Applied Languages

Inuit languages — and how to preserve them in a culture increasingly dominated by English — are the focus of a Nunavut summit this week drawing experts from several circumpolar nations.

About 200 delegates from Canada, Greenland and the United States are in Iqaluit for the Nunavut Language Summit, which began Tuesday and runs through Friday. The Nunavut government organized the conference because it wants to implement new laws aimed at making Inuit languages, including Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun, more prominent in the daily lives of Nunavummiut.

While about 90 per cent of Inuit in Canada still speak Inuktitut, its use has been slowly declining, according to Statistics Canada. Inuit make up 84 per cent of Nunavut’s population of about 30,000. “Language is very important because it defines who you are,” Louis Tapardjuk, Nunavut’s minister of languages, told CBC News before the summit began.

“[The] Inuktitut language, there’s no other such language throughout the world. It’s only spoken by those that live in the circumpolar region, so it is something to be proud of, something that you can call your own.”

The summit began with a “healing gathering” in which Inuit speakers from a wide range of ages and backgrounds spoke about their own experiences, often as students forbidden from speaking their native tongue at school. “My father, when he was asked or told by the schooling authorities to speak English to us, did not,” Edna MacLean, an Inupiat delegate from Alaska, told delegates. “He claimed that English was not his language, so he refused to speak English. And since Inupiaq was his language, he would speak with us.”

Raymond Ningeocheak of the Nunavut land claims organization Nunavut Tunngavik Inc. said Inuit in Nunavut must not work in isolation to preserve their languages. Speaking in Inuktitut, he said Inuit must stop arguing over each other’s regional dialects and work together to keep the language alive.

In 2008, the Nunavut government passed a revamped Official Languages Act and the Inuit Language Protection Act, with the latter offering Inuktitut and Inuinnaqtun the most powerful protection among Canada’s aboriginal languages.

A series of roundtable discussions about the laws have been held in several Nunavut regions, but this week’s summit also includes delegates from outside Nunavut. Tapardjuk said the discussions will guide the government’s implementation of the new laws. The topics to be discussed include:

•Language development in children and youth.
•Language leadership, or how people can be good language role models.
•Standardizing the Inuit language.
•The Inuit languages in workplaces, media, culture and government.

Read more: CBC News

Around a third of parents fail to encourage their children into languages at GCSE level despite 27% regretting dropping the subjects themselves, a survey has found.

A study by the National Centre for Languages (CILT) found that nearly a quarter of parents felt unable to offer their children adequate homework support in languages. It follows recent research indicating that just 44% of 14 to 16-year-olds now take up the subjects at GCSE level.

An online survey of more than 3,500 adults revealed that 34% of parents did not actively encourage their children to take a language at that level. This is despite many citing failure to learn a foreign tongue as a major regret from their own schooldays.

Nearly half of unilinguists said they envied their polyglot friends, with one in five believing those who speak a second language appear more intelligent.

CILT called on parents not to let their own hang-ups affect their children’s chances of learning other languages. Spokeswoman for the organisation Teresa Tinsley said: “It’s understandable that many parents struggle with homework help, as it’s impossible to be an expert at everything.

“However, being able to speak a second language will open up a world of opportunities for young people, so today we’d like to see parents put away their anxieties and think about the benefits of their children taking a language at GCSE level – to ensure they don’t look back with regret.”

Read more: The Press Association

In the remote Northern Territory community of Wadeye linguists say four languages will be gone in the next decade.

Patrick Palibu Nudjulu is a Magati Ke elder, custodian of the Rak Naniny clan and is one of two remaining speakers of the Magati Ke language. His sick and elderly sister can speak Magati Ke, but not to the point where she can help in the documentation of the language.

Maree Klesch works closely with Mr Nudjulu through her job at the Endangered Languages Centre at Batchelor Institute for Indigenous tertiary education. Ms Klesch said languages are dying in the community at the hands of the dominant Murrinhpatha language, which is used at the local school.

“Within 10 years certainly four of the languages we are currently working on with Wadeye probably won’t be there and there are several reasons for that,” she said. “Languages may not be spoken in the home as much because of the lingua franca of the community.”

In August last year, the Federal Government acknowledged a report which found 110 Indigenous languages are at risk of disappearing and committed $9.3 million towards saving them.

Ms Klesch said the money has made a slight difference, but does not go anywhere near far enough. “There is just not enough speakers left to document and record these languages,” she said.

“Although there is Commonwealth support for this, it is not really nearly enough to be able to achieve the goals necessary to retrieve these languages and maintain them in a timeframe of those elders staying alive as first language speakers,” she said.

Ms Klesch wants bilingual programs to continue in Northern Territory schools as a way of ensuring the preservation of languages and Indigenous culture. “You only have to look at those languages that are already extinct, and those languages that people are trying to retrieve to find out that without the language you just don’t have the cultural knowledge.

“You don’t have the scientific knowledge of medicine, the weather, how to manage the environment, all of that is lost in translation.”

The outgoing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Social Justice Commissioner, Tom Calma put the preservation of Indigenous high on his list of issues of concern in his last address in January.

Read more: ABC News

The last speaker of Bo, which is one of the world’s oldest languages, has died at the age of 85 in India’s Andaman Islands, according to the Chinese Xinhua News Agency on Friday.

Bo is now an extinct Great Andamanese language. According to some linguists, it may have been related to languages spoken in Neolithic times and was one of the world’s oldest languages.

Tribal Health Deputy Director R.C. Kar said Boa Sr, who died on January 28 this year, had been suffering from old age and health ailments for some time. He said she was the oldest member of the Great Andamanese tribe.

According to leading linguist Professor Anvita Abbi, the death of Boa Sr from a unique tribe in the Andamans also led to the tragic demise of the world’s oldest languages — Bo.

“After the death of her parents, Boa Sr was the last Bo speaker for 30 to 40 years. She was often very lonely and had to learn an Adamanese version of Hindi in order to communicate with people,” Prof Abbi said.

“But throughout Boa Sr’s life, she had a very good sense of humor and her smile and full-throated laughter were infectious,” said Abbi.

Professor Abbi said that Boa Sr’s death was a loss to intellectuals wanting to study more about the origins of ancient languages because they had lost “a vital piece of the jigsaw”.

“The Andamanese are believed to be among our earliest ancestors,” she explained. Languages in the Andamans are thought to originate from Africa, with some estimated to be even 70,000 years old. The islands are often called an “anthropologist’s dream” and are one of the most linguistically diverse areas of the world.

Read more: Bernama

A generation of teenagers who communicate via the Internet and by text messages are risking unemployment because their daily vocabulary consists of just 800 words, the Government’s new children’s communication tsar has warned.

Although, according to recent surveys, they know an average of 40,000 words, they tend to favour a “teenspeak” used in text messages, on social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace and in internet chat rooms like MSN.

One poll, commissioned by Tesco, revealed that while children had the vocabulary to be articulate, the top 20 words they used accounted for about a third of all the words they used.

According to Jean Gross, England’s first Communication Champion for Children who started in the post this month, the lack of range will impact negatively on their chances of getting a job.

Miss Gross is planning to launch a nationwide campaign next year to ensure children use their full language potential and are not impeded in the classroom and later, the workplace, because they are inarticulate. It will target children in primary and secondary schools and she intends to ask QI presenter, author and prolific Twitterer Stephen Fry to back it.

“Teenagers are spending more time communicating through electronic media and text messaging, which is short and brief,” she told The Sunday Times. “We need to help today’s teenagers understand the difference between their textspeak and the formal language they need to succeed in life – 800 words will not get you a job.”

She plans to send children with video cameras into workplaces so they can see the range of words used by professionals and share what they have learned with classmates, and wants parents to limit the amount of children under two watch to half an hour a day, replacing it with conversation.

Her concern was raised, she said, by research conducted by Tony McEnery, a professor of linguistics at Lancaster University sponsored by Tesco, who examined 10m words of transcribed speech and 100,000 words from teenagers’ blogs.

As well as establishing that teens use their top 20 words in a third of their speech, he discovered words likely to be entirely alien to adults, including “chenzed”, which means tired or drunk, “spong”, which means silly, and “lol”, the shorthand version of “laugh out loud”.

Both Marks & Spencer boss Sir Stuart Rose and Tesco’s Sir Terry Leahy have recently lamented the lack of school-leavers with the right skills for the workplace.

John Bald, a language teaching consultant and former Ofsted schools inspector, said the poor use of language was a deliberate, anti-establishment act. “There is undoubtedly a culture among teenagers of deliberately stripping away excess verbiage in language,” he said.

“When kids are in social situations, the instinct is to simplify. It’s part of a wider anti-school culture that exists among some children which parents and schools need to address.”

But David Crystal, honorary professor of linguistics at Bangor University in Wales, told The Sunday Times that experts simply did not understand the complexities of teen language and had judged it by their own standards.

“The real issue here is that people object to kids having a good vocabulary for hip-hop and not for politics,” he said. “They have an articulate vocabulary for the kind of things they want to talk about. Few academics get anywhere near measuring that vocabulary.”

Read more: Telegraph