Applied Languages

Universities are being forced to “dumb down” foreign language degrees because of a dramatic drop in the number of teenagers studying French and German at school, according to an official report.

Standards have been “betrayed” in recent years as institutions attempt to attract students from a rapidly “diminishing field”, it is suggested.
The study said some universities were ditching texts in foreign languages in favour of English translations to make them easier to understand.

The report – funded by the Government’s Higher Education Funding Council for England – said that academics were being required to provide “remedial” lessons for first-year students because A-levels fail to give them a decent grounding in basic grammar or language. It comes amid growing fears over a decline in the popularity of French, German, Spanish and Italian at all ages in the last decade.

The study, by Professor Michael Worton, vice-provost of University College London, said that the number of undergraduates studying foreign languages had dropped five per cent and many departments had already closed.

A drop in the number of pupils studying languages at GCSE and A-level meant the discipline was seen as a “diminishing field”, leading to a “loss of status and often of funding”. “The absence of foreign languages from the national curriculum after the age of 14 sends out a powerful negative message, especially in comparison with other countries, be this in continental Europe, the Far East, Central Asia and so on,” the study said.

Prof Worton, professor of French language and literature, found that moves by the Government to protect funding for science and maths-based subjects amounted to an 11 per cent cut in funding for languages. A survey of universities conducted for the review said language departments felt “vulnerable and beleaguered” and the importance of the subject was not understood or recognised by the Government or potential students.

In response, he said, languages departments have been forced to alter courses. The most widely-reported trend was towards a “greater emphasis” on cultural and film studies, the report said, resulting in a decline in literary studies.

It added: “Several departments also reported an increase in the number of courses offering texts taught in translation or other options accessible to non-linguists. This was generally driven by the need to increase student… numbers (and therefore income), but was generally perceived as a form of ‘dumbing down’ or even a betrayal of the nature and aims of a modern foreign languages curriculum.”

The report said that in 2002/3 some 3.3 per cent of all full-time students were studying languages as part of their degree. In 2007/08 this figure was 2.9 per cent, despite a 9.4 per cent increase in the number of students at university overall.

The report found that, despite the overall decline in numbers, there was a rise in interest for Asian, Modern Middle Eastern, African and Iberian studies.

David Lammy, the Higher Education Minister, said: “I believe that modern languages are of real importance and value, will look carefully at the findings of the report and work closely with [the Department for Children, Schools and Families] and Hefce to take them forward.”

Read more: Telegraph

 An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?

In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world’s languages would have ceased to exist. According to Ethnologue, a US organisation owned by Christian group SIL International that compiles a global database of languages, 473 languages are currently classified as endangered.

As globalisation sweeps around the world, it is perhaps natural that small communities come out of their isolation and seek interaction with the wider world. The number of languages may be an unhappy casualty, but why fight the tide?

“What we lose is essentially an enormous cultural heritage, the way of expressing the relationship with nature, with the world, between themselves in the framework of their families, their kin people,” says prominent French linguist Claude Hagege. “It’s also the way they express their humour, their love, their life. It is a testimony of human communities which is extremely precious, because it expresses what other communities than ours in the modern industrialized world are able to express.”

For linguists like Claude Hagege, languages are not simply a collection of words. They are living, breathing organisms holding the connections and associations that define a culture. When a language becomes extinct, the culture in which it lived is lost too.

The value of language as a cultural artefact is difficult to dispute, but is it actually realistic to ask small communities to retain their culture?
One linguist, Professor Salikoko Mufwene, of the University of Chicago, has argued that the social and economic conditions among some groups of speakers “have changed to points of no return”.

An increasing number of communities are giving up their language by their own choice, says Claude Hagege. Many believe that their languages have no future and that their children will not acquire a professional qualification if they teach them tribal languages. “We can do nothing when the abandonment of a language corresponds to the will of a population,” he says.

Perhaps all is not lost for those who want the smaller languages to survive. As the revival of Welsh in the UK and Maori in New Zealand suggest, a language can be brought back from the brink.

Hebrew, says Claude Hagege, was a dead language at the beginning of the 19th century. It existed as a scholarly written language, but there was no way to say “I love you” and “pass the salt” – the French linguists’ criteria for detecting life. But with the “strong will” of Israeli Jews, he says, the language was brought back into everyday use. Now it is undeniably a living breathing language once more.

Closer to home, Cornish intellectuals, inspired by the reintroduction of Hebrew, succeeded in bringing the seemingly dead Cornish language back into use in the 20th Century. In 2002 the government recognised it as a living minority language.

But for many dwindling languages on the periphery of global culture, supported by little but a few campaigning linguists, the size of the challenge can seem insurmountable. “We would spend an awful lot of money to preserve a very old building, because it is part of our heritage. These languages and cultures are equally part of our heritage and merit preservation,” says Ethnologue editor Paul Lewis.

Read more: BBC Today

Researchers have used a rare surgical procedure to map the part of the human brain associated with processing language, including grammar and speech. Three patients who were getting brain surgery to treat epilepsy agreed to have the electrical activity in their brains measured while they were asked questions about language.

The patients all had a network of electrodes placed into their brains to determine which regions were healthy and which were causing the patients’ seizures. Surgeons use the technique to pinpoint which areas of the brain to remove to stop the seizures.

The researchers asked the patients questions after the electrodes were inserted and before the surgery was scheduled to begin. The patients, while awake and responsive, were asked to repeat a given word, then to give derived forms of the word, such as plurals for nouns or past tense forms for verbs. The patients were also asked to mouth the words without speaking.

The researchers used a procedure called intra-cranial electrophysiology to measure brain activity while the patients were being quizzed on grammar. The technique gave the scientists information on changes in activity accurate down to the millimetre and the millisecond.

Because opening a person’s skull and inserting electrodes into his brain is something surgeons would only do when medically necessary, the study gave researchers a rare look into human brain function. Researchers in other fields of neurology can use animals to study brain activity, but complex language is unique to humans.

Neurologists studying language do use MRI scans of the brain to map where language is processed, but the resolution of such scans is much lower than the intra-cranial technique. The research focused on a portion of the brain called Broca’s area, known to be important in language and speech.

French doctor Pierre Paul Broca found in 1865 that two of his patients who were unable to produce more than a few words had lesions on their brains in the same spot. “In the 150 years since this discovery, progress in the understanding what precisely Broca’s area contributes to language has been disappointing,” said Eric Halgren of the University of California at San Diego.

The research found that the different language processes the scientists tested were in separate but partly overlapping locations within Broca’s area. They found that the brain’s computation of vocabulary, grammar and articulation took place very quickly: roughly 200, 320 and 450 milliseconds, respectively.

“We showed that distinct linguistic processes are computed within small regions of Broca’s area, separated in time and partially overlapping in space,” said Ned Sahin of UCSD, first author on the study, which appeared this week in the journal Science.

Sahin said the research dispels some notions that are still taught in medical textbooks, such as the idea that Broca’s area is only involved in speaking, while reading and hearing are handled in a different part of the brain. “Our task involved both reading and speaking, and we found that aspects of word identity, grammar and pronunciation are all computed within Broca’s area,” he said.

Read more: CBC News

Poetry written in regional dialect helps preserve local language and way of life in a globalized world. But a group of German and Scottish poets who have translated it found out just how similar Europeans are.

From landlocked farms in the Franconia region of Bavaria to fishing villages on the coast of Scotland or the Shetland Islands, regional dialects throughout consolidated and globalized Europe are something of an endangered cultural resource.

The task of preserving them goes in part to dialect poets, including two Germans and two Scots who have been involved in a project to translate regional verse.

Last year they held a workshop in Fife, Scotland, where they communicated through oral translators and were provided with literal “gloss” translations in both languages of each other’s poems. Today, they say the experience has had a lasting effect on how they view their poetry.

The sentiments of dialect poems are often expressed through rustic and geographically-bound language. While Franconian poets often work with imagery and idiomatic expressions based on a life of farming, the Scots poets do so with a life of fishing in mind. In some instances, this makes literal translation impossible and forces the poets to search for comparable literary devices.

Isabel Cole organized the workshop and edits a Berlin-based journal of German literature in English translation called “no man’s land.” She said dialect is less accepted in Germany as a form of literary expression than it is in Scotland.

“I think if people are open-minded about literature, dialects or non-standard literature, it is a real enrichment,” said Cole. “That’s something I actually miss in standard German literature. One thing I like about Germany is how many dialects there are, and how people cultivate their dialects. They have really different ways of expressing themselves.”

Alexander Hutchison, who lives in Glasgow, is not optimistic about current attempts to cultivate dialect in Scotland’s schools, he said that in poetry the Scots dialect is every bit as viable a form of self-expression as standard English.

“If people don’t understand the dialect, they can’t connect,” he said. “But if they do understand it, then there’s an immediacy – a personal element – that you cannot get in the parent language. There’s just as much possibility of a lack in the parent language as there is in the dialect. They operate in different dimensions to me.”

Although Hutchison expressed similar sentiments while speaking about his desire to preserve Scots and see it flourish, he compared the dialect to a “threatened habitat,” endangered by time and changing patterns of human behavior. Having lived for years in North America, Hutchison said he understands the pressures modern existence exerts on local cultures.

“I’m always wary of standardization, of people trying to impose things. As a poet, I never want to make rules for other poets.”

Read more: Deutsche Welle

In a recent translation of War and Peace, Platon Karataev, Tolstoy’s kindly peasant, addresses his interlocutor as “little falcon”. It just doesn’t sound right, reminding of someone from Fenimore Cooper’s The Last of the Mohicans. Remember Montigomo Hawk’s Claw?

Actually, “little falcon” is a literal translation of the Russian word sokolik, an intimacy or endearment that is still used by older people.

The Russian language is full of such words: First, the Russian national character is expressive and emotional, and one aspect of it is that it has so many diminutive adjectives and nouns (hence attempts to render them in English by the word “little”); second, the language itself offers a variety of ways to be expressive and emotional. One of them is suffixes. Russian is sometimes called the language of suffixes.

Russian suffixes express an extremely wide range of emotions and attitudes. They can produce words that are caressing, diminutive, familiar, vulgar or contemptuous.

Polish linguist Anna Wierzbicka studied the way Russian suffixes work with Russian personal names. She says the meanings expressed by names with suffixes are so rich and complex they cannot be represented by simple labels such as “affectionate” or “scornful”. Some are ambivalent.

The suffix ka (as in Mashka) may express familiarity or “anti-respect” but it becomes diminutive and even caressing in Mashenka.

Ik (the suffix used in Karataev’s sokolik) is diminutive when used with masculine names. People use it when they talk to small boys, who begin to resent it in their early teenage years.

In English, suffixes are rarer, and they are less expressive. Most commonly, standard short forms such as Tom or Bill are used with regard to people one knows well. Sometimes, such short forms are preferred by the person and are used officially as in Jimmy Carter rather than James Earl Carter, as Leonid Brezhnev’s letter of congratulations was addressed to the then president-elect.

Translators of fiction face enormous problems rendering the expressive range conveyed by Russian suffixes. Simple shortening has become widespread, at least in male names. Increasingly, people prefer to be called Vlad or Stas. We’ll see how that plays out.

Read more: Telegraph