Applied Languages

Indonesia’s linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.

For some Indonesians, as mastery of English has become increasingly tied to social standing, Indonesian has been relegated to second-class status. In extreme cases, people take pride in speaking Indonesian poorly.  The global spread of English, with its sometimes corrosive effects on local languages, has caused much hand-wringing in many non-English-speaking corners of the world. But the implications may be more far-reaching in Indonesia, where generations of political leaders promoted Indonesian to unite the nation and forge a national identity out of countless ethnic groups, ancient cultures and disparate dialects.

The government recently announced that it would require all private schools to teach the nation’s official language to its Indonesian students by 2013. Details remain sketchy, though. In 1928, nationalists seeking independence from Dutch rule chose Indonesian, a form of Malay, as the language of civic unity. While a small percentage of educated Indonesians spoke Dutch, Indonesian became the preferred language of intellectuals.

Each language had a social rank, said Arief Rachman, an education expert. “If you spoke Javanese, you were below,” he said, referring to the main language on the island of Java. “If you spoke Indonesian, you were a bit above. If you spoke Dutch, you were at the top.”

Leaders, especially Suharto, the general who ruled Indonesia until 1998, enforced teaching of Indonesian and curbed use of English. “During the Suharto era, Bahasa Indonesia was the only language that we could see or read. English was at the bottom of the rung,” said Aimee Dawis, who teaches communications at Universitas Indonesia. “It was used to create a national identity, and it worked, because all of us spoke Bahasa Indonesia. Now the dilution of Bahasa Indonesia is not the result of a deliberate government policy. It’s just occurring naturally.”

Anna Surti Ariani, a psychologist who provides counseling at private schools and in her own practice, said some parents even displayed “a negative pride” that their children spoke poor Indonesian. Schools typically advise the parents to speak to their children in English at home even though the parents may be far from fluent in the language.
Uchu Riza — who owns a private school that teaches both languages — said some Indonesians were willing to sacrifice Indonesian for a language with perceived higher status. “Sometimes they look down on people who don’t speak English,” she said.

She added: “In some families, the grandchildren cannot speak with the grandmother because they don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. That’s sad.”

Read More: The New York Times

Putting children in front of educational DVDs does not help boost their language skills, according to a U.S. study that focused on one product, the Baby Wordsworth from the Walt Disney Company’s Baby Einstein series.

While The Baby Einstein Co does not make educational claims, it notes on its web page that the Baby Wordsworth DVD is a “playful introduction to words and sign language.”

A study by researchers at the University of California, published in the Archives of Pediatrics & Adolescent Medicine, put the DVD to the test with one and two-year-olds. For six weeks, 88 children were randomly assigned to either watching the DVD a few times a week or not at all. Researchers then tested the language skills in each group based on how many words the children knew according to their parents and how well they did in a lab test.

At the end of the period, toddlers who had watched the DVD fared no better than those who hadn’t. Children in both groups understood about 20 of the 30 words highlighted in the DVD, on average, and spoke 10. Their general language development showed no difference, either.

The researchers also asked parents about their childrens’ television viewing before entering the study. The earlier a child started watching Baby Einstein DVDs, it turned out, the smaller his or her vocabulary was.

The Baby Einstein Company emphasized in an e-mail to Reuters Health that it “does not claim educational outcomes.” On its web page, it notes that its products “are not designed to make babies smarter,” but rather “to engage babies and provide parents with tools to help expose their little ones to the world around them.”

The study’s finding is in line with earlier research, said Rebekah Richert, a psychologist at the University of California, Riverside, who led the study, but it is unclear if the DVDs themselves are responsible. Parents who place their kids in front of the screen could be trying to remedy slow language development, or they could be using the DVDs as baby sitters, cutting back on social stimulation. “A lot of children, particularly when they’re young, seem to have these kinds of (DVDs),” Richert told Reuters Health. “My take-home message would be to encourage live interaction between parent and child.”

Although it is not well understood how watching television affects language, Richert and colleagues wrote in their report that the American Academy of Pediatrics recommends that children younger than two stay away from the screen. Some experts have even suggested that baby videos might be harmful by impeding social and cognitive learning.

Read more: Reuters

The study of modern languages could die out within the next 20 years because of the government’s focus on science subjects, leading academics have warned. A group of 14 influential figures, including leading academics and influential figures in the arts, has issued the warning in response to higher-education funding cuts.

Lord Mandleson, the business secretary, has ordered a £600 million budget reduction by 2013 while calling for stronger links between universities and business. The group, including four university vice chancellors, states in a letter to the Observer that these are “worrying times” for the arts and humanities.

Among them is Professor Colin Riordan, an expert in post war German literature and culture at the University of Essex, who fears that modern languages could “die out in the next 20 years at university if we are not careful”. The group believes urgent action is needed to prevent the country’s intellectual heritage being eroded, with a third of the world’s research into arts and humanities taking place in Britain.

There is concern that the Government’s decision last year to ring-fence funding for science-related subjects means that other courses face huge cuts if this is repeated.

The signatories to the letter, who include Nicholas Penny, director of the National Gallery, and Sir Nicholas Kenyon, the Barbican’s managing director, argue that the importance of the arts and humanities should not be overlooked. They say: “There seems to be a belief in government and in much of business that knowledge can be cut into discrete blocks and that the ones that matter most are those of science, technology, engineering and maths.

“The challenges facing the country and the world cannot be addressed without the arts and humanities. People’s complexity comes from their language, identities, histories, faith and culture.

“Without understanding that complexity we cannot address these challenges. Subjects such as literature, philosophy and history teach students to look at the world from a different perspective, to challenge ideas and to communicate effectively, to bring the flexibility and imagination that employers need and welcome.”

Lord Mandleson has denied creating a situation where universities would become production lines delivering graduates to fulfil industry’s needs. The Department for Business, Innovation and Skills said in a statement that it was committed to funding “research excellence” wherever it was found and had invested record levels in higher education.

Read more: The Telegraph

It has happened to almost everyone. You are sitting on a train or a bus and someone right next to you is annoyingly shouting into his or her mobile phone. But those days could soon be past with “silent sounds”, a new technology unveiled at the CeBIT fair on Tuesday that transforms lip movements into a computer-generated voice for the listener at the other end of the phone.

The device, developed by the Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), uses electromyography, monitoring tiny muscular movements that occur when we speak and converting them into electrical pulses that can then be turned into speech, without a sound uttered. “We currently use electrodes which are glued to the skin. In the future, such electrodes might for example by incorporated into cellphones,” said Michael Wand, from the KIT.

The technology opens up a host of applications, from helping people who have lost their voice due to illness or accident to telling a trusted friend your PIN number over the phone without anyone eavesdropping — assuming no lip-readers are around.

The technology can also turn you into an instant polyglot. Because the electrical pulses are universal, they can be immediately transformed into the language of the user’s choice. “Native speakers can silently utter a sentence in their language, and the receivers hear the translated sentence in their language. It appears as if the native speaker produced speech in a foreign language,” said Wand.

The translation technology works for languages like English, French and German, but for languages like Chinese, where different tones can hold many different meanings, poses a problem, he added.

Noisy people in your office? Not any more. “We are also working on technology to be used in an office environment,” the KIT scientist told AFP.

The engineers have got the device working to 99 percent efficiency, so the mechanical voice at the other end of the phone gets one word in 100 wrong, explained Wand. “But we’re working to overcome the remaining technical difficulties. In five, maybe ten years, this will be useable, everyday technology,” he said.

Read more: AFP

When Doctor Gregory Anderson and Doctor K. David Harrison set off in 2003 to a few remote villages in Russia’s eastern Tomsk Oblast, they took only the bare essentials: toothbrushes, socks, soap, plus their microphones, video cameras, audio recorders, and linguistics textbooks. What brought them to this isolated corner of central Siberia was a business conference — of sorts: a series of meetings with the less than 25 remaining speakers of Middle Chulym, or Os.

Anderson and Harrison are the two linguists behind the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages. A U.S.-based nonprofit, it is one of a handful of initiatives spearheaded by linguists who are scrambling to save the world’s endangered tongues. Experts predict that by the end of the century, half of the world’s 6,700 languages will be extinct.

Language endangerment, a global phenomenon, has likely never before been so pervasive. As small, minority languages give way to socioeconomic and cultural pressures, they also yield to languages that replace them. In the process, unique linguistic and anthropological information is lost forever.

“Can it [language loss] be stopped or slowed? It’s very difficult to know how that could happen,” says Doctor Nicholas Ostler, chairman of the UK-based Foundation for Endangered Languages. “It’s a social fact about the way the world is developing at the moment which puts pressure on small language groups, and only if there’s a radical change in the way the world is, the pressures that the world puts on things, [and] people’s consciousness, is it likely to change.”

Ostler’s organization, like Anderson’s and Harrison’s, is fighting the trend. That involves research trips to some of the world’s remotest spots — from Siberia to Bolivia to Australia — and working with locals to preserve rare languages through recordings, transcriptions, and videos. Then comes detailed analyses of the samples — most offering new insight into the grammar and sound system of a language — and sometimes even a rare glimpse into history.

It has been established, for example, that Yaghnobi, a minority language of Tajikistan, is a descendant of the ancient language Sogdian, spoken up and down the Silk Road in medieval times. After documentation comes the hard part — revitalization and maintenance of a dying language. But it’s work that linguists cannot do alone. “No matter what linguists think, say, or do, they can’t do anything to maintain a language. All they can do is provide adequate documentation for it,” says Anderson.

“The people themselves have to choose to maintain it. That requires a lot of effort, both in producing materials that will be suitable for schooling, for example, and a lot of personal effort that the people themselves require to make real the desire that they have to maintain their language.”

With enough effort, disappearing languages can flourish again. One of the great success stories of recent times is Welsh, the language of Wales in Great Britain. It was well on its way to extinction only two decades ago, but now has hundreds of thousands of speakers.

But Welsh had something that most endangered languages do not: vigorous government support. And that support assured the Welsh revival included another crucial element: enough money to make the dreams of reviving the language a reality.

Read more: Radio Free Europe