Applied Languages

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

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