Applied Languages

Lebanon, a tiny, vibrant Mediterranean country, prides itself on its polyglot society but for the country’s youths native Arabic is not very “cool.” English and French often replace the local dialect in conversation, especially among the urban youth, and one organisation has launched a campaign to preserve Arabic in Lebanon.

“Arabic is still very much alive as a language, but young people are moving farther and farther away from it,” said Suzanne Talhouk, who heads the organisation “Fael Ummer” (Imperative) which is running the campaign.

“Some of our youngsters are incapable of writing correctly in Arabic, and many university students we interviewed were not even able to recite the alphabet,” Talhouk said.

Urban youths are often unable to hold a conversation in one language, causing amusement but also irking those around them with such home-grown expressions as the popular farewell: “Yalla, bye.” “At my school it’s more cool to speak French. Arabic is looked down upon,” said high school student Nathalie.

On Thursday the Tunis-based Arab Organisation for Education, Culture and Science decided to set aside March 1 of each year to celebrate the Arabic language. A statement from the organisation said the move was an attempt to “preserve the heritage of the Arab nation in the face of globalisation.”

The message was heard loud and clear in Lebanon, which was once the Francophone hub of the Arab world. The country of four million was under French Mandate from 1920 until its independence in 1943, and it is still widely considered the most “Western” country in the conservative Middle East.

In Lebanon most schools teach Arabic, French and English to their students from a young age, and the education authorities allow students with dual nationality to waive Arabic classes and government examinations. “Having a second language is an asset, provided students do not forget their native language,” said Talhouk.

Experts are divided on who should shoulder the responsibility, with some blaming schools which they say have placed Arabic at the bottom of the educational pyramid.

“Schools often treat Arabic as a secondary subject,” says Henri Awaiss, who heads the department of translation at Saint Joseph University in Beirut. But some teachers say the problem starts at home. “Many parents tend to speak to their children in English or French,” said Hiba, who teaches Arabic at a primary school.

According to Talhouk “some parents even request teachers address their children in French or English if they do not understand Arabic.” “It’s sad. One shouldn’t be ashamed of their language,” she said.

And with the Internet age in full swing, “writing in Arabic is no longer fashionable among the young,” Talhouk added.

The Lebanese have even devised a web-friendly script for their dialect, using Latin font. Numbers such as 2, 3, and 7 are used to represent Arabic phonetic sounds that do not exist in English or French.

The United Nations cultural body UNESCO designated Beirut World Book Capital of the year (April 2009-April 2010). But reading, generally not a popular activity in Lebanon, is even less popular in Arabic.

“I don’t read Arabic novels because they don’t speak to the youth,” said Bilal, a Lebanese university student studying television broadcasting.

Leila Barakat, who manages the World Book Capital programme, stressed the need for more modern Arabic texts that address the new generation. “We must support and encourage Arabic literature for young adults, which is today underdeveloped,” Barakat told AFP.

Talhouk insisted that Lebanon should invest in preserving the nation’s cultural and literary heritage, as well as develop Arabic technological and scientific terms.

“Young people should feel that this beautiful language speaks to them too, that it is of their day and age,” she said.

Read more: DAWN Media

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