Applied Languages

The oldest words in any language are among the most basic and profound words we know, according to new research from Britain.

As one might expect with humans, “I” is first among them. So is “who,” as well as the numbers “two,” “three” and “five,” which date back approximately 10,000 years to a time when humans were just moving beyond a primitive hunting and gathering existence. The number “one,” which seems so essential to everyday speech, actually evolved more recently than the others, according to Mark Pagel, an evolutionary language scientist at Reading University.

He used sophisticated computer modelling to study the transformation of vocabulary in the Indo-European language group, which includes most of the languages spoken across Europe, the Middle East and the Indian subcontinent.

The research was done using an IBM supercomputer that matched the words in various languages with the time period of their use. Many words with similar meanings in different languages share common sounds, such as the word water in English, wasser in German and vaten in Swedish. Using that kind of information as a starting point, they were able to trace words back to common roots and map their evolution.

The study predicts that certain words are likely to disappear in time, just as they have been doing for thousands of years. “Fifty per cent of the words we use today would be unrecognizable to our ancestors living 2,500 years ago,” he said.

He predicts that “dirty” is the word most likely to be scrubbed from the English language in the next 750 years. “It has been replaced throughout the history of Indo-European languages by other words that mean the same thing at a higher rate than any other word. We can predict that in the future that word will be replaced by some other word,” he told the BBC.

Words that are seldom used are the ones most threatened by extinction, he said. “The frequency with which some words are used in our everyday speech is a strong predictor of whether they’ll be retained. Words we use a lot tend to be highly conserved,” Prof. Pagel said.

Numerals change only slowly, followed by pronouns, nouns, verbs, adjectives and conjunctions, which are the most volatile. Words such as “and” or “but” evolve 100 times more quickly than numerals, according to the study.

Read more: The Globe and Mail

Text messaging, rather than harming literacy, could have a positive effect on the way children interact with language, says a study. Researchers from Coventry University studied 88 children aged between 10 and 12 to understand the impact of text messaging on their language skills. They found that the use of so-called “textisms” could be having a positive impact on reading development.

“Children’s use of textisms is not only positively associated with word reading ability, but it may be contributing to reading development,” the authors wrote in the report. The children involved in the study were given 10 different scenarios and asked to write about them using text messages. The textisms were split into categories, including shortenings, contractions, acronyms, symbols and non-conventional spellings, and analysed for their use of language alongside more traditional schoolwork.

According to Dr Beverley Plester, the lead author of the report and senior lecturer at Coventry University, texting is likely to be an important part of a child’s learning development. “The more exposure you have to the written word the more literate you become and we tend to get better at things that we do for fun,” she said. The study found no evidence of a detrimental effect of text speak on conventional spelling. “What we think of as misspellings, don’t really break the rules of language and children have a sophisticated understanding of the appropriate use of words,” she said.

Other reports have produced similar results. Research from the University of Toronto into how teenagers use instant messaging found that instant messaging had a positive effect on their command of language.

Read more: BBC News, Little About, Into Mobile

Polish is now the most spoken foreign language among pupils in Scottish schools, according to figures published yesterday. The findings were made as part of the government’s annual census of pupils. A total of 26,801 students at publicly funded schools in all 32 Scottish council areas took part in the census, showing Polish ahead of Punjabi and Urdu in schools for the first time.

In 19 areas, Polish is now the second most popular language behind English. Earlier this year, the government revealed that 3347 school pupils had registered their first language as Polish. Cantonese, Arabic, French and Gaelic were also among those most heard in classrooms.

Last month, Polish parents in Scotland were split over plans to set up their own schools across the country. Mums and dads expressed fear their children were losing their native language, disadvantaging them when they go home. The schools were earmarked for premises which are empty and would have been run by Polish teachers living in Scotland .

But the plans divided the Polish community – many of whom have been here since World War II – with many favouring integration with Scots pupils. Yesterday, a government spokesman said: “The government encourages all schools to be inclusive of pupils from different cultures.”

Read more: Evening Times, Daily Record

The world is losing languages at an alarming rate, a United Nations agency reported Thursday, with thousands of tongues expected to disappear by the end of this century. Yet amid the losses, one community – the Basque people, who live in the mountainous region of southern France and northern Spain – is reviving a language that many once feared would die out.

In St. Jean de Luz, a seaside town near the Spanish border at the western edge of the Pyrenees, efforts are under way to revitalize the Basque language, which 30 years ago was rarely heard outside mountain villages. Among a population of about 3 million in the Basque region, which comprises seven provinces in Spain and France, an estimated 700,000 people speak Basque today. Bilingual signs dot the roads and mark storefronts, and an annual festival celebrates the Basque language, music and culture. Public and private schools full of children and adults learn Basque.

Fabienne Perrin, a 37-year-old woman employed by the local tourism office, grew up speaking Basque in a small mountain town a half-hour’s drive from St. Jean de Luz. She recalled that her grandfather spoke only Basque, never French. Now, though, “the generation that spoke only Basque is gone,” she said. “To work, you have to speak French.”

France recognizes Basque as a distinct regional language – the departmental government has an office dedicated to the Basque language – but Basque doesn’t have official status in France, meaning that it can’t be used in a court of law, for instance. On the Spanish side of the border, Basque has been one of two official languages in the Basque autonomous region since 1979.

As successful as this region has been in preserving its unique language, however, others aren’t as lucky. The language report, released by UNESCO, the U.N. agency based in Paris, provides vivid detail of the linguistic diversity that still exists in the world – more than 6,000 languages are spoken on the planet – and the threats that it faces. India, the United States, Brazil, Indonesia and Mexico have the greatest linguistic diversity, it says, but also the greatest number of languages at risk. Among 2,500 endangered languages in the agency’s online atlas, 538 are classified as “critically endangered.”

Beyond Basque, which UNESCO labeled “unsafe,” the agency notes that some endangered languages can be saved through a combination of government intervention and community will. Welsh, for instance, has made a comeback in the past few decades after nearly dying out when Wales was exclusively under English rule. UNESCO’s most recent estimate of Welsh speakers: 750,000.

Read more: KansasCity.com

In the Balkans, language and politics are closely intertwined, and a region that was once seen as speaking a single common language now argues that it has as many as four native tongues – Serbian, Croatian, Bosnian, and Montenegrin. The post-Yugoslav period of heightened national awareness has seen an evolution in the local languages. Never mind that a Serb from Banja Luka and a Croat from Dubrovnik can carry on a conversation and understand each other perfectly.

If asked in each other’s company what language they are speaking, they’d be likely to answer: “our language” – the nation-neutral answer that has become a form of courtesy in the ethnically divided region. Privately, however, everyone acknowledges the differences. As the former Yugoslavia has broken down into individual, ethnically based countries, federations, and districts, the single composite language once known as Serbo-Croatian has broken down into what its speakers say are individual, ethnically based languages.

The distinctions sometimes reach extremes even locals find absurd. Streets signs often give multiple versions of the same designation, to accommodate all likely users. Bookworms look for translated works by writers from neighboring states. Films produced in Serbia are released elsewhere in the Balkans with subtitles.

Linguist Zhivko Bjelanovic says to the trained eye, the languages are fundamentally distinct. “Serbs and Croats can understand each other on the level of basic communication. But when experts start to actually analyze the languages, there are in fact a lot of differences — in grammar, syntax, and every other way,” Bjelanovic says.

Croatians have coined entirely new words, Bosniaks have peppered their speech with Turkic terms and phrases, and Serbs throughout the region remain committed to using the Cyrillic alphabet instead of Latin script. August Kovacec, a member of the Croatian Academy of Sciences and Art, says it is unlikely the people of the region will ever agree to return to a unified language.

Egon Fekete, a linguist in Belgrade, says most academics still say a single language is spoken in the Balkans — albeit one with numerous variations. But he says the issue is more about politics than it is about language. “In our region, political concerns outweigh everything else, and because of that, everyone has to have their own nation, religion, language, and alphabet. And that’s not good,” Fekete says.

Others say that although the languages have different names now, they are still all the same language. It’s a language everyone in the Balkans understands perfectly well.

Read more: Radio Free Europe