Language Museum Blog

An Italian university has announced it will teach and assess its degree courses in English rather than Italian.

The change will be made from 2014 at the Politecnico di Milano, one of Italy’s leading universities. The university, based in Milan, believes that it will be unable to compete on a global scale if it continues to use the Italian language.

“We strongly believe our classes should be international classes – and the only way to have international classes is to use the English language,” says the university’s rector, Giovanni Azzone.

“Universities are in a more competitive world, if you want to stay with the other global universities – you have no other choice,” says Professor Azzone. (Source: BBC News)

The professor believes other Italian universities will follow suit, as English has become the language of higher education and international business.

What do you think? Should universities teach in their country’s language, or switch to English? What will this change mean for the Italian language?

We’ve recently been hearing a lot about the English language – from David Crystal’s English in 100 words to the Open University’s history of English in 10 minutes.

But what did they think about the language back in 1943? A newly released film from the British Film Council’s Collection showcases the multiculturalism of English and describes its origins. You can view and download the film here.

Interestingly, the film originally included more focus on the Germanic aspects of the language – as it was wartime however, these were cut, citing “time constraints”.

Last October, I highlighted the linguist David Crystal’s new book, The Story of English in 100 Words.

It appears the book has just come out in America, as Crystal has given a fairly lengthy interview to NPR. You can listen to the interview and read some extracts over at NPR’s website. My favourite extract is this, about the origins of ‘OK’.

On the origins of ‘OK’

“One of the reasons why I love it is because of the point that Roger has made, and that is that it has had so many guesses for its origins. I stopped counting at 50.

“I think we do now know where OK comes from. There was a great American lexicographer called Allen Walker Read, who many years ago did a huge study and found out that the word ‘OK’ first appeared in the 1830s … in a newspaper in Boston. Because at the time, there was a vogue for inventing humorous abbreviations using initial letters.

“And OK came, at that point in time, from ‘oll korrect,’ … O-L-L for ‘all,’ and K-O-R-R-E-C-T for ‘correct.’ Now, there were dozens of other abbreviations in the Boston newspaper at the time, and most of them had disappeared. But this one didn’t. OK stayed. And the reason is it had a completely fresh boost of life the following year, when it began to be used as a slogan in the U.S. elections in 1840.”

In English there are many words that look similar but have different meanings. Brought and bought for example, or lose and loose.

A single letter marks the difference in meaning in each of these four words. Let’s look at lose and loose, as I’ve recently seen a lot of examples of misuse of these words. In particular people seem to write loose when they really mean lose.

Loose is an adjective, and means not tight or constricted; free. Examples include “my shoes feel really loose today” and “the dog got loose”. When someone tells you to “loosen up”, they mean for you to relax, chill out.

Lose, however, means to be without something through theft, accident, etc. Examples include “I lost my wallet” and “I lost my job”. When someone tells you to “get lost”, they mean for you to go away!

There’s an easy way to remember the difference – just think that “lose has lost the extra o”!

We all remember the horror of stumbling over Shakespeare’s texts in school English classes, but what do the plays sound like when not spoken aloud by embarrassed teenagers?

The British Library has released a CD featuring scenes and speeches from Shakespeare’s work as he would have heard them. The selection of speeches includes Hamlet’s “to be, or not to be” and Henry V’s “Once more unto the breach, dear friends”, with scenes featured from Much Ado About Nothing, Macbeth and Othello.

The recording reveals new ways of looking at Shakespeare’s work, with lines that were meant to rhyme actually rhyming and puns that don’t work in modern English revealed. You can listen to some clips from the recording here. People have said the accents sound Cornish, do you agree?

Shakespeare’s Original Pronunciation CD is available from the British Library shop.

Last month I posted about a new book by Michael Erard called Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners.

Erard defines a hyperpolyglot as someone who speaks eleven languages or more, and he can add Oxford University student Alex Rawlings to the list. Alex is only twenty, but can speak eleven languages: English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian.

He started learning as a child because his mother spoke three languages with him – English, French and Greek. Alex’s love of languages has grown from there. You can hear him talk about his language acquisition progression in this video from BBC News.

Reading or watching the news may make it hard to believe, but new research shows that English is biased towards being positive.

Researchers from the University of Vermont gathered billions of words from sources including Google Books and looked at the top 5,000 words from each source. They found that happier words cropped up more frequently.

Why is this? “It’s not to say that everything is fine and happy,” Dodds says. “It’s just that language is social.”

In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.

“If you want to remain in a social contract with other people, you can’t be a…,” well, Dodds here used a word that is rather too negative to be fit to print — which makes the point. (Source: Science Daily)

I wonder what other languages are as ‘happy’ as English?

Like many others, I’m probably guilty of overusing the word “awesome”. It’s a good thing I don’t live in LA (although I would love the sunshine), because one man is on a mission to ban the word.

British-born but LA based poet and journalist John Tottenham has launched CPSOA – the Campaign to Stamp Out Awesome. His headquarters is a bookstore which he is trying to turn into an “awesome-free zone”. Tottenham argues that the word has been so overused it has been rendered meaningless.

Tottenham already is looking toward other cliches to conquer.

“Other words will be addressed once we get rid of awesome,” Tottenham promises. “‘It’s all good.’ That’s definitely crying out to be done.” (Source: LA Times)

Do you see the problem with awesome? Or is Tottenham just a grouch?

Being mistaken for a local is seen by many language learners as the ultimate in being fluent in their target language. This involves learning not just the language but the accent to go with it. (Tramadol online)

It’s not just language learners who want to ‘perfect’ their accent though – apparently there’s a rise in the number of British people taking elocution lessons. Many feel that their regional accent is holding them back in the workplace or hindering getting a job.

In what we like to think of as an increasingly classless society, and at a time when the distinctive regional accents are gradually being melded and lost, it seems a shame that there are so many people anxious to lose their accents. “I get a lot of requests from people looking to reduce their regional accents, Midwinter says. “I think as long as people speak clearly, if they have an accent, that’s OK, as long as they can be understood. But there are times when a voice with less of an accent might be an advantage, for example at an interview, or if you are speaking to a large group of people, when it helps to have a voice that is loud and clear. Most people have very specific needs that they want to correct. Very few come to me and say, ‘I want to speak like the Queen.’” (Source: The Independent)

I have the opposite issue – being the lone southerner in an office full of northerners I often wish that my accent was from somewhere else! The Yorkshire-born people I work with seem particularly proud of their accents, and I can’t imagine them taking elocution lessons. We should celebrate this diversity!

Ever wanted to visit China but fear the language barrier? You’re in luck!

In one of the oddest pieces of news I’ve seen in a while, it’s reported in China’s People’s Daily that a Beijing suburb is to build a European style town where no one will be allowed to speak Chinese. To be built within 5 years, the town will have an English castle and create “the illusion of being abroad”.

The local mayor, Wang Haichen, said one courtyard has been turned into a boutique hotel, and promised to transform Miyun County into an international tourism and leisure attraction.

We shall have to wait and see how successful this is!