Applied Languages

Around a third of parents fail to encourage their children into languages at GCSE level despite 27% regretting dropping the subjects themselves, a survey has found.

A study by the National Centre for Languages (CILT) found that nearly a quarter of parents felt unable to offer their children adequate homework support in languages. It follows recent research indicating that just 44% of 14 to 16-year-olds now take up the subjects at GCSE level.

An online survey of more than 3,500 adults revealed that 34% of parents did not actively encourage their children to take a language at that level. This is despite many citing failure to learn a foreign tongue as a major regret from their own schooldays.

Nearly half of unilinguists said they envied their polyglot friends, with one in five believing those who speak a second language appear more intelligent.

CILT called on parents not to let their own hang-ups affect their children’s chances of learning other languages. Spokeswoman for the organisation Teresa Tinsley said: “It’s understandable that many parents struggle with homework help, as it’s impossible to be an expert at everything.

“However, being able to speak a second language will open up a world of opportunities for young people, so today we’d like to see parents put away their anxieties and think about the benefits of their children taking a language at GCSE level - to ensure they don’t look back with regret.”

Read more: The Press Association

In the remote Northern Territory community of Wadeye linguists say four languages will be gone in the next decade.

Patrick Palibu Nudjulu is a Magati Ke elder, custodian of the Rak Naniny clan and is one of two remaining speakers of the Magati Ke language. His sick and elderly sister can speak Magati Ke, but not to the point where she can help in the documentation of the language.

Maree Klesch works closely with Mr Nudjulu through her job at the Endangered Languages Centre at Batchelor Institute for Indigenous tertiary education. Ms Klesch said languages are dying in the community at the hands of the dominant Murrinhpatha language, which is used at the local school.

“Within 10 years certainly four of the languages we are currently working on with Wadeye probably won’t be there and there are several reasons for that,” she said. “Languages may not be spoken in the home as much because of the lingua franca of the community.”

In August last year, the Federal Government acknowledged a report which found 110 Indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing and committed $9.3 million towards saving them.

Ms Klesch said the money has made a slight difference, but does not go anywhere near far enough. “There is just not enough speakers left to document and record these languages,” she said.

“Although there is Commonwealth support for this, it is not really nearly enough to be able to achieve the goals necessary to retrieve these languages and maintain them in a timeframe of those elders staying alive as first language speakers,” she said.

Ms Klesch wants bilingual programs to continue in Northern Territory schools as a way of ensuring the preservation of languages and Indigenous culture. “You only have to look at those languages that are already extinct, and those languages that people are trying to retrieve to find out that without the language you just don’t have the cultural knowledge.

“You don’t have the scientific knowledge of medicine, the weather, how to manage the environment, all of that is lost in translation.”

The outgoing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma put the preservation of Indigenous high on his list of issues of concern in his last address in January.

Read more: ABC News

The last speaker of Bo, which is one of the world’s oldest languages, has died at the age of 85 in India’s Andaman Islands, according to the Chinese Xinhua News Agency on Friday.

Bo is now an extinct Great Andamanese language. According to some linguists, it may have been related to languages spoken in Neolithic times and was one of the world’s oldest languages.

Tribal Health Deputy Director R.C. Kar said Boa Sr, who died on January 28 this year, had been suffering from old age and health ailments for some time. He said she was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese tribe.

According to leading linguist Professor Anvita Abbi, the death of Boa Sr from a unique tribe in the Andamans also led to the tragic demise of the world’s oldest languages — Bo.

“After the death of her parents, Boa Sr was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years. She was often very lonely and had to learn an Adamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people,” Prof Abbi said.

“But throughout Boa Sr’s life, she had a very good sense of humor and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious,” said Abbi.

Professor Abbi said that Boa Sr’s death was a loss to intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages because they had lost “a vital piece of the jigsaw”.

“The Andamanese are believed to be among our earliest ancestors,” she explained. Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa, with some estimated to be even 70,000 years old. The islands are often called an “anthropologist’s dream” and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

Read more: Bernama

A generation of teenagers who communicate via the Internet and by text messages are risking unemployment because their daily vocabulary consists of just 800 words, the Government’s new children’s communication tsar has warned.

Although, according to recent surveys, they know an average of 40,000 words, they tend to favour a “teenspeak” used in text messages, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and in internet chat rooms like MSN.

One poll, commissioned by Tesco, revealed that while children had the vocabulary to be articulate, the top 20 words they used accounted for about a third of all the words they used.

According to Jean Gross, England’s first Communication Champion for Children who started in the post this month, the lack of range will impact negatively on their chances of getting a job.

Miss Gross is planning to launch a nationwide campaign next year to ensure children use their full language potential and are not impeded in the classroom and later, the workplace, because they are inarticulate. It will target children in primary and secondary schools and she intends to ask QI presenter, author and prolific Twitterer Stephen Fry to back it.

“Teenagers are spending more time communicating through electronic media and text messaging, which is short and brief,” she told The Sunday Times. “We need to help today’s teenagers understand the difference between their textspeak and the formal language they need to succeed in life – 800 words will not get you a job.”

She plans to send children with video cameras into workplaces so they can see the range of words used by professionals and share what they have learned with classmates, and wants parents to limit the amount of children under two watch to half an hour a day, replacing it with conversation.

Her concern was raised, she said, by research conducted by Tony McEnery, a professor of linguistics at Lancaster University sponsored by Tesco, who examined 10m words of transcribed speech and 100,000 words from teenagers’ blogs.

As well as establishing that teens use their top 20 words in a third of their speech, he discovered words likely to be entirely alien to adults, including “chenzed”, which means tired or drunk, “spong”, which means silly, and “lol”, the shorthand version of “laugh out loud”.

Both Marks & Spencer boss Sir Stuart Rose and Tesco’s Sir Terry Leahy have recently lamented the lack of school-leavers with the right skills for the workplace.

John Bald, a language teaching consultant and former Ofsted schools inspector, said the poor use of language was a deliberate, anti-establishment act. “There is undoubtedly a culture among teenagers of deliberately stripping away excess verbiage in language,” he said.

“When kids are in social situations, the instinct is to simplify. It’s part of a wider anti-school culture that exists among some children which parents and schools need to address.”

But David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, told The Sunday Times that experts simply did not understand the complexities of teen language and had judged it by their own standards.

“The real issue here is that people object to kids having a good vocabulary for hip-hop and not for politics,” he said. “They have an articulate vocabulary for the kind of things they want to talk about. Few academics get anywhere near measuring that vocabulary.”

Read more: Telegraph 

Increasing demand for places at Welsh language and denominational primary schools in Llanelli has brought a change to catchment areas in the town. Carmarthenshire council said the old system was “messy”, with fewer than half of pupils attending schools in areas they were supposed to.

The changes will come into force in September for those starting school. The council said children would still to be able to go to the school of their choice provided there was room.

The council said it had consulted widely with all schools involved in drawing up the new maps. The aim is to ensure enough places are available for those wanting either a Welsh first language, Welsh second language or denominational provision locally.

Council leader Meryl Gravell said the changes would not affect any child currently at school, or their siblings. But from September it may affect first born children starting school, but only if there was no room at their preferred school. “It was very messy for a number of years, but now this makes a lot of sense,” she added.

Read more: BBC News