In 1933 people were asked to state their second language only if they were not literate in English, as did the earliest census to ask about language in 1921.

According to the census tweeps (@2011census, who have proved to be highly entertaining these last few months) 105 Australians speak a made up language. We’re not sure if this is the sum total of Na’vi, Klingon, Esperanto and Elvish speakers or if those people just wrote nonsense on the form.

So don’t forget tonight to make your language count!