Language Museum Blog

A project run by the BBC aims to teach people English – through the medium of television.

BBC World Service Trust’s English in Action project is an initiative in Bangladesh to raise the English language skills of 25 million people by 2017. The project has created TV shows that children and adults can watch and learn from together.

One of the shows is called Bishaash, and is described as a “supernatural detective series”. It will be accompanied by a linked English-language learning show BBC Janala: Mojay Mojay Shekha (Learning is Fun). The characters in Bishaash mainly speak in Bangla, but useful English lines are woven into the script, with Janala building on the language used.

It seems the project has language benefits for the television production crew as well, with the producer commenting:

The local crew runs the studio floor in Bangla, English or both and their confidence is palpable.

This is most evident with the integration of language and humour, where the local crew has embraced irony. Much to the amusement of the crew, I’ve been taught how to say ‘marvellous’ in Bangla in three very different ways – along with ‘It’s not possible’. (Source: BBC World Service)

The programmes are supported by lessons and quizzes that can be accessed online and by phone, as well as in a national newspaper. I wonder how successful this project will be?

Learning a new language can be tough – and it must be even more difficult if it’s your job to communicate effectively with a group of native speakers.

Apparently this is what the manager of England’s football team is finding out. Fabio Capello, a native Italian speaker, mastered Spanish whilst working at Real Madrid but his English is not yet fluent. With a nation desperate for football success, this is becoming an issue:

England’s players have privately expressed their frustration at struggling to understand the Italian. His difficulty in expressing himself and, when the situation demands it, explaining himself to the media is actually damaging.

Even when he does know what he’s doing, he sounds like he doesn’t. (Source: Daily Mail)

And what does the journalist recommend?

…he needs to work harder with his teacher and with those he does encounter – be it when he is in the office at Wembley or on his travels around the country.

We can all probably take that advice – learning a language is hard work and learners need to put in the effort to get results. But maybe it’s unfair to blame Mr Capello’s language skills – as the commenters on the article point out, perhaps our lack of success is just down to England’s players being rubbish…

An American friend was amused when I was showing him around London and introduced him to the Gherkin. No, not the cucumber-like fruit, but the building also known as the Swiss Re Building, or 30 St Mary Axe in the City of London.

A new project is to document the nicknames Brits give to where we live and local landmarks. Location Lingo aims to capture these names and the stories behind them. It’s not all about fun though – the research will serve a serious purpose:

“With the huge variety of place nicknames that exist we could never hope to capture them all ourselves” says Glen Hart, our Head of Research. “Technically this research goes by the name of Vernacular Geography which is looking into which names should be recorded and how best to discover them.

“Projects like Location Lingo can provide us with useful research data to help answer these questions. Organisations like the emergency services rely on our information when responding to 999 calls, so by having the most complete set of ‘unofficial’ names we could help the emergency services quickly locate the right place, and maybe even save lives.” (Source: Ordnance Survey Blog)

You can contribute your own Location Lingo through the English Project’s website.

Playing games is a fun way to improve in your target language. Someone recommended to me the language game website Digital Dialects, and I thought I’d share the tip!

The site features interactive games in 60 languages, from Afrikaans to Zazaki (spoken by Zazas in eastern Turkey). As well as the languages you’d expect (French, German, Spanish), it has some other more unusual ones – Tibetan and Cebuano, to mention a couple.

The games are suitable for learners at beginner to intermediate levels, and are fairly simple, focusing on word categories such as colours, food and clothing. In the Spanish section, which I’ve been using, there are also a couple of activities for more advanced learners and some verb conjugation games.

Give it a try, and I’ll be on the lookout for some more online game sites.

Language learners often aspire to native-like fluency in their target language. Some even hope to achieve an accent that makes them sound like a local.

Perhaps learners can take some tips from this British kid – who can speak English in 24 different accents, ranging from Cockney to German to Nigerian. Whilst he doesn’t quite hit the mark with all of them, it’s definitely an impressive achievement.

It seems eggcorns are having their day. The word has just been added to the Oxford English Online Dictionary, according to the Boston Globe.

If you’re not sure what an eggcorn is, here’s the official definition: “an alteration of a word or phrase through the mishearing or reinterpretation of one or more of its elements as a similar-sounding word.” So if you, like Joey from Friends, say “it’s a moo point” rather than “moot point”, you’re using an eggcorn.

Eggcorn seems like an odd word though – what’s its origin?

The term derives from “egg corn” as a substitution for “acorn,” whose earliest appearance comes in an 1844 letter from an American frontiersman: “I hope you are as harty as you ust to be and that you have plenty of egg corn bread which I can not get her and I hop to help you eat some of it soon.”

Why would eggcorn (as we now spell it) replace acorn in the writer’s lexicon? As the OED editors comment, “acorns are, after all, seeds which are somewhat egg-shaped, and in many dialects the formations acorn and eggcorn sound very similar.” (And, like corn kernels, acorns can be ground into meal or flour.) This coinage came to the attention of the linguists blogging at Language Log in 2003, and at the suggestion of Geoffrey Pullum, one of the site’s founders, it was adopted as the term for all such expressions.

Eggcorns needed their own label, the Language Loggers decided, because they were mistakes of a distinct sort — variants on the traditional phrasing, but ones that still made at least a bit of sense. “Nip it in the bud,” for instance, is a horticultural metaphor, perhaps not so widely understood as it once was; the newer “nip it in the butt” describes a different strategy for getting rid of some unwelcome visitation, but it’s not illogical. Hamlet said he was “to the manner born,” but the modern alteration, “to the manor born,” is also a useful formula. (Source: Boston.com)

Does anyone have any interesting eggcorns to share? If not, take a look at the Eggcorn Database.

The actress Emma Thompson has attacked the use of sloppy language in an interview with the Radio Times.

From the BBC:

She said: “We have to reinvest, I think, in the idea of articulacy as a form of personal human freedom and power.”

Ms Thompson added that on a visit to her old school she told pupils not to use slang words such as “likes” and “innit”.

“I told them, ‘Just don’t do it. Because it makes you sound stupid and you’re not stupid.”‘

Whilst this may sound harsh, Ms Thompson went on to say:

“There is the necessity to have two languages – one that you use with your mates and the other that you need in any official capacity.”

This is something I think we can all agree on. The ability to recognise the correct vocabulary to use in different situations is learnt through experience. And it’s noticeable when learning a new language also – in Spanish for example there are different greetings depending on the time of day (buenos dias, buenas tardes, buenas noches) and the person you are talking to.

These “two languages” are part of the reason why it’s difficult to become fully fluent in a language – you can learn the “official” language and yet until you hear and see how it is used by people in different contexts, you can’t really get the true feeling of a language.

What do you think of Emma Thompson’s views on sloppy language?

A New York City linguist is giving hope to a dying language in Croatia.

Zvjezdana Vrzic is originally from Croatia, and grew up in a household with Vlashki roots. The historical homeland of the Vlashki language (also known as Istro-Romanian) is the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia’s north-west. The language has been dying out since World War II, when emigration made the population smaller.

Vrzic initiated a project to save the language after she became a professor at New York University and connected with the community of Vlashki speakers in the city.

“I want to create a digital archive — a regional digital archive — where all the materials available on the language, including those that I’m collecting myself, will be deposited,” Vrzic says. “[I want to create] an archive that will become available to the community members. And I’m kind of bringing a different angle to it by making it very technologically-inspired.” (Source: Radio Free Europe)

Crucially, Vrzic realises that to save the language, the community needs to work to revitalise it. And it seems Vrzic has had some success – in Croatia her team is working with locals to plan a Vlashki heritage centre and has already organised well-attended language workshops.

To listen a proverb spoken in Vlashki, as well as a folk song, click here.

Are you having trouble telling your treggings (seen in picture) from your jeggings? Then a new dictionary is here to help. (clearskiesmeadery.co)

Department store Debenham’s has launched an online reference guide to fashion lingo to “help clear up the confusion”. The guide defines terms such as “mandles” (sandals for men”) and “whorts” (winter shorts).

As these terms are reasonably simple amalgamations of two common items of clothing (blurt = blouse/skirt), I can’t help feeling that a spokeswoman for Debenham’s is taking it a bit too far when she says:

“It’s now easier to understand Sanskrit than some of the words commonly used by commentators within the fashion industry to describe garments.” (Source: Sky News)

Apparently the reason behind the dictionary is:

..so that every shopper – both fashion expert and non expert alike – can shop easily and clearly in all of our stores. However, we are also urging the fashion industry to use existing English words to describe their garments rather than made up amalgamations. We’d love to drop all these amalgamations and at the very least we are committed to keeping their use to a minimum. (Source: Debenhams.com)

A noble cause indeed.

Continuing my occasional series of reviewing language books, here’s a slightly less serious one than before – Talk to the Snail by Stephen Clarke.

Clarke’s witty book doesn’t deal with subjects as weighty as dying languages; instead he tackles (as the book’s subtitle says) Ten Commandments for Understanding the French. Through themed chapters such as ‘Thou Shalt Be Wrong’ and ‘Thou Shalt Not Be Served’, readers are guided through how to get what they want from the French.

Helpfully each chapter ends with a list of phrases (including phonetic spellings) for visitors to France to use to get their way. Clarke clearly adores the French, for all their idiosyncratic ways, and gently mocks the national character throughout the book whilst providing handy tips on say, how to get served in a restaurant.

Definitely aimed at the British – a number of stereotypes are used) – the book is a good read, and perhaps a good accompaniment, to any trip across the Channel.