Applied Languages

A July study by the Maytree Foundation has found that language skills are the most important factor impacting new immigrants’ abilities to settle in and move to Canada as newcomers.

Naomi Alboim authored the report, which spoke to immigration settlement workers, academics and the government over the period of a year. She says, “knowledge of one of Canada’s official languages has been identified as the single most important predictor of successful labour market integration.”

The report follows an announcement from Citizenship and Immigration Canada that it is launching language training services for new immigrants. Immigration minister Jason Kenney has also recommended that people hoping to move to Canada get a head start by brushing up on their English and French to strengthen their visa applications.

In addition, good language skills can also help immigrants to find a job and succeed in their careers in Canada. The Maytree study states, ‘experience has also shown that early investments in language and employment training can lead to higher earnings.’

Minister Kenney says that language skills also help newcomers to settle in their communities. He explains, “Access to language training services is, for many newcomers, a first step in establishing networks and contacts so they are engaged and feel welcomed in their communities.”

Read more: Global Visas

For a member of a supposedly extinct species, Craig Wetherill does a pretty good impression of the living. He responds to premature reports of his demise by launching into a local fairy tale. “Y’n termyn eus passys, ‘th era tregas yn Selevan den ha benyn yn tyller cries Chi an Hord … ”

The story he’s recounting is “John of the Ram’s House.” The language he’s speaking is Cornish. (Translation: “Once upon a time, there lived in St. Levan a man and a woman in a place called the Ram’s House.”)

And the battle he’s waging — to keep alive a Celtic tongue thousands of years old — is in full swing here at the westernmost tip of England, in the scenic county of Cornwall.

It’s not an easy fight when your enemies include the United Nations, which has officially declared Cornish to be dead, and the ignorance of a world more apt to associate “Cornish” with the words “game hen” than “language.” Or when plenty of your fellow Brits don’t realize that Cornish was flourishing on this rainy island ages before Anglo-Saxon interlopers arrived and changed the course of linguistic history.

“The Cornish language has been around for far, far longer than ever English was. It’s a direct descendant of the language spoken at the time of the Romans and before the time of the Romans in this country,” says Matthew Clarke, 39, a local radio newsman. “It’s that long history that I don’t want to see broken.”

The struggle for linguistic survival has come down to the efforts of a hardy band of devotees like Wetherill and Clarke, who see Cornish as an ineluctable component of local identity, albeit one ignored by most of the people of Cornwall. Fluent speakers are estimated to number only about 300 out of a population of a half-million, though several thousand residents probably know a smattering of words and phrases.

Preservationists have some helpful allies, including the British government, which has provided a small pot of money for promoting Cornish on signs and in schools.

Wetherill is doing his part by offering Cornish lessons at a pub in Newbridge. Recently, a few students sat around a wooden table in front of a 17th century fireplace, practicing everyday phrases such as “The cat is on the chair” (“Ma’n gath war’n gador”) while Wetherill, 58, looked on approvingly.

His eye is on young people, who he hopes will recognize the importance of ensuring that their linguistic heritage is perpetuated. “There is an old saying in Cornish: ‘A man without his language has lost his land.’ Without the language we are nothing; we just become chaff driven by the wind,” Wetherill says.

“We’ve been here something like 6,000 or 7,000 years, and we’re still here. And we will always be here.”

Read more: Chicago Tribune, BBC News

Wang Zhifen, a 39-year-old woman of the Yi ethnic minority, does not speak her mother tongue any more. She stopped using it when she left her village in southwest China’s Yunnan Province to be educated more than 20 years ago. “I have no regrets. Mandarin and English are becoming popular in a rapidly changing society and it’s natural for people from ethnic minorities to use suitable languages to communicate better,” said Wang, a professor at the Wumayao Anthropological Museum in Kunming, the capital of Yunnan, home to 25 ethnic groups.

Only a few natives of Wang’s hometown of Mile County in Honghe Hani and the Yi Autonomous Prefecture still speak their mother tongue. The exotic Yi dialect and the gorgeous handmade dresses of its women are now only heard and seen during festival activities or religious ceremonies, said Wang, who returned to work in June after receiving her doctor’s degree at Beijing-based Minzu University of China.

Wang’s village has frustrated the Chinese government, which, along with experts, have taken various means to preserve endangered languages, believing that they are an indispensable part of China’s diversified ethnic culture.

There are approximately 130 different languages of 55 ethnic minority groups in China, but more than 100 are dying out – and 60 are on the verge of extinction, according to statistics from the Chinese Academy of Social Sciences. Across the world, more than 6,000 languages are disappearing at a rapid rate, and 3,000 of these are in an extremely critical state.

“Language is an important transmitter of myths, poems, operas and many other forms of art. It disseminates valuable knowledge and life experiences accumulated over the centuries,” said Li Ziran, a professor with Ningxia University in northwest China.

To help preserve the viability and vitality of these languages, the Chinese government has moved to finance academia’s efforts to compile books about their linguistics and to collect traditional masterpieces that disappeared from sight shortly after China started economic reforms in the late 1970s.

Contemporary China has benefited in many ways from this indigenous culture, including the discovery and application of ancient medical prescriptions, Li said. “We have found or reproduced more than 30,000 ancient books of various ethnic minorities in Yunnan over 20 years, only one third of the registered masterpieces,” said Pu Xuewang, director with the publishing and planning office of ethnic ancient books in Yunnan. “The local government has also spent 80 million yuan (11.7 million U.S. dollars) in editing and translating classics of the Dai, Yi and Naxi ethnic people,” he said.

Innovative bilingual courses for children of ethnic background are also having a beneficial effect. The authorities have also managed to help ethnic groups to retrieve and better understand their native tongues, especially the ones indigenous people could only speak but not write; and those made up of only symbols.

“We should archive the languages and let people make their own choices,” said Georg Pfeffer, professor with Freie University of Berlin. The opinion that the death of a language indicates the extinction of an ethnic culture could be too exaggerated, and the social elite should not force ordinary people to share their views about resurrecting antique languages, said Pfeffer.

Language is basically, and most importantly, a tool of communication for common people, and its survival or death has been natural selection of the environment. “We should not blame people for not carrying on with a language that becomes less useful,” said Latami Dashi, an ethnologist with a research center in Ninglang, Yunnan. Should indigenous people really have to shoulder the responsibility of preserving a language just because they are members of an ethnic group?

Read more: China View

Tajikistan is preparing to ban the use of Russian by state agencies and in official documents to boost the role of the local language, in what analysts see as either a move to win new financial support from Moscow or to demonstrate political independence.

But the move, criticized by a senior Russian lawmaker, could bring more damage than help to the impoverished country, where remittances sent back from Russia accounted for almost 50 percent of the economy last year, according to World Bank estimates.

Tajik President Emomali Rakhmon called on the government to speed up consideration of a bill that would require state agencies and companies to communicate with one another and issue official documents exclusively in Tajik. The bill would also make knowledge of the local language compulsory for every Tajik citizen, the report said.

“A speedy adoption of a new law about the [national] language is needed,” Rakhmon said in a televised address to the nation, according to a transcript on his official web site in the Russian and Tajik languages. “A state language … is an attribute of political independence,” he said.
Rakhmon’s televised address was dedicated to the anniversary of the law on the national language adopted on July 22, 1989. That law made Tajik the national language but gave every citizen the right to choose between Tajik and Russian when addressing state agencies.

Official Tajik web sites are published in Tajik, Russian and English. About 15 percent of the population is ethnic Uzbek, while Russians and Kyrgyz each comprise about 1 percent.

Alexei Ostrovsky, chairman of the State Duma’s CIS Affairs Committee, called the bill a “great mistake,” Interfax reported. He predicted that Russia would be “forced” in the future to ban the employment of Tajik migrants who do not know Russian, which would “aggravate the difficult economic situation of the majority” of Tajiks and could lead to street protests there.

Tajikistan borders Afghanistan and fought a civil war with Islamist rebels in the 1990s. Dushanbe and Moscow have been wrangling over financing for a half-completed hydropower station intended to help solve Tajikistan’s chronic power shortages.

Analysts said the language bill was a new chip in the political bargaining between Russia and Tajikistan. Alexander Rahr, a Russia expert with the German Council on Foreign Relations, said Tajikistan was trying to “show that it can do without Russia” and cooperate with countries such as China. But sidelining the Russian language would also impede “globalization processes” in Tajikistan, he said.

The proposed changes are not the first time Tajikistan’s president has sought to strengthen the status of the national language. In March 2007, Rakhmon dropped the Slavic “ov” from his surname and ordered that all babies born to Tajik parents do the same.

Saparmurat Niyazov, the eccentric former leader of Turkmenistan, banned teaching Russian in schools and ordered that diplomas issued in Russian universities not be recognized in the republic. In December 2007, Ukraine’s Constitutional Court banned the showing of movies in Russian and other foreign languages in Ukraine’s movie theaters despite objections from the country’s Russian-speaking eastern regions.

Read more: The Moscow Times

Speakers of regional languages in Spain are on the increase, with Catalan, a form of Occitan or Gascon, being spoken by about 5,000 people. Minority languages, fostered by regional and local governments, have undergone a revival in Spain since the end of the Franco dictatorship in the 1970s. The regime enforced control from the centre. Languages such as Catalan and Basque were banned from public use, and citizens were obliged to give their children Spanish names. The commonly used word for Spanish – castellano or Castilian – reveals the roots of the language in central Spain.

Linguistic revival in Catalonia, Valencia, the Balearic islands, the Basque country and Galicia has gone hand-in-hand with the steady increase in regional autonomy since a democratic constitution was introduced in 1978. Catalan and Basque nationalists in particular regard their languages – along with their political autonomy and specific legal systems – as essential to their sense of nationhood.

Catalan nationalists are lucky their language is already spoken by most Catalans and, like Galician, is easily mastered by any speaker of a romance language such as Spanish, French, Italian or Portuguese.

Not so with Basque, which is spoken by only a minority of Basques, is of unknown origin, has a fiendishly complex grammar, and has no connection with romance tongues other than borrowings from them for modern words.

In central Spain and among Castilian-speakers, however, there are signs of irritation at the increasingly nationalistic language policies of some regions, as well as a belief that investors will be deterred by the fracturing of the Spanish state into linguistically distinct enclaves.

On the other hand, a sense of hostility to Spanish hegemony in Catalonia or the Basque country is often accompanied by a more international outlook and an eagerness to learn English or French.

The two most contentious areas are education – some residents of Catalonia and the Basque country want their children taught in Spanish – and public services such as hospitals, where local language tests can discriminate against doctors who do not speak the local language even if all their patients understand Spanish.

Nationalists, especially in Catalonia – where the local language is vibrant and widely spoken – say that if there are any language problems, they lie with monolingual Spaniards.

“The linguistic reality of Catalonia is that all the people who want can speak castellano. There’s no conflict,” says Antoni Castells, the urbane and multilingual Catalan finance minister. “Our aim is to make a bilingual society. There’s no Catalan who doesn’t speak Castilian, but on the other hand you can find people that speak only Castilian.”

These debates will continue across Spain, and doubtless in many languages, although the power of politicians to control the way languages develop is always dubious.

In the Basque country, Euskaltzaindia, the language academy in Bilbao, has spent decades trying to create a standard from the spoken dialects and has inevitably been accused of creating an “artificial” language, albeit one understood by up to 1m people and spoken daily by perhaps a quarter of those.

Now young Basques, according to Andrés Urrutia, who heads the academy, have started to speak an informal mixture of euskera (Basque) and español (Spanish) known as euskañol, which he says would disturb him if they started to write it as well.

So is the decline of the local language inevitable? “It is gaining people who speak it more often,” says Prof Urrutia. “I think what is inevitable is that we can’t be monolingual.”

Read more: Financial Times Deutschland