Listen & Learn Blog

It may come as a shock to Americans, but Hallowe’en is actually British, beginning life as a Celtic festival and exported to the States by immigrants. I absolutely love this holiday – admittedly mostly because I get to dress up, but there’s also the fun of trying to scare people!

Hallowe’en is celebrated around the world, so it’s also a good excuse to learn about other cultures. In Mexico for example, Dia de los Muertos (“Day of the Dead”) is celebrated as a time to remember friends and family who have died. Sweden celebrates Alla Helgons Dag or “All Hallows Day”.

Perhaps you could try making some Hallowe’en recipes in your target language, telling some ghost stories or try out some games. Whatever you do, enjoy – and don’t forget to dress up!

My last post explored some ideas about the future of the English language. Now it’s time to look to the past – a new project aims to find 100 events that shaped the English language.

The English Project, a charity dedicated to promoting the language, has started to compile a list of important events that made English what it is today. Starting in 475, the list includes the Undley Bracteate medallion which is the first evidence of written English. The most recent entry on the list is from 2003, when apparently more people said “I luv you” by text than said “I love you” by post.

The project has so far made 20 entries and is looking to the public to help fill the remaining slots.

Bill Lucas, a trustee of the English Project and professor of learning at the University of Winchester, said: “This is a wonderful way of engaging people in a wider conversation about the English Language.

“We want to get the nation really thinking about the stories behind our evolving language.

“How, for example, do you rate the relative significance of Shakespeare’s Stratford-upon-Avon, versus London’s part in the birth of the world wide web?

“English has now become the lingua franca of the world. It is the most exciting and exotic language partly because of its capacity to incorporate so many elements of other languages, and somehow to make these dynamic, descriptive and always exciting.

“The history of Britain and the history of the English language are also very closely intertwined.

“We’re excited about hearing people’s ideas about the places and events they think have shaped the language.” (Source: Telegraph)

Sadly it seems that they are only looking for places in the British Isles that are important to the history of the language – I wonder if this will extend to include the rest of the English-speaking world?

An interesting blog post at the Washington Post looks at the five words shaping our future.

Jonathon Keats proposes that “words occasionally anticipate the reality they come to reflect”, particularly now in our technological society. The words he thinks we will be using more in the future are mostly combinations of other words, for example memristor = a resistor with electrical memory.

The most interesting for me is Panglish – “a simplified future world English”.

An estimated 1.5 billion people speak English, fewer than a quarter of whom speak it as a first language. Most get by with simplified grammar and a vocabulary of a couple thousand words. Coined to identify this streamlined English, panglish has transformed the phenomenon into a topic of debate. Panglish has been vilified by English nativists afraid that their language is being gutted, and by lexical nationalists abroad terrified that panglish will sully local tongues. Yet few panglish speakers even know the word panglish. They have no need for it. Those who would decree the future of language might as well speak gibberish.

The idea that everyone will speak some level of English in the future is hotly debated. Some believe English will wither away and die out, others think it will go from strength to strength. One of the world’s foremost experts on English thinks it will fragment into global dialects. In 2000, the British Council estimated that over a billion people were learning the language, so it looks healthy so far – who knows what the future will bring?

New research from the University of Texas at Austin shows that people match each other’s language styles more during happier periods in their relationship than at other times. From Science Daily:

“When two people start a conversation, they usually begin talking alike within a matter of seconds,” says James Pennebaker, psychology professor and co-author of the study. “This also happens when people read a book or watch a movie. As soon as the credits roll, they find themselves talking like the author or the central characters.”

This is called language style matching or LSM, and as it is automatic (people match their language with others without noticing), it’s apparently a good indicator of a relationship.

Style-matching scores were calculated between poetry written by two pairs of spouses, Victorian poets Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning and 20th century poets Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, which mapped major changes in their relationships.

“Style words in the spouses’ poems were more similar during happier periods of their relationships and less synchronized toward each relationship’s end,” Ireland says.

Differences in style matching between the two couples were revealing as well. Even at the high point of their marriage, Hughes and Plath were less in sync than the historically more harmonious Brownings were at their lowest point.

I wonder if style matching works across languages also? Is it easier to learn a new language if you’re in a relationship with someone who speaks that language?

Students at some universities are foregoing traditional languages in favour of learning indigenous languages, according to the LA Times.

Rather than taking French, Spanish or Mandarin, the students are learning indigenous Latin American languages such as Zapotec, Quechua and Mixtec. Their reasons for taking the classes are varied – some want to work with the people who speak the language, others to get closer to their roots.

In Los Angeles, Felipe Lopez also gradually shed his shame for Zapotec.

Many of the estimated 300,000 Oaxacans living in Los Angeles County are of Zapotec decent, he said. He wanted the language and the culture recognized as distinct, even in a sea of Spanish-speaking Mexicans.

Lopez now represents his countrymen living in the United States by serving as a liaison to the Oaxacan government. And he and two UCLA colleagues worked for eight years in the 1990s to write the first Zapotec, Spanish, English dictionary. The thick book defines 9,000 words in Zapotec, a language that is hardly ever written.

With the many stories in the news about endangered indigenous languages, this shows that there is still enthusiasm and reason for learning and keeping at-risk languages alive.

North Korea has featured in the news a lot in the past few weeks, mainly showing the 65th anniversary celebrations of the ruling Workers’ Party.

I was interested to find out that a North-South dictionary of the Korean language has been in production for a number of years now. The “Big Dictionary of the Korean People’s Language” was approved in 2004 and was over half completed by the end of last year. It was slated to be finished in 2013, but the project has come across some issues.

Ko Un, the poet who chairs the project, came out this week to draw attention to its impending demise. He told one local paper that since the Cheonan sinking even discussions about expenses have been suspended. Consequently, the two sides have been unable to exchange first drafts, the writing has stopped, and researchers in the South are now looking for other work. (Source: Korea Times)

The two countries have been separated for so long that their common language has divided also.

Small differences are already apparent which can lead to misunderstanding. A toilet in South Korea, for example, is the equivalent of a “powder room.” In the North, it’s a “hygiene room.” President Lee’s surname in the South is pronounced as the letter “e.” In the North, it would be “ree.” The North has adopted Russian words and the South had adopted many more English words. The dictionary would aim to capture the language as it evolves in these different directions.

It must be fascinating for each side to discover the similarities and differences in their languages. Hopefully the compilers of the dictionary can continue on to complete their work.

Banned Books Week was held around the country last week, celebrating “the freedom to read and the importance of the First Amendment”. Now, how about holding a Banned Words Week?

The idea is explored in this article by Erin McKean, a lexicographer and founder of Wordnik. As she explains, there’s been a lot of media coverage in the past year about banned words – from the 119 words banned from a Chicago radio station to broadcasters in China being told to use the Chinese equivalents of English-language abbreviations. Whilst books seem to be banned for moral or ideological reasons:

Words, on the other hand, seem just as likely to be banned for being euphemistic, pretentious, or banal as they are for being offensive. The bans are efforts to protect the language as much as to protect young ears. Most of the “official” lists of banned words fall into this category, such as the “Banished Words” list put together every year by faculty and staff at Lake Superior State University in Michigan, which tends towards new tech words, awkward neologisms (often blends of existing words, like staycation), and overused buzzwords (2010’s list included tweet, app, czar, bromance, and teachable moment).

McKean asks if bans are effective. Books that are banned in libraries often see an upsurge in bookstore sales. Is there a word equivalent – does usage increase when a word is banned?

A new language has been discovered in a remote part of India.

The language, Koro, was discovered by a team of linguists who were on an expedition as part of National Geographic’s “Enduring Voices” project on threatened indigenous languages.

It is estimated that the language is spoken by around 800 to 1200 people and has never been written down. Koro is distinct from other languages in the area, and belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family. According to BBC News:

The researchers were searching for two other little-known languages spoken only in one small area.
As they heard and recorded these, they found a third which was completely new to them and had never before been listed.

“We didn’t have to get far on our word list to realise it was extremely different in every possible way,” said Dr David Harrison, one of the expedition leaders.

The linguists recorded thousands of words- and found Koro was distinct from other languages in the area.
It belongs to the Tibeto-Burman family, which includes around 150 languages spoken in India. But scientists were unable to find any others closely related to Koro within this group.

I find it amazing that this language wasn’t ‘discovered’ until now! I wonder how many other languages we haven’t yet heard about?

The first production performed entirely in Klingon has premiered in the Netherlands.

Called u, the production was conceived by the Klingon Terran Research Ensemble (KTRE), based in the Hague. The title translates as ‘universe’ or ‘universal’.

Klingon was invented by linguist Marc Okrand as the language of the fictional Star Trek warrior race. Fans have taken up the language with enthusiasm and sometimes controversy – one American man decided to speak to his child only in Klingon for three years.

The opera apparently features a Klingon story with Klingon lyrics and Klingon singers although this has caused some difficulties:

..Schoenfeld admitted the KTRE had to “assume a lot of things”. “We can’t go to Qo’noS and hang out with the Imperial Opera,” he said. “That’s just not an option right now. And we’re hoping, of course, for some grants to allow that.” (Source: The Guardian)

Quite an achievement for an invented language.