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Language Extinction / Endangered Languages

I'd like to hear Jackie Bird reading the news in broad Scots.
 
Is RP a goner..?

When I didn’t know owt about posh speak
My fascination with Received Pronunciation stems from a traumatic encounter with Elastoplast.
By Vicki Woods
8:41PM BST 05 Aug 2011

Tonight on Radio 4 I shall mostly be listening to Melvyn Bragg as he wanders down the routes of the English language yet again. He is doing one of his routine checks on whether or not Received Pronunciation (RP, aka BBC English, Standard English or the Queen’s ditto) has finally come to the end of its 400-year reign in the southern half of these islands.

The Blessed Melv has trod these paths before, but I never mind the repetition because I am a fellow Northerner, whose own speech has changed (softened, you might say, or even “mellowed”) over the years as much as his has. And I am as fascinated by RP as he is.

I like it. I don’t see why one shouldn’t prefer one regional variation of a national language over another. An Italian sculptress I met at a friend’s house near Lucca told me to listen hard to the prevailing accent if I wanted to improve my Italian pronunciation. “Molto, molto Toscano,” she said. “The best.”

etc...

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/tvan ... speak.html
 
I'd like to see a fund for the preservation of proper Cockney instead of estuaryspeak. :)
 
Oop 'ere, we get a season of Broadside productions of various Shakespeare plays at the WYP, always a good night out. The point of Broadside is that they perform Shakespeare in a Yorkshire accent. I've always thought the rhythm of the language suits a local dialect much better that the RP versions I've seen. Shylock never had so much pathos until he said " Y' goff* on me Jewish gaberdeen..."

*spit, or if IRC, spat in the text
 
I'm quite interested in how Shakespearian/biblical english would have actually been pronounced.

I've got theories that the -eth was often silent, so for example 'leadeth' was just how you spelled 'leads' - it was still said 'leads' and that Thou was pronounced more like the german 'du' than, say, 'plough'.

I'm also sure I've got something to back this up, but I can't remember what.
 
I seem to recall reading that 'ye' was just an alternative spelling of 'the' and pronounced just the same.
 
liveinabin1 said:
I seem to recall reading that 'ye' was just an alternative spelling of 'the' and pronounced just the same.
Click to expand...

You're right.

The 'Y' in 'ye' is not actually a Y, it's a medieval printers' substitution for 'Thorn': an Anglo Saxon letter imported from the earlier runic alphabet, the Futharc.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thorn_%28letter%29

It was, you've guessed it, pronounced like a modern 'th'.

There's also the other 'Ye' (as in 'Merry Gentleman') which was a second person plural pronoun until about 1600 at the latest.
 
Is the other ye (Merry Gentlemen) pronounced ye or the?
 
Today it's pronounced yee; in middle English it was also (I think) tee, but in old English it was spelt ge and pronounced (again, I think) with a soft-g sound: jee.

The point I'm reasonably certain on is that the 'Y' in Ye meaning 'You' (plural) wasn't a thorn substitution like the 'Y' in Ye meaning 'the'.
 
Cochise said:
Is the other ye (Merry Gentlemen) pronounced ye or the?
Click to expand...
It's 'Ye' as in 'You'. In Dutch, it's 'Je', or 'Jullie' (plural, formal), pronounced 'Ye', or Yullie. In Scotland and the North of England, it's still often, 'Ye', as in, 'D'Ye ken John Peel?.

The Dutch for 'to know', is, 'kennen'.

It all has its roots in the Anglo-Frisian language group. :lol:
 
I'm currently reading a book about runes and no matter how many times it is mentioned, I still instinctively think of cows whenever I read the word Frisian.

As an aside, the most interesting point about the line:

"God rest ye merry Gentlemen."

...is the commonly-made mistake that the speaker is addressing gentlemen who are merry. 'Merry' here isn't acting as an adjective modifying the plural noun 'Gentlemen'. Indeed, the verb 'rest' here doesn't even mean 'relax, put your feet up and smoke a pipe'; it means 'remain', and it is with this verb that the 'merry' is linked: Remain merry: like 'rest assured', Gents. Of course, it requires the oft-omitted comma to clearly bear this meaning:

"God rest ye merry, Gentlemen."
 
Actually, I made an error in the above post. 'jullie' is slightly more formal, than 'je', when used in the plural, but the actual formal plural, or singular, of you, would be 'uw', or 'uwe', pronounced 'oo-w'.

'Jouwe' is also slightly more formal than 'je', in the singular and pronounced a bit like it is sometimes spoken in the West Midlands and Black Country: 'Yow', only the Dutch put even more emphasis on the last two letters, 'Jow-we'.

http://nl.wiktionary.org/wiki/jouwe
 
Thanks. That's really interesting (and I'm not being sarcastic!) There's about 5 things in the last couple of posts that I never knew!
 
Cornish translation of Bible's Old Testament

Cornish speakers can now read the complete Bible - An Beybel Sans - in their chosen language.
The New Testament was translated into Cornish by Prof Nicholas Williams and published in 2002.
It has taken him about six years to translate all the books of the Old Testament, using a variety of versions, including Hebrew and Greek texts.
An Beybel Sans is written in standard Cornish and its 10 maps also have place names in Cornish.

The 69-year-old professor from London, who is considered to be one of the leading experts on Celtic languages, taught himself Cornish at the age of 15 because it seemed "a bit odd and a bit bizarre".
He told BBC Radio Cornwall: "One of the reasons we lost the language was because there was no Bible in Cornish.
"The Welsh had one (in Welsh) from the time of Elizabeth I, but the Cornish didn't.
"As well as being the Hebrew and Christian Scriptures it is one of the defining books of our culture.
"Once you have the Bible you have created your literary heritage and I hope this book will be influential in the Cornish revival."

Prof Williams, who also taught Irish Gaelic at University College Dublin for 30 years before retiring, said he kept going on the marathon task by doing the "boring bits first" - starting with Leviticus, the chapter of the Old Testament which deals with which foods people can eat.

The last speaker of Cornish as a first language is believed to have died more than 200 years ago.
It was recognised as a language by the UK Government in 2002, but deemed "extinct" by the United Nations in 2009, to the anger of many in Cornwall.

The language has been undergoing a revival in its native lands, with dual-language road signs an increasingly common sight.
In January 2010 a creche teaching young children the language was opened.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-england-cornwall-15141836

Audio clip of a reading by Prof Williams from Isaiah on page.
It sounds Welsh to me, but the languages are very close.
Alternatively, Prof Williams (who has a Welsh name) may just speak with a Welsh accent! (I've known many people whose accent or dialect is still evident when they speak a foreign language!)
 
I trust we are all watching Stephen Fry's excellent series on language on BBc2?

catch up on iPlayer if not.
 
Mal_Content said:
I trust we are all watching Stephen Fry's excellent series on language on BBc2?

catch up on iPlayer if not.
Click to expand...

Apparently not. I haven't seen it myself, although I might take a look later :) It seems that this is getting the thumbs down from most linguists.

Apologies in advance for the long post.

http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3479

Around the world of words, without a linguist

October 6, 2011 @ 2:49 pm · Filed by Geoffrey K. Pullum under Ignorance of linguistics, Language and culture, Words words words


Non-linguists frequently ask me whether I am avidly watching "Fry's Planet Word", the new five-part BBC television series on language written and presented by Stephen Fry. (A bit of googling will probably find it for those outside the UK who can't access the BBC iPlayer; there are various illicit copies around, including some on YouTube.) The answer is no; I simply cannot bear Fry on the topic of language. Such a fine actor (the quintessential Jeeves); such an insufferable twit on linguistic topics. So I know barely anything of this series except that even the radio trailers for it make my teeth itch. However, Edinburgh syntactician Manuela Rocchi is made of sterner stuff, and has watched some. She kindly contributes this guest post to inform you (and me) about it.

Guest post by Manuela Rocchi

The first episode of Fry's Planet Word was entitled 'Babel', and covered a huge range of topics, from language origins to language change, from first language acquisition to feral children, to the number of languages spoken in the UN. As the show was only an hour long, none of these topics were really explored in any meaningful detail, partly because a lot of time was wasted on showing Fry travelling around the globe for no particular reason.

Pauline Foster at Bad Linguistics has written an excellent review of this episode (my friend Seán has written a more favorable one here). I don't have much to add to their analyses, so I will focus solely on the second episode, entitled 'Identity'.

As the name suggest, the theme of this episode was the relationship between the language we speak and our 'identity', defined rather loosely as "what makes me me". This meant discussing different British accents and attitudes to them, minority languages, language purity, football (?), and the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis. Once again, the range of topics was quite broad, but this was undoubtedly a more focused and coherent episode than the first one.

The section on accents kept reminding viewers how "beautiful" all accents are. This is a nice change, I suppose, from seeing them derided as lazy and uneducated ways of speaking, but it came across as rather patronizing, especially as most of this section involved Fry and the poet Ian McMillan doing silly and over-exaggerated impressions of different accents, rather than any serious discussion of what we mean by 'accent' or 'variety', or standard. Moreover, different accents were often described inaccurately with statements like "they don't pronounce their t's", or "they can't pronounce 'house'", which made it sound like they were deficient in some way. In sum, I don't think the viewers will have learned much new about accents at all, and I doubt that snobs will have changed their mind about non-standard varieties just because Stephen Fry told them they are wonderful.

From accents, Fry moved on to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, the link being the question "if your accent can have such an impact on your identity, imagine what a difference the language that you speak has" [sic]. This took Fry to Stanford University, where he talked to Lera Boroditsky about how language influences thought. This is by far the most irritating part of the documentary, and it's a textbook case of why documentaries on complex topics should be done by people who know the subject well.

For all his enthusiasm and passion about language, Fry simply doesn't have the expertise that would allow him to ask probing questions, or to challenge any of Boroditsky's claims. For example, he never brings up, either to her or to the viewers, that what she is saying is not the accepted consensus, and that there is a lively debate in the field about what her results mean.

When Boroditsky says that German speakers give more feminine descriptions of bridges than Spanish speakers because the words for bridge is feminine in German but masculine in Spanish, he could ask her how strong these effects are, and whether they vanish when more context is added (e.g. if you ask them to describe a very sturdy, big concrete bridge with huge towers, would German speakers still go with 'fragile' and 'pretty'?). But I also wonder whether it should have been up to Boroditsky herself to mention the fact that her results are controversial. Obviously, she believes that she's right, but shouldn't intellectual honesty demand that, in a popularization program like this one, the viewers be told that there is a debate in the field, and that a lot of peopledisagree on the correct interpretation of her findings? (Of course, it may well have been the case that she did this and it was edited out. I'd be very interested to hear what she thought about how the interview was used, I'm sure a lot of material was omitted).

More worryingly, however, the interview soon degrades to rather silly generalisations about the Russian mind, and bilinguals having two conflicting ways of thinking. I've transcribed the exchange for people who can't find the video. At this point Fry and Boroditsky have been talking about the fact that she is bilingual, and Fry has been asking whether bilinguals have two ways of seeing the world.

Fry: As someone who speaks both [Russian and English] what is there that is characteristically Russian in the way you feel and experience when you're thinking in a Russian way?

Boroditsky: Russian speakers express much more collectivist ideas when they're speaking Russian, they espouse more collectivist values, and they espouse much more individualistic values when they're speaking English, so, even if they're giving an explanation about the same kind of phenomena, when they're doing it in one language they have a very different perspective on it than when they're doing it in another language. So, language serves as a cue to the cultural values?.?.?. [gets interrupted]

Fry: So it's not a miserable oppressed dark Russian soul sort of way of looking at the world then?

Boroditsky: Well, yeah, that's a very English way of looking at the Russian soul. [laughs]

It's clear towards the end that both Fry and Boroditsky are joking, but it's really worrying that Boroditsky lets the conversation stray into crass generalizations that confuse language, thought and culture. I wouldn't be surprised if some viewers went away thinking that the Russian revolution occurred because the Russian language makes people think in collectivist terms (especially if they've heard of a certain Starkey who thinks that language can make you riot). In fact, the confusion between culture and language runs throughout the program, as when Fry repeatedly conflates Jewish culture and the Yiddish language (Woody Allen and Ben Stiller are mentioned as examples of the fact that some languages, like Yiddish, are funnier than others), or when he goes to the Basque Country, and spends most of his time discussing Basque food (more on minority languages later).

After the interview we see Fry walking in New York pondering on the age-old 'no word for X' problem, or, as he puts it "if you don't have a word for evil, does it vanish?", and concluding (without giving any reasons) that, whereas he sees Boroditsky's position, he also agrees with the Chomskian view that "all languages have intrinsically the same structure". This is where having a linguist on board would have helped. It's true that sometimes linguists themselves present Chomskian and Whorfian ideas as though they were in contradiction. But as Barbara Scholz stressed, they're not; you can very easily subscribe to both theses even in their strongest forms.

Surely no linguist would have let Fry move from a point about vocabulary to one about structure as though they were the same thing, nor would they have let him get away with his gross overstatement of UG. And why tell the viewers whose side he's on without explaining why? This would have been a good time to explain that there are linguists who don't subscribe to the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, and maybe to interview one of them. What a missed opportunity.

From Neo-Whorfianism Fry moves on to Yiddish (the language that makes you funny even if you don't speak it) and from there to minority languages in general. This section is not as bad as the previous one, partly because Fry doesn't really say anything particularly meaningful, so there's not as much to get wrong. There are still problems however.

The first one is the cliched romanticization of minority languages. I understand that speakers of endangered languages may be on the defensive and may feel the need to come up with reasons why their language is worth preserving. But asking people about their own language, especially if it's one that is in danger, is like asking them about their God: they'll just all tell you that it's better than anybody else's, and you won't have learned much. So, for instance, you get the Irish fisherman saying that Irish is so much more creative and colorful than English because it has wonderful descriptions, an example being the name for jellyfish, which means "seal's spit", and nobody mentions that jelly fish is actually more effective as descriptions go (and is quite funny if you've never heard it before).

Or you get an Irish golfer saying that Irish has more ways of saying "It's a nice day" depending on who you're addressing ("or undressing", he adds), but who fails to notice that, in explaining what he means, he's doing just that (i.e. finding "different ways of saying the same thing", as he puts it) in English.

It would have been so much more interesting to learn about the history of the relationship between Irish and English, or what policies have been implemented to protect Irish, and how successful they are. In the Basque country, Fry could have gone to the Basque Language Department of the University of the Basque Country and ask them how a language used mostly for farming and fishing became a medium of university instruction. Instead, we got silly talk with a chef about the Basque language being like Basque food, i.e. open to outside influence, and how Basque food and language are so intrinsically linked in their culture because, historically, recipes were transmitted orally (the many Basques who are monolingual Spanish speakers must starve to death).

The second problem is that, as a result of this attempt to show the relationship between traditional culture and language, Fry ends up presenting a very outdated, nostalgic view of minority languages. He interviews fishermen, farmers and cooks, or people in quaint little cottages in rural Ireland, as though minority languages couldn't also be languages of culture, technology and progress. When he interviews an odious member of the French Academy who talks about the other languages of France as though they were not as sophisticated as French, one feels that what has been shown up to then sort of proves his point.

In sum, the program is well-meaning, and it does show Fry's great love for language; but it either gets some things very wrong, or treats complex topics as though they were dinner-party talking points, thus failing to tell viewers anything they didn't already know or suspect anyway.

— Manuela Rocchi
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Welsh Language Society 'radical' change in 50th year

The chair of the Welsh Language Society - Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg - has said the group will have to change "radically" in its 50th year.
Bethan Williams said protecting Welsh-speaking communities should be the focus of future campaigning.
Until now, its aim had been to securing equal status for the Welsh language, alongside English.
Ms Williams says: "We cannot afford for the future of the language on a community level to disappear."

This year marks the 50th anniversary of a radio lecture by playwright, poet and Plaid Cymru co-founder Saunders Lewis which led to the setting up of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society).

The society's long campaign for equal status for the language led to the introduction of the 1993 Welsh Language Act, followed by fresh legislation in 2010 and the appointment of a commissioner to enforce it.
But barely a week into its anniversary year, the continued existence of the group has already come under criticism in online articles, and questions have been raised about its ability to survive as a pressure group of any influence.

Ms Williams is to address the society's members on Saturday in a newly created forum, the cyngor [council].
She is to say the organisation should focus future efforts on keeping the language alive in Welsh-speaking communities, and that it should not be afraid to challenge its own status quo.
She is to say: "Some people say that the struggle for the Welsh language is over, but we don't want to see it just as a marginal language, or as a language of education only.
"Now, as we step forward to the next period in our campaigning we are turning our sights to our communities, and ensuring that Welsh is a living language, used day-to-day."

In 1962 Saunders Lewis gave a lecture on BBC radio entitled Tynged Yr Iaith (The Fate of the Language).
In this speech Lewis predicted the extinction of the Welsh language and declared that the language would die unless revolutionary methods were used to defend it.
The lecture led to the foundation of Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (the Welsh Language Society).

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-16449862
 
The chair of the Welsh Language Society - Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg - has said the group will have to change "radically" in its 50th year.
Click to expand...

What are they winging about now, Welsh is fine it's flourishing it's used everyday. It sneaks up and surprises you at the cash point when you're trying to get a mini statement, you sit through a telephone menu which is twice as long in case you 'want to conduct your inquiry in Welsh'. On top of that you get large parties of Welsh speakers whose delight is to paralyse cafe's, shops etc by insisting on nominating one of their group to translate what the whole lot of them are saying into English, a language which they all speak anyway, While ques build up pointlessly behind them.

Starting to hear little quips these days like, "Welsh,mmm, not Welsh speaking though is he'.

I think they should calm down a bit.
 
They want to force everyone in Wales to speak Welsh, same as the Irish Language fanatics.
 
To be really honest I don't think it's as inclusive as that.
 
No, they wish to eliminate anyone who might by some mischance speak english.

(Can you see I dont like the welsh? Particularly as I am welsh.)
 
I'm partly Welsh. My Welsh Nain wouldn't allow the Welsh language in the house, she felt strongly that it was a trap that kept people in poverty.

Certainly if some of the more extreme demands regarding the language and employment were implemented it would deter businesses from relocating to Wales - especially since Wales is a quite small country and if you wanted to use a pool of Welsh talent but not be bothered with the language you could set up just over the border.

If they would just be content with making sure the language was not actively discriminated against it would be fine - it's the normal language of conversation for many people round here and isn't going to go away any time soon - unless everyone has to go to England to get a job.
 
Digital tools 'to save languages'
By Jonathan Amos, Science correspondent, BBC News, Vancouver

Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe.
Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end.

Globalisation is usually blamed, but some elements of the "modern world", especially digital technology, are pushing back against the tide.
North American tribes use social media to re-engage their young, for example.

Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students.

"Small languages are using social media, YouTube, text messaging and various technologies to expand their voice and expand their presence," said K David Harrison, an associate professor of linguistics at Swarthmore College and a National Geographic Fellow.
"It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation. We hear a lot about how globalisation exerts negative pressures on small cultures to assimilate. But a positive effect of globalisation is that you can have a language that is spoken by only five or 50 people in one remote location, and now through digital technology that language can achieve a global voice and a global audience."

Harrison, who travels the world to seek out the last speakers of vanishing languages, has been describing his work here at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS).
With National Geographic, he has just helped produce eight talking dictionaries.
These dictionaries contain more than 32,000 word entries in eight endangered languages. All the audio recordings have been made by native speakers, some of whom like Alfred "Bud" Lane are among the last fluent individuals in their native tongues.

Mr Lane speaks a language known as Siletz Dee-ni, which is restricted to a small area on the central Oregon coast.
"Linguists came in and labelled our language moribund, meaning it was heading for the ash heap of history; and our tribal people and our council decided that wasn't going to happen. So we devised a plan to go forward to start teaching our dialect here in the Siletz Valley," he told the meeting.

Mr Lane has sat down and recorded 14,000 words for the online dictionary. "Nothing takes the place of speakers speaking to other speakers, but this bridges a gap that was just sorely needed in our community and our tribe."

Margaret Noori is an expert in Native American studies at the University of Michigan and a speaker of Anishinaabemowin, which is the sovereign language of over 200 indigenous "nations" in Canada and the US. These communities are heavy users of Facebook.
"What we do with technology is try to connect people," Prof Noori said. "All of it is to keep the language."

Dr Harrison says not all languages can survive, and many inevitably will be lost as remaining speakers die off. But he says the new digital tools do offer a way back from the brink for a lot of languages that seemed doomed just a few years ago.

He told BBC News: "Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.
"If we care about sustainability and survival on the planet, we all benefit from having this knowledge base persevered." [Er, 'preserved', perhaps?] ;)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-17081573
 
Many small languages are dying out - the flip-side of that statement is that some will remain. Which raises the question, could one become dominant..?

Is English or Mandarin the language of the future?
By Jennifer Pak, BBC News, Kuala Lumpur

English has been the dominant global language for a century, but is it the language of the future? If Mandarin Chinese is to challenge English globally, then it first has to conquer its own backyard, South East Asia.

In Malaysia's southernmost city of Johor Bahru, the desire to speak good English has driven some children to make a remarkable two-hour journey to school every day.
Nine-year-old Aw Yee Han hops on a yellow mini van at 04:30. His passport is tucked inside a small pouch hung around his neck.
This makes it easier for him to show it to immigration officials when he reaches the Malaysian border.
His school is located on the other side, in Singapore, where unlike in Malaysia, English is the main language.

It's not your typical school run, but his mother, Shirley Chua thinks it's worth it.
"Science and maths are all written in English so it's essential for my son to be fluent in the language," she says.

An estimated 15,000 students from southern Johor state make the same bus journey across the border every day. It may seem like a drastic measure, but some parents don't trust the education system in Malaysia - they worry that the value of English is declining in the country.
Since independence from the British in 1957, the country has phased out schools that teach in English. By the early 1980s, most students were learning in the national language of Malay.
As a result, analysts say Malaysian graduates became less employable in the IT sector.

"We've seen a drastic reduction in the standard of English in our country, not just among the students but I think among the teachers as well," says political commentator Ong Kian Ming.

Those who believe that English is important for their children's future either send their kids to expensive private schools or to Singapore, where the government has been credited as being far-sighted for adopting the language of its former colonial master.
Nearly three-quarters of the population in Singapore are ethnic Chinese but English is the national language.
Many believe that this has helped the city state earn the title of being the easiest place to do business, by the World Bank.

However, the dominance of English is now being challenged by the rise of China in Singapore.
The Singapore Chinese Chamber Institute of Business has added Chinese classes for business use in recent years.
Students are being taught in Mandarin rather than the Hokkien dialect spoken by the older Chinese immigrants.
These courses have proved popular, ever since the government began providing subsidies for Singaporeans to learn Chinese in 2009 during the global financial crisis.
"The government pushed to provide them with an opportunity to upgrade themselves so as to prepare themselves for the economic upturn," says chamber spokesperson Alwyn Chia.

Some businesses are already desperate for Chinese speakers.
Lee Han Shih, who runs a multimedia company, says English is becoming less important to him financially because he is taking western clients to do business in China.
"So obviously you need to learn English but you also need to know Chinese," says Mr Lee.

As China's economic power grows, Mr Lee believes that Mandarin will overtake English. In fact, he has already been seeing hints of this.
"The decline of the English language probably follows the decline of the US dollar.
"If the renminbi is becoming the next reserve currency then you have to learn Chinese."
More and more, he says, places like Brazil and China are doing business in the renminbi, not the US dollar, so there is less of a need to use English.

Indeed, China's clout is growing in South East Asia, becoming the region's top trading partner.
But to say that Mandarin will rival English is a "bit of a stretch", says Manoj Vohra, Asia director at the Economist Intelligence Unit.
Even companies in China, who prefer to operate in Chinese, are looking for managers who speak both Mandarin and English if they want to expand abroad, he says.
"They tend to act as their bridges."

So the future of English is not a question of whether it will be overtaken by Mandarin, but whether it will co-exist with Chinese, says Vohra.
He believes bilingualism will triumph in South East Asia.
It is a sound economic argument, but in Vietnam's case, there is resistance to learning Mandarin.
The country may share a border with China, but the Vietnamese government's choice to not emphasise Mandarin is an emotional one, says leading economist Le Dang Doanh.

"All the streets in Vietnam are named according to generals and emperors that have been fighting against the Chinese invasion for 2000 years," he says.
Tensions flared up again last May over the disputed waters of the South China Sea.

Anti-Chinese sentiment means that young Vietnamese are choosing to embrace English - the language of a defeated enemy. Many families still bear the psychological scars from the Vietnam War with the United States.
Yet there is no animosity towards English because the founding father of Vietnam, Ho Chi Minh, made a clear distinction between the so-called American imperialists who were bombarding Vietnam and the American people, says Le Dang Doanh.

Many Vietnamese who have lost family members during the war are now studying in America, he says.
"We never forget any victim in the past but in order to industrialise and normalise a country, Vietnam needs to speak English."
The Vietnamese government has an ambitious goal to ensure all young people leaving school by 2020 will have a good grasp of the English language.

But it's not hard for young Vietnamese to accept English. For some, the language offers a sense of freedom in Vietnam, where the one-party communist state retains a tight grip on all media.
In a public square in central Hanoi, a group of young men are break-dancing to the pulsing beats of western hip hop. Ngoc Tu, 20, says he only listens to English music.
"The Ministry of Culture has banned a lot of [Vietnamese] songs and any cultural publications that refer to freedom or rebellion but... English songs are not censored."

It is debatable whether English or Mandarin will dominate in South East Asia in the future. There are arguments for both on the economic front.
But culturally, there is no dispute.
Even Mandarin language enthusiasts like Singaporean businessman Mr Lee, says that English will remain popular so long as Hollywood exists.
The success of movies such as Kung Fu Panda, an American production about a Chinese animal, has caused a lot of anxiety in China, he says.

There have been many cartoons in China about pandas before, but none had reached commercial success, says Mr Lee.
"The moment Kung Fu Panda hit the cinemas everybody watched it. They bought the merchandise and they learned English."

--------------------------

Robert Lane Greene
Author of You Are What You Speak

The assumption that Mandarin will grow with China's economic rise may be flawed. Consider Japan which, after spectacular post-war economic growth, became the world's second-biggest economy. The Japanese language saw no comparable rise in power and prestige.

The same may prove true of Mandarin. The character-based writing system requires years of hard work for even native speakers to learn, and poses a formidable obstacle to foreigners. In Asia, where China's influence is thousands of years old, this may pose less of a problem. But in the West, even dedicated students labour for years before they can confidently read a text of normal difficulty on a random topic.

Finally, many languages in Asia, Africa and the Amazon use "tones" (rising, falling, flat or dipping pitch contours) to distinguish different words. For speakers of tonal languages (like Vietnamese) learning the tones of Mandarin poses no particular difficulty. But speakers of non-tonal languages struggle to learn tones in adulthood - just ask any adult Mandarin-learner for their funniest story about using a word with the wrong tone. 8)

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/magazine-17105569

I think that if some kind of global catastrophe should occur (some combination of asteroid impact, global warming, famine, disease, etc) English would be most likely to survive, because it's got a much wider geographical spread, covering most time zones with any significant areas of land.
 
More about word loss but I think it fits here. Chart at link.

More words dying and fewer words being added to languages in digital age: study
http://www.physorg.com/news/2012-03-wor ... gital.html
March 19th, 2012 in Other Sciences / Social Sciences

Word extinction. The English word “Roentgenogram” derives from the Nobel prize winning scientist and discoverer of the X-ray, Wilhelm Röntgen (1845-1923). The prevalence of this word was quickly challenged by two main competitors, “X-ray” (recorded as “Xray” in the database) and “Radiogram.” The arithmetic mean frequency of these three time series is relatively constant over the 80-year period 1920-2000, ? f ? ? 10^-7, illustrating the limited linguistic “market share” that can be achieved by any competitor. We conjecture that the main reason “Xray” has a higher frequency is due to the “fitness gain” from its efficient short word length and also due to the fact that English has become the base language for scientific publication. Image (c) Scientific Reports doi:10.1038/srep00313

(PhysOrg.com) -- Adding new words to an existing language, or dropping old ones is something people have always done. As new things or ideas are discovered, new words crop up to describe them. But now, in the digital age, that process appears to be slowing despite the increased pace of new things arriving on the scene. In a paper in Scientific Reports, a group from the Institutions Markets Technologies' Lucca Institute for Advanced Studies in Italy, describe how they have found after studying English, Spanish and Hebrew trends, that words are being dropped from languages faster and new ones added at a slower rate, than at any other time over the past three hundred years.

Suspecting that the addition of new words to languages might be inhibited by modern tools such as spellcheckers, the team looked at 107 words that have been recorded by Google as part of its book digitizing process, which is now estimated to represent somewhere near four percent of all of the world’s books. Because they are in digital form, it is possible to perform statistical analysis on them, which is just what the team did. In doing so, they were able to note when new words appeared in a language and then to see if they held on long enough to become permanent, or if they vanished after a certain amount of time. Analyzed works included books from 1800 to 2008.

One of the most striking results the team found was that words being lost from the three languages occurred more often in the past ten to twenty years than in all of the other eras in the period of study. They also found that newer words were being added less frequently during the same period indicating that modern languages are shrinking. They suggest that electronic spellcheckers introduced during this period might be partly responsible for the change, as might the tendency to gravitate towards a smaller vocabulary when writing emails and especially when texting. They also cite the increased use of just one language, English, in science endeavors and projects, regardless of native tongue.

Interestingly, the group also found that when new words are added in the digital age, they tend to become mainstream much faster than occurred in previous years, likely because of the same modern electronic communications tools that are causing languages to constrict. They also found that it generally takes at least forty years for new words to become truly accepted as a part of a language, and if that doesn’t happen, they tend to die.

More information: Statistical Laws Governing Fluctuations in Word Use from Word Birth to Word Death, Scientific Reports 2, Article number: 313 doi:10.1038/srep00313

Abstract

We analyze the dynamic properties of 107 words recorded in English, Spanish and Hebrew over the period 1800–2008 in order to gain insight into the coevolution of language and culture. We report language independent patterns useful as benchmarks for theoretical models of language evolution. A significantly decreasing (increasing) trend in the birth (death) rate of words indicates a recent shift in the selection laws governing word use. For new words, we observe a peak in the growth-rate fluctuations around 40 years after introduction, consistent with the typical entry time into standard dictionaries and the human generational timescale. Pronounced changes in the dynamics of language during periods of war shows that word correlations, occurring across time and between words, are largely influenced by coevolutionary social, technological, and political factors. We quantify cultural memory by analyzing the long-term correlations in the use of individual words using detrended fluctuation analysis.

via Livescience
Click to expand...
 
'Welsh is a wonderful gift': speakers of the language relish new support
With language commissioner promising to act against suppression of Welsh, there could be a resurgence in the tongue
Steven Morris
guardian.co.uk, Sunday 8 April 2012 15.07 BST

Abi Pierce takes time out from her work at the Affordable Household Goods stall at Wrexham Butchers' Market to wax lyrical about the Welsh language: "I see it as a wonderful gift, something to be cherished and developed."
It's not easy being a Welsh speaker, she admits. "I'm not always comfortable speaking it," the 17-year-old says. "Some people take it as a bit of a joke, they think it's a dying language and not worth saving."

Which is why she is buoyed up by the bold attitude of the newly minted Welsh language commissioner, who is promising not only to act as an advocate for the tongue but to take action against those who do not give Welsh speakers such as Abi the freedom to express themselves.

In her first speech as commissioner, Meri Huws spoke of her vision of a Wales where speakers had the confidence to use the language and trust in the law to rectify any prejudice. Her initial focus will be to make sure that the Welsh government and public bodies fulfil their obligations to offer services both in English and Welsh.

Strikingly, Huws signalled she would step in if employees in small businesses were denied the freedom to speak Welsh at work. She gave the scenario of two hairdressers who were speaking Welsh together and a third insisting they speak English because he or she could not understand.
"In that situation the third colleague has interfered with the other two's freedom to use the Welsh language," said Huws. The Welsh speakers could complain to the commissioner and she could investigate.

Abi is impressed. "Anything that can be done to make Welsh speakers more comfortable and more confident has to be a good thing. Especially in a place like Wrexham, which is not a Welsh-speaking heartland, we do need someone that is going to help us fight for the language."

The legislation that introduced the post of commissioner – and makes Welsh an official language – is the Welsh Language (Wales) 2011 Measure, the first piece of law relating to the language drafted and passed in Wales since the Act of Union in 1536.

There is a possibility that Huws could be the first of a wave of language commissioners. Scotland and Northern Ireland are watching how she operates with a view to replicating her role. Some believe there could be an argument to bring in commissioners in England to champion minority languages.

In Wales, many believe the language is in crisis. Efforts have been made to teach Welsh in schools and more younger people such as Abi relish speaking the language but there continues to be a net loss of fluent speakers.

Nigel Ruck, who works for a public body but is today on a day off and enjoying a pint at Wrexham's new Welsh cultural centre Saith Seren (Seven Stars), has learned Welsh since moving from the south to a language heartland in the north. "I felt guilty I couldn't speak Welsh. Learning was a revelation and I find it very empowering," he says. But he wonders if it is better to encourage rather than coerce.

Meirion Prys Jones, the head of the now defunct Welsh language board (which has been replaced by the commissioner), raised a similar point in a BBC interview: "You can have as much legislation as you want, you can have as much policy as you want, but unless you get in amongst the people and persuade them that the language is useful to them, there's no hope, I think."

The standards that organisations will have to meet will be shaped in the coming months during a period of public consultation. The commissioner will be able to fine bodies that do not comply with standards up to £5,000. Her powers relating to, for example, the hairdressers she mentioned are more limited though she could investigate complaints, write a report and release it to the media.

The tenor of the commissioner's remarks is causing alarm bells to ring in business and industry.
The Federation of Small Businesses (FSB) in Wales believes that more language legislation could put more of a burden on its members.
Iestyn Davies, head of external affairs, said the FSB was "fully supportive" of Wales's development as a bilingual country. "But I believe the best way to encourage the language is through voluntary codes. People should be encouraged to use Welsh because they want to, not because they are coerced."

Over in the People's Market (Wrexham has a rich variety of indoor markets) Nyeem Aslam is less diplomatic than the FSB. "I think this commissioner is talking nonsense. They always seem to be coming up with new rules to make it harder for businesses." Aslam runs the Welsh Shop in the market, selling rugby shirts and T-shirts bearing patriotic slogans such as "Every morning I wake up, I thank the Lord I'm Welsh" but believes that in towns such as Wrexham, the Welsh language is irrelevant. "I don't speak it and don't do any business in Welsh."

Huws' role is not unique. Canada has language commissioners to protect its bilingualism and, as in Wales, immigration is seen as one of its major challenges. The Republic of Ireland also has a commissioner and is reviewing how its language laws are working on the ground.

Bethan Williams, chair of the pressure group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg (Welsh Language Society), said legislation was necessary to make sure Welsh was a "central part of everyday life".
She wants the commissioner to tackle big business, to force supermarkets to provide services in Welsh rather than just sticking up a few "tokenistic" signs in Welsh and to ensure banks offer online services in Welsh.

Professor Colin Williams, a language policy expert at Cardiff University's School of Welsh, said there could be an argument for language commissioners in the UK for other tongues such as Urdu or Gujarati. "These minority languages aren't temporary, they are permanent."
Williams said the new law was important for the language but also because it showed that Wales, which only gained primary law-making powers last year, could frame its own legislation.
"The new language measure was a test case of the ability of the national assembly to produce primary legislation. It was proof that legislation distinct for Wales could be fashioned in Wales and implemented by Welsh public servants. It is a symbolic sign."

http://www.guardian.co.uk/uk/2012/apr/0 ... h-speakers
 
I don't get this I really don't, I'm in Swansea Welsh is common, no one's ever embarrassed to speak it as far as I can see it's spoken totally naturally.

Surely if it's flourishing and fine down here in what hasn't been Welsh language heartland for many many years, it can't be a problem anywhere else.

Whiny Gogs.
 
I notice nobody has mentioned Manx still spoken in the Island but not recognised elsewhere. WE need a language comissar to make sure a significant number of UK signs are in Manx :)
 
Yes they do...on the island.

(And they dont inflict it upon others as do the scots.)
 
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