Category: Linguistics

30,000 words a day

By Simon

According to a study undertaken by Infoture, children who at least 30,000 words a day from their parents and other people around are likely to excel academically as they grow up.

The study found that children who heard at least 33 million words (30,000 a day) from birth the age of 3 tend to have higher IQs at the age of 10 than those who hear fewer words. The study also found that television viewing tends to significantly decrease the amount of conversation in a home, which negatively effects children’s language and academic development.

Infoture has developed a system called LENA (Language ENvironment Analysis system) which provides parents with information about their children’s language environment such as the number of words spoken by parents and children.

Tuning into language

By Simon

Language and music appear to be processed in the same parts of our brains, according to the results of research undertaken at Georgetown University Medical Center.

The research suggests that one part of the brain in the temporal lobes helps us to memorise information such as words and meanings in language and melodies in music. Meanwhile part of the brain’s frontal lobes helps us to learn and use the rules of language and music, such as sentence syntax and musical harmony.

More details of the project.

Some theories of the origins of language, such as this one, argue that singing developed before language and that the brain structures that originally evolved to enable us to sing were later adapted for language. This research provides possible support for such theories.

Preserving and reviving languages – a high-tech solution

By Simon

A hand-held device called a Phraselator, that can translate between English and a variety of other languages, has been adapted by a Cherokee business man, Don Thornton, to help with the preservation and revival of Native American languages, according to an article I found today.

You can talk into the Phraselator in English, it recognises your voice, translates your words and then reads the translation aloud. It was originally developed for military use in Afghanistan to translate from English into Dari, Pashto. Quite a few more languages have been added since then and the device is now used by used by the military, police and in disaster relief.

When he read about the Phraselator in 2001, Don Thornton thought that it could be used to help to save indigenous languages. After a long campaign for the right to use the technology, he set up a company, Thornton Media Inc. to do just that, and now works with over 70 tribes. The device is being used by and with elders to record words, phrases, stories and songs in their native languages, along with English translations, and then other members of the tribes are able to use it to learn their languages.

The device enables people to preserve and revive their own languages in their own ways without relying on others. For this reason, because it emulates oral traditions, and because of it’s ease of use, it has be adopted with enthusiasm by many. Thornton acknowledges that it would be better if the languages were passed on in the home from generation to generation, however this is not always possible. This device offers an alternative solution.

Kernewek/Kernowek/Kernuak/Curnoack

By Simon

Moves are apparently being made to establish a single written form of Cornish, which currently has four different spelling systems. The Cornish Language Partnership has set up a Linguistic Working Group consisting of Cornish speakers with a good knowledge of the language to recommend a solution to this excess of orthographies. A conference will be held this month to discuss this matter. If an agreement is reached on a single written form, it will be used in schools and for official purposes.

I understand that the lack of a standard spelling system is discouraging some people from taking Cornish seriously. If a standard can be agreed on, this could lead to more people learning the language.

Here are a few Cornish-related sites I found yesterday.

Cornish for Absolute Beginners
http://www.howlsedhes.co.uk/dallether/dlan0.shtml

Radyo an Norvys – a pod cast in Cornish
http://www.dasunys.net/podcast.htm

Cornish forum – discussions in and about the Cornish language
http://www.dasunys.net/php/

Tablys leveryans – Cornish pronunciation tables
http://www.dasunys.net/tables.htm

Language hotspots

By Simon

The Enduring Voices Project, which I came across today on the National Geographic website, has the aims of documenting endangered languages and preventing language extinction by identifying the most crucial areas where languages are endangered and embarking on expeditions to:

Understand the geographic dimensions of language distribution
Determine how linguistic diversity is linked to biodiversity
Bring wide attention to the issue of language loss

There’s a map on the site which shows the areas of the world with a particular high density of endangered languages, and also provides information about the languages and a few recordings. The ‘hotspots’ on the map are colour coded to give an idea of the severity of the problems. The areas with the most endangered languages are northern Australia, eastern and central Siberia, central South America, and the northwest Pacific plateau of North America.

Here are a few random factoids from the site:

The Yukaghir people (Siberia, 30-150 speakers) traditionally measured time with a unit called ‘the kettle boiled,’ about an hour long. A longer interval was called ‘the frozen kettle boiled,’ which took about 90 minutes.

Tuvan (200,000 speakers) has a word that means ‘the two wives of my two brothers.’ If you had three brothers, or one of your two brothers was unmarried, you would never use this word.

A noun in Tabassaran (95,000 speakers, Dagestan (Russia)) may have up to 53 distinct forms, using suffixes that describe the location and movement of objects in relation to that noun.

Being bilingual 有很多好處

By Simon

The other day I found an interesting interview with Professor Laura-Ann Petitto, a cognitive neuroscientist who has spent the past 29 years seeking to uncover the biological and environmental factors that affect how humans acquire language and how language is organized in the brain. The main aim of her research is the find the biological foundations of language.

She found that the language development of children who grow up bilingually or multilingual is not delayed when compared with monolingual children, as a popular belief suggests. That bilingual and multilingual children do mix languages, just as adults do, and that they do so in a highly principled way. Language mixing is mainly a social phenomenon and the amount of language mixing among children reflects mixing behaviour among adults in their community.

She also studied the optimum time to expose children to two or more languages, comparing groups of children who were exposed to multiply languages at different ages. Some were raised bilingually from birth, others from the ages of three, five, etc. She found that up to nine years old, children immersed in a bilingual environment can become equally fluent in both languages. However if such children are only exposed to one of the languages in school, their ability in that language is much reduced.

Other interesting bits from the interview include the finding that “young children who have rich and early exposure to two languages are […] cognitively more advanced than their monolingual peers on certain highly sophisticated cognitive tasks to do with attention and abstract reasoning.” Also that those children exposed to two languages after the age of nine or so will eventually learn them, but will probably never speak them as well as the early starters.

LingDoku

By Simon

LingDoku

Here’s a game similar to sudoku called LingDoku (illustration top right), which is designed for linguists. According to the Speculative Grammarian, the site where I came across it, “LingDoku simplifies the logical components of SuDoku, and introduces a thin veneer of linguistics which confuses outsiders while making linguists feel superior.”.

The rules of LingDoku are straightforward. Using the nine IPA symbols in the table above, complete the unfinished table below. Each symbol occurs exactly once in the box, and no row or column may contain more than one symbol with either the same place or same manner of articulation. If this one is too easy, there’s a more challenging version called Samurai LingDoku here.
LingDoku

The Speculative Grammarian is well worth a thorough browse, packed as it is with “twisted ramblings, academic parody [and] satirical linguistics”, including The Lingo – A car designed for linguists… by linguists, The European Dialects of Cheese, and crosswords for linguists.

Urban Irish

By Simon

According to some of the people I met in Ireland last week, Irish might become a mainly urban language in the future. At the moment the majority of regular Irish speakers live in remote, rural areas, the Gaeltachtaí. These areas are suffering from depopulation because there are few opportunities for young people, who tend to move elsewhere to study and work. Some return, but many don’t. In some of the rural Gaeltachtaí the language remains strong, however in others the numbers of people using Irish as their main language is shrinking.

Not all Gaeltachtaí are in rural areas though – in West Belfast there is a thriving and growing community of Irish speakers, which was established in the late 1960s by six Irish-speaking families. In 1970 the first Irish medium primary school in Northern Ireland, Bunscoil Phobal Feirste, opened its doors, and the first Irish medium nursery school, Naíscoil, was set up in 1978. Since then numerous Irish medium nursery and primary schools have opened, and there are three secondary schools as well. There is also a daily Irish language newspaper – Lá Nua – and an Irish language community radio station – Raidió Fáilte. One of the people I met in Glencolmcille works for this radio station and he did a number of short interviews with people attending the summer school, including myself.

According to Wikipedia, the varieties of Irish native to Northern Ireland became extinct as spoken languages when the last native speaker of Rathlin Irish died in 1985. However over 10% of the population now have some knowledge of Irish – mainly the Donegal dialect of Ulster Irish. The Irish speakers in Belfast and Northern Ireland in general seem determined to keep the language alive there whatever obstacles are put in their way, and there is no shortage of obstacles.

Reviving Sanskrit

By Simon

Recently the number of people studying Sanskrit, the best known of India’s classical languages, has been increasing, according to an article I found today. The piece mentions that there’s a lot of interest in Sanskrit both in India, and among India ex-pats in the USA and other countries.

Reasons for this include the booming Indian economy, which has lead more people to take an interest in India’s history, and also the efforts of a group called Samskrita Bharati, whose mission is to “bring the pan-Indian language back to the mainstream and lay the groundwork for a cultural renaissance”. There are more details of their work here.

In one village called Ganoda in Rajasthan, many of the people are apparently able to speak Sanskrit and use it to some extent in their everyday lives.

Do you speak Sanskrit or have you studied it? Are there any other places where Sanskrit is used as a community language?

The critical period

By Simon

There’s a hypothesis that we have a critical period for acquiring languages during our childhood, and that learning a language in later life, roughly after the age of 12 or 13, is difficult because of this. As a result of this theory, it’s widely believed that the earlier you start learning a foreign language, the more successful you’ll be.

According to an article I came across today, the different aspects of language acquisition take place at different times and rates. If there is a critical period, there probably isn’t one single one but many. We continue to improve our knowledge of our language(s) throughout our lives.

The article suggests that one reason why most of us find it difficult to learn new languages is because our brains have are set up to handle the language(s) we already know, and find other languages challenging, especially ones that differ significantly from our native ones.

The conclusion is that our language learning abilities decline with age, so the earlier you start learning languages the better, but “there is no particular age beyond which the effort is hopeless”.