Language Museum Blog

With seemingly endless choices out there, it can often be confusing trying to choose a language school that is right for you. Of course, first you need to consider your reasons for learning as they will impact on what school you choose. For example, are you hoping to progress your career or do you simply need some phrases for a holiday? (https://www.governmentauctions.org/)

Once you’ve done that, here are some further questions to consider, which I have grouped into general categories to make reading easier:

Location and environment

Classes

General

If you are planning to study abroad, it is worth checking if the school is accredited, especially when learning English. In the UK, English schools are accredited by the British Council, and overseas you should look at IALC and EAQUALS.

Finally, this is an interesting article from a writer who has personal experience of choosing a language school overseas.

I’m no sci-fi geek, but I’ll admit I did enjoy the recent Star Trek movie. Off the back of the movie comes something for uber sci-fi geeks and dedicated linguists: the Klingon dictionary for the iPhone.

Originally invented for the Star Trek TV series, the Klingon language is called
tlhIngan Hol, and even has its own language institute. It is one of the more successful invented languages, along with Esperanto and Elvish. It appears to be much more complex than either of those languages, however:

Marc Okrand is a student of various Native American languages, which are notoriously difficult for speakers of Indo-European languages to learn, and in creating Klingon he borrowed rare and unfamiliar grammatical and syntactical rules, along with tongue-twisting sound combinations, from those and other little-known world languages. Klingon verbs have 29 different prefixes to indicate subject and object agreement, Klingon sentences have a highly unorthodox word order (object-verb-subject), and Klingon vocabulary can be almost endlessly agglutinated, meaning that long phrases can be stuck together into single words. (The supposed Klingon proverb “If it is in your way, knock it down,” is expressed in just two words: “Dubotchugh yIpummoH.”) Okrent says her reaction to Klingon, as an accredited linguist, was that “it was completely believable as a language, but somehow very, very odd.”

Read the rest of the article on invented languages here. And if you’ve never heard Klingon being spoken, check out this young linguist.

(*That’s “we are Klingons!” for all you non-speakers.)

The first big spelling contest in the UK has been decided. A talented trio from St Martin’s School in Middlesex beat teams from all over the country to take the title of The Times Spelling Bee Champions 2009 at the Grand Final in London on June 23rd.

So what kind of word challenges did the winners face? Well, in the quick fire round (the team had to spell as many words in 2 minutes as they could), they spelled contemporaneous and rehearsal in seconds, no pause for thought. From the highlights I’ve seen, that’s what made the St Martin’s team winners – not only could they spell the words correctly, they could spell them quickly.

Other competitors were tripped up by words such as troglodyte and pterodactyl.

Compared to the Scripps Spelling Bee (the major American competition) however, it seems the British have a ways to go. Perusing the sample word list for The Times competition, I can’t say there are any words I haven’t seen before, compared with the final of the Scripps, which threw up zingers like schizaffin. Any kid who can spell that, let alone know the definition definitely deserves a prize. Let’s hope The Times Spelling Bee continues on to become as successful (and difficult!) as the Scripps.

A couple of posts ago I was talking about Singlish, and the Singaporean government’s attempts to promote English.

Now it seems, however, that Mandarin is the favoured language. Whilst the Speak Mandarin Campaign has been around for a long time, now it is being actively promoted over English. This seems to make economic sense at least, with Mandarin spoken by approximately 870 million people and the Chinese economy being the third largest, as well as the fastest growing in the world.

Interestingly, the Minister promoting the campaign also actively discourages dialects, saying:

Learning dialects will add to our children’s burden, and take away time and energy from English and Mandarin. Dialects also cause negative interferences on the learning of English and Mandarin, due to differences in their vocabulary, phonetics and syntax.

With Mandarin, we can connect with the whole of China and its 1.3 billion people. Dialects will confine us to our original village or town or at the most, the province of our ancestors.

Personally I think this is a shame as dialects contribute to the diversity of languages and can be an integral part of a person’s cultural identity. There is debate among linguists however, as to whether people should be encourage to eliminate these “non-standard” ways of speaking. This Singaporean certainly seems to have a stong opinion on the subject.

Following on from my last post (again!) is the hopeful news that another Aboriginal language is being brought back from the dead.

Dharug was one of the dominant Aboriginal dialects in the Sydney region when British settlers arrived in 1788, but became extinct under the weight of colonisation.

Details of its demise are sketchy but linguists believe the last of the traditional Dharug speakers died in the late 19th Century, and their unique tongue only survives because of written records.

In a remarkable comeback, Dharug now breathes again – its revitalisation helped by the efforts of staff at Chifley College’s Dunheved campus in Sydney.

The language is being taught partly through song, which I have mentioned previously as being a useful tool for language acquisition. It seems to be successful at this school, so their methods can hopefully be imitated in other places to promote the comeback of this Aboriginal language and others.

Read the rest of the article here.

My last post was about Aramaic, the language scholars believe was spoken by Jesus, making it approximately 2000 years old.

Perhaps even older are the languages of the Aboriginal people, the indigenous people of Australia. The Aboriginals, or Indigenous Australians, are thought to have inhabited Australia for around 40,000 years before the first European settlement. Pre-colonisation, Aboriginal people were part of different ‘nations’ spread all over the continent, each with its own language. There were an estimated 700 dialects and 250 distinct languages, which were as distinct as English, Swedish and Mandarin.

Today it is estimated there are 20 – 50 “healthy” Aboriginal dialects. These are spoken mostly in the Northern Territory. “Healthy” means the language is spoken to, and used by kids.

Aboriginal languages are strongly interlinked with their culture, with ancestral creative beings said to have left languages in the country.

In Aboriginal societies language is not only seen as a form of communication but as a method of right to land, forming boundaries for each family group, and language group. Language is used as social control as it has various forms depending on the ages and status of people within a language group. (Indigenous Australia)

Some elements of Aboriginal language have made it into Australian culture (for example, place names such as Canberra) and gone on to take a place in popular culture. Koala, kangaroo, and boomerang are all things we associate with Australia, generally without knowledge of their Aboriginal roots.

So, perhaps next time you think about Ayers Rock, you could spare a thought for this ancient culture and refer to it by its original name, Uluru*.

*Note: the correct spelling of Uluru has a retroflex under the ‘r’, which I cannot recreate here.

First, a confession. I did not think that anyone still spoke Aramaic, the language scholars say was spoken by Jesus. Sure, I’d heard that the controversial movie The Passion of the Christ was mostly in Aramaic, but it never connected in my brain that anyone would still actually speak it.

This article, however, proved me wrong. The world’s oldest living tongue, Aramaic is listed by Unesco (United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organisation) as an endangered language and as such efforts are being made to preserve and promote it.

With similarities to both Arabic and Hebrew, Aramaic is spoken mostly in the Middle East, principally in a few villages north of Damascus, Syria, in the form of Western Neo-Aramaic. The Syrian government has set up the Aramaic Language Academy in one of the villages to assist in the continuation of the language.

Linguistic experts say that Syria is doing well in fostering this part of its heritage. “Aramaic is actually pretty healthy in Maaloula,” said Professor Geoffrey Kahn, who teaches semitic philology at Cambridge University. “It’s the eastern Aramaic dialects in Turkey, Iraq and Iran that are really endangered.”

Listen to the Lord’s Prayer being spoken in Aramaic here. And for more articles on Aramaic, see here.

Recently I was lucky enough to visit the city-state of Singapore for a few days and soak up the culture and language (in amongst all the shopping).

A multicultural country made up of ethnic Malays, Indians and Chinese, along with quite a few ex-pats, Singapore has four official languages: Malay, Tamil, Mandarin and English. In addition to these, a number of dialects are spoken, including Hokkien, Hakka and Teochew.

What you’ll hear on the streets, however (and despite the government’s efforts with their Speak Good English Movement), is Singlish, a form of English mashed up with words borrowed from Tamil, Malay, Hokkien and other languages and dialects spoken by Singaporeans.

Primary based on British English, with some American English influence, Singlish is a creole that is the first language for many Singaporeans. Evolved gradually after the withdrawal of the British from this former colony, Singlish has its own grammatical forms and is spoken on a continuum ranging from an almost-pidgin to something very similar to British or American English. It even has its own dictionary!

The term you’ll probably hear most often though, is lah. Tacked on to the end of many sentences, lah is used like a full stop. Examples from the Coxford Dictionary:

1. “It was just like that, lah.”
2. “He was running, lah.”
3. “Donno, lah.”

Whilst this may not be “good English”, Singlish is definitely a great example of language helping form and shape culture and identity.

I’ve posted before about dictionaries and the huge amount of work that goes into them. Now, you can get involved yourself in a new type of dictionary making – in online video form.

Wordia.com is “the world’s first democratically compiled, multimedia online dictionary” and is made up of videos uploaded by everyone from your average Joe on the street to the illustrator Quentin Blake. The danger is obvious – how do you know the definition offered is true and accurate? Wordia solves this by having the definition of the word from the Collins dictionary in text below the video.

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Probably my favourite of the videos I’ve viewed so far is the vaguely hysterical one from Nikki Grahame, a former Big Brother UK contestant (above). Although won’t help you too much if you want to know the proper definition of the word invention, it is amusingly overwrought.

Currently the site is asking for videos on words related to Refugee Week 2009, which runs from 15 -21 June. Entries include musings from The Archbishop of Canterbury on refuge and Baaba Maal (community). Upload your own video giving a definition of one of the selected words for the week, and you could win a Simple Acts journal.

Whilst it’s just getting off the ground at the moment, wordia.com could really develop into an interesting tool for language learning, especially if it goes global and definitions from different languages are added. Watch this space.

Spending a lot of time talking to an American man from the South, the word “y’all” has struck me as very interesting, although probably unusable if you don’t have a Southern accent. It has, however, spread to the extent that it’s included in the Merriam-Webster, so maybe it’ll catch on across the Atlantic eventually.

“Y’all” is short for “you all”, and is pronounced something like “yawl”. “Y’all” is commonly incorrectly spelled “ya’ll”, but think of the two words it’s made up of and it’s simple: “you” and “all”. When saying or writing “y’all”, you’re merely taking out the “ou” in “you” and replacing it with an apostrophe. “All” is one word that you cannot break up.

So when and how do you use it? As David Parker explains on Another History Blog:

…the word serves an important function in English. We have separate singular and plural first person pronouns (“I” and “we”) and third person pronouns (“he”/”she” and “they”), but there is no distinction in the second person; “you” is both singular and plural. The distinction between the French “tu” (singular) and “vous” (plural) doesn’t exist in English. It did until a few centuries ago: “thou” was singular, “you” plural. (www.belotero.com) But by the time the American colonies won their independence, “thou” had practically disappeared and “you” was serving a double function. It’s almost as if we’re missing a pronoun now, and “y’all” admirably fills the second person plural position.

In other words: it’s OK to say “how are y’all doing?” if you’re referring to a group of people, but if you’re just talking to the one person, it’s best to stick to “how are you doing?”

And some further usage examples from my American friend:

“Y’all gon be around later?”
“Where y’all from?”
“Who won between y’all and em?”