Applied Languages

He is a living relic and an ancient linguistic treasure. Kuku Thaypan elder Tommy George, 82, is the sole surviving fluent speaker of his language. “I’m the last of them,” said the son of an Aboriginal king. “Everybody knows that.” When the famed tracker dies, 48,000 years of oral history – from beyond the Dreamtime – dies with him.

Kuku Thaypan, one of four Aboriginal languages spoken in Quinkan country on Cape York, is destined for extinction like 120 other dialects lost across Australia since European settlement.

Despite efforts of academics, the primordial tongue and ancient secrets of the old healer handed down from generation to generation will likely vanish. It is estimated that of more than 300 specific Aboriginal languages in use pre-British arrival, there will be fewer than 100 left by 2050.

Ilana Mushin, a lecturer in linguistics and indigenous language at the University of Queensland, said language formed an integral part of a culture’s world view. “All sorts of things are expressed in traditional language from how you understand the natural world, to songs, laws, traditions, stories, how you relate to each other, and the whole philosophy of life,” she said. “All these are expressed in a language and if you don’t have that language any more some of that is translatable but some of it isn’t, so a lot of that knowledge gets lost.”

Dr Mushin said there were less than 50 indigenous languages still being regularly spoken as first languages, and that it was inevitable that many of these would become extinct. “If you have the community will then languages can be saved but if you are down to the last speaker there is not much you can do,” she said.

When his brother, medicine man George Musgrave, died three years ago, Tommy lost the only other fluent speaker of his tribal tongue. Both shared honorary doctorates for their efforts in later years trying to document their living archives of tens of thousands of years of traditional knowledge with researcher Victor Steffensen.

“It might die in the throat,” blue-eyed elder Tommy, known by his language name of Awu Laya, said yesterday. “But it stays alive in the heart.”

Read more: The Courier Mail

‘İki Dil Bir Bavul’ (On the Way to School) was one of the most admired films at the Adana Golden Boll International Film Festival. The two directors have shot many documentaries over the years but they say this was their most successful. The film won two awards at the festival: the Cinema Critics Association, or SİYAD, Best Film Award and the Yılmaz Güney Award. It will continue being talked about long after it has screened at cinemas because it confronts on ongoing problem in Turkey.

The documentary-like film’s characters are from the real world. Emre, a young teacher who comes from Denizli tries to teach Turkish, instead of primary school classes, to Kurdish children who do not even speak a word of Turkish.

The film starts with a young teacher starting his first year of teaching in an eastern village of Turkey. Yet the teacher finds himself in a small, under populated area where no one speaks Turkish, only Kurdish. His astonishment grows when he discovers that he has no water in his small apartment adjacent to the one-classroom school.

The two down-to-Earth directors, Özgür Doğan and Orhan Eskiköy, had 70 hours of footage. They placed their cameras in specific parts of the classroom for the indoor shots and sometimes waited for a moment to come. “We choose four prominent characters and built up the story mostly around them. The parents of the students sometimes joked around with Emre saying we were also learning a second language, meaning Kurdish,” Doğan said. Even though Emre became a little withdrawn in the village, still the children and parents admired him.

There have been moments Emre has had difficulties. He did not know that people in some parts of the country did not speak Turkish. He struggled to teach a new language to the children instead of teaching classes.

The film premiered at this year’s Istanbul International Film Festival, was screened in Diyarbakır and was later screened at the Amsterdam Documentary Film Festival. The directors filmed the documentary from a neutral vantage, without giving any credit to people who might say the Kurds are terrorists or that teachers are fascists, Doğan said.

The duo spent 43,000 euros shooting the film but the whole budget for “On the Way to School” was 210,000 euros. They are now in debt but this hasn’t stopped them making films. They are eager to bring attention to issues that have not been or cannot be talked about in Turkey.

Read more: Hurriyet DailyNews

English may be the most popular foreign language in Korea, but in Mongolia more people take the Test of Proficiency in Korean (TOPIK) than the TOEFL. The TOPIK is a Korean language proficiency test for non-Koreans, supervised by the Korea Institute of Curriculum & Evaluation and offered twice a year.

582 Mongolian students recently took the first TOPIK test of the year. Introduced in 1999, the test initially drew only about 200 students per year in Mongolia. But in 2005 that figure more than doubled to 487, then climbed to 584 in 2006 and 925 in 2007. Based on the number taking the first test, the total figure will likely exceed the 1,000 mark this year.

The high popularity of Korean in Mongolia is attributable to a wide-spread hope and aspiration of making the “Korean dream” come true. Mongolians can buy a house in their home country after working and saving in South Korea for just three years.

In 2007, as many as 15,000 Mongolians took the Korean Language Proficiency Test (KLPT), a separate test designed for people preparing to work in South Korea. Currently some 33,000 Mongolians, or 1.2 percent of the entire Mongolian population of 2.7 million, are staying in South Korea.

Some 1,700 Mongolians come to study in South Korea each year, making this the number one destination for Mongolians studying abroad. They are drawn by the relatively low study expenses, and, for some, by a love of Korean pop culture, introduced to them by the Korean Wave.

Meanwhile, in Mongolia, around 1,700 students are currently studying Korean at 22 of the country’s 180 universities, and 1,027 Mongolian elementary and secondary students are also learning the language.

Beginning in the second grade, Mongolian students can study two foreign languages from a selection of several, including Russian, English, Japanese, Chinese and Korean. Byambasuren, a 17-year-old girl, said, “My mother said it would be helpful for me if I learned Korean, because Korea is a growing country.”

Read more: The Chosun Ilbo

The DARE project, as it is known, was initiated in the 1950s by Frederic Cassidy, a well-known linguist who sent field workers out across the country in “word wagons” to interview people. Cassidy’s catalogers talked to nearly 3,000 people over six years, making recordings along the way in order to capture pronunciations.

The first volume of the DARE was released in 1975, with additional volumes following in time. But the final volume still had not been published by the time of Cassidy’s death in 2000, and the linguist’s tombstone reads, “On to Z!”

Now, after five decades of research, “S to Z” of the DARE will be published next year. Joan Hall, the book’s chief editor, says the dictionary is unique because it tells us how we speak, rather than how to speak. “It’s very helpful because it’s really more descriptive than prescriptive,” she says.

The DARE also helps capture obscure expressions before they fade away. Stephanie Grayson, the founder of CorporateSpeechTrainer.com, says in some ways, American language is becoming more uniform, and television and the Internet are giving us all a common vocabulary. “We’re living in a world of 140 characters or less on Twitter,” Grayson says.

Stanford University linguist John Rickford disagrees. He says people speak one way in e-mails and another way at the local coffee shop: “The primary driving force behind language use and language change is face-to-face interaction. And that takes place in smaller communities and smaller groups, the kinds of people you hang out with.”

While it’s fun to learn about colloquial language, Hall says, there are serious practical uses for the DARE as well. Forensic linguists once used it when a little girl was kidnapped and police had only a ransom note to go on. “In this ransom note, the writer said, ‘Put $10,000 cash in a trash can on the devil’s strip,’ ” Hall says.

The key phrase in the note was “devil’s strip,” a term used only in a tiny section of Ohio to refer to the strip of grass between the sidewalk and the street. As it happened, one of the suspects on the police list was a man from Akron. After being confronted with the evidence, linguistic and otherwise, the man ultimately confessed.

And, of course, there’s always a social element to regional phrasings. When the final volume of the series is released next year, the completed DARE, containing 75,000 entries, will help you understand that if you’re invited to a “pitch-in” or a “scramble,” you’re really going to a potluck.

Read more: npr

During the recent economic downturn, job seekers are learning another language to make themselves more competitive against other applicants submitting for the same positions. In a recent survey of 300 respondents, 71% of US workers have begun learning another language to give them an edge against competing applicants. Additionally, 94% believe bilingual or multilingual skills will make an employment application more competitive and can positively impact earning potential.

As companies expand and grow their international relations, bilingual and multilingual candidates are increasingly in demand by employers. According to the survey, 67% of respondents communicate regularly with someone who predominantly speaks another language in their current or most recent position. Additionally, 59% applied for jobs in the past year that required a moderate knowledge of another language.

Language learning continues to be a growing market, as evidenced by recent findings from executive recruiting firm Korn/Ferry International, which cites that 31% of executives speak two languages and 20% speak three. Success Magazine also reports that bilingual workers earn $5,000 – $7,000 more in salary a year than solely English-speaking employees.

The survey was conducted by Auralog, the pioneer of integrating advanced speech recognition technology with language learning. Auralog’s award-winning TELL ME MORE® language-learning solution offers an engaging, culturally-immersive learning experience.

“As the world gets flatter, companies grow more global and span numerous cultures and languages,” said Christophe Pralong, Auralog’s North American vice president. “Job seekers need bilingual and multilingual skills to be competitive and succeed in this new business environment.”

Read more: Marketwire