Applied Languages

Germany’s Foreign Minister Guido Westerwelle drew plenty of sarcastic remarks when he insisted on speaking German to a British reporter just after his election to parliament four months ago. Now, he’s making it his official mission to promote his mother tongue. “German is the language at the heart of Europe,” Westerwelle said in a somewhat poetic statement Thursday at the outset of his new global campaign for the so-called “Language of Ideas,” and he came up with reasons to learn German.

“It is the key to more than 350 German universities and colleges, to Europe’s largest economy,” Westerwelle said. “It grants access to German literature, music, philosophy, and science, to the wealth of great European cultural traditions and, not least, it is the key to realizing one’s own goals and ideas.”

Europe counts about 101 million native German speakers, according to the Foreign Ministry, and some 14.5 million people outside the country are studying the language. That number is down, however, from about 17 million only three years ago, and Berlin is noting, with some alarm, the increasing importance of English as well as efforts by Spain and China to promote their respective languages.

The new campaign aims to combine and highlight the multitude of existing language teaching and cultural projects – without actually spending more than the euro300 million ($406 million) provided by the government in 2009. They want to inspire young people worldwide to take up German and “to motivate decision makers in politics, education, business, and the media within Germany and outside to promote German as a foreign language,” the ministry said in a statement.

Westerwelle has stressed the beauty of German repeatedly ever since a somewhat notorious press conference in late September, when a BBC reporter asked him if, possibly, the foreign minister to be would answer a question in English. Westerwelle, who can speak English, rebuffed the request saying: “Just like it goes without saying that English is spoken in Great Britain it is customary to speak German in Germany.”

Germany, like France, has seen occasional efforts to ban English language imports such as “rent-a-bike,” “ticket counter,” or “coffee shop.” Earlier this month, Deutsche Bahn, the national railway – which routinely provides announcements in German and in a form of almost indecipherable English – pledged to weed out some of its borrowed vocabulary such as “kiss & ride” and “call-a-bike” after Ernst Hinsken, a Bavarian member of Germany’s parliament, complained.

While most Germans study English in school and often resort to the global language, some foreigners seem to go along with Westerwelle’s take on German. “I like German. It is amazing, it is so rational and it makes so much sense,” said Inara Vaz from Sao Paulo, Brazil, who has been studying German in Berlin for a year. She said she is still struggling, not so much with grammar, but with expanding her vocabulary. Nonetheless, it seems to be worth her while. “It is a beautiful language, it is deeper than any other language I know,” she said, a flattering declaration considering she speaks not only Italian, Portuguese and Spanish, but English, too.

Read more: The Washington Post

Microsoft Corp., in collaboration with UNESCO, has launched an initiative of its own kind to save several rare languages from being lost after they have been falling victim to the ever-changing cultural landscape.

The company has announced that it will be launching its upcoming versions of Windows, Office, and Visual Studio software suites supported with several new language packs, including Yoruba in Nigeria, Inuktitut in Canada, Oriya in India, isiZulu in South Africa, to mention a few.

Additionally, Redmond-based software giant also unleashed 59 new Language Interface Packs for its next-generation Windows 7 OS and the forthcoming Office 2010 business suites.

Microsoft is touting that the support for 95 languages incorporated with the Local Language Program would help at least a billion people to work with Windows and Office suites in their local languages.

The announcement comes as part of the celebration of International Mother Language Day 2010, an occasion observed to preserve thousands of local dialects and languages across the globe.

A recent research has claimed that a local language dies out every 14 days, succumbing to advancements in technology, thereby taking away with it centuries of cultural history, traditions that existed in oral forms only, and a huge repository of knowledge.

Read more: IT Pro Portal

Parents who want bilingual children should start the lessons early. Newborns who were exposed to two languages while in the womb have already begun the process of bilingual acquisition, a new study has found. If that’s not enough, babies who are only days old are able to discriminate between the languages.

The study, published in the journal Psychological Science, reveals that the origins of learning two languages lie so deep that they extend even to the prenatal period. “Whatever the mother speaks, if she speaks one language or if she speaks two languages, her baby is going to be prepared to learn one or two languages at birth,” co-author Janet Werker, a professor in psychology at the University of British Columbia, said yesterday.

Dr. Werker and her colleagues ran two experiments to investigate language preference and discrimination in newborns. Babies sucked on a pacifier connected to a computer, with increased sucking indicating interest in a stimulus.

Babies whose mothers spoke only English had more sucks per minute when they heard the language, as opposed to when they heard Tagalog. Newborns whose mothers spoke both English and Tagalog regularly during pregnancy showed equal interest in both languages.

Researchers wondered if the babies could distinguish between the rhythm and melodies of the two languages, or whether their exposure to both meant they couldn’t differentiate between the two.

The second experiment, however, found that babies could discriminate. Infants listened to sentences being spoken in one language until they lost interest and their sucking per minute weakened. They then heard sentences in the other language, or in the same language spoken by a different person. Infants sucked more fervently when they heard the other language being spoken, a finding that suggested infants can discriminate between the two.

“Babies have a preference for listening to what’s familiar at birth. But it doesn’t mean that they confuse the two languages if they’ve been exposed to two languages in utero,” Dr. Werker said. “People are always so afraid that their children will confuse their two native languages, and what this suggests is that even when they leave the starting gate, they have some little mechanisms in place to begin to keep them apart.”

Read more: The Globe and Mail

What is common between ‘pencil’, ‘railway station’, ‘programme’ and ‘machine’? These are English words used in Hindi, Punjabi and other languages. And a professor has found a novel way to use these words in teaching of the English language.

Professor Anil Sarwal, linguistics expert and faculty member at DAV College, Sector 10, has identified 12,000 such words. The aim behind compiling these words, according to Professor Sarwal, was to use one’s mother tongue to teach the English language. “If encouraged to learn English by beginning with words that are known to them, the ice between learners and the English language will start thawing,” Professor Sarwal says.

He says now learning a language will no longer be a burden. “Rather, it will be fun, as the learner will be able to identify with what is being taught. Many new words in English have been introduced only around 10 years ago and have no substitute in any other language. For example, words like ‘computer’, ‘keyboard’ and ‘mouse’ have no substitutes. And learners even in the most rural areas know these words. If they are incorporated while teaching the language, learning would be much easier.”

Using these words with the technique of developmental teaching, Panjab University has asked Professor Sarwal to write a book for the Adult and Continuing Studies department. The book is being co-authored by Robin Diallo, linguistics teacher and the first secretary of the American Embassy in India.

In the book, local languages will be incorporated, wherever possible, with literature from America, Africa, Australia and other countries. Professor Sarwal says, “We need to change our approach of teaching English and that is what the book would try to achieve.”

Read more: Indian Express

Schoolchildren in Reading in Berkshire have been found to speak as many as 150 different languages at home, highlighting the pressure placed on teachers by growing numbers with little or no command on English.

The Government described the number of languages and dialects spoken by pupils in the town - uncovered in a survey by the local authority – as “extraordinary” and conceded that it would place extra pressure on schools. Languages spoken by children in the town include the Ghanaian dialect of Akan, Chichewa, from the south central Africa, the Aztec tongue of Nahatl and the Indian language of Telugu.

Reading Borough Council has been forced to offer cheap English lessons to pupils and their parents to tackle the rising number of children who cannot communicate in class. But the figure suggests that language barriers are making it increasingly impossible for teachers to communicate effectively with pupils.

It follows the disclosure in 2005 that pupils at Woodside High School school in Tottenham, north London, speak as many as 58 languages, with many arriving at the comprehensive unable to speak any English at all. Census figures show that children across the whole of Scotland speak 147 languages, while pupils in Lancashire speak 72 mother tongues.

A spokesman for the Department for Children, Schools and Families said: “If pupils are speaking 150 different languages in one place, that’s quite an extraordinary number. “We become concerned when schools aren’t coping with these children’s needs, and I can imagine that is no mean feat for a local authority where pupils speak this many languages.”

Philip Davis, the Conservative MP for Shipley, West Yorks, said: “It’s very worrying and Labour’s lax immigration policies are a huge factor in this. “It is also a result of political correctness, we haven’t really made people integrate properly into British society and we haven’t made them learn English.”

A Government study found last year that some 240 different languages are spoken by schoolchildren in the home across Britain as a whole, with one-in-seven primary school pupils not speaking English as a first language across the UK. There are 10 schools in the UK where no child speaks English as a first language, the figures show.

Staff and pupils at Fairlight Primary School in Brighton resorted to learning sign language to communicate, with children speaking 26 different languages at home in 2008.

Lesley Reilly, head of adult learning at Reading council, said: “There are now 150 languages spoken by children in Reading schools and our aim is to involve stakeholders in community groups across the town to encourage people to join the English classes. “Our target is to reach more male learners, unemployed people, learners recently arrived in Reading and parents of primary school-aged children.”

Read more: Telegraph