Applied Languages

Indonesia’s linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.

For some Indonesians, as mastery of English has become increasingly tied to social standing, Indonesian has been relegated to second-class status. In extreme cases, people take pride in speaking Indonesian poorly.  The global spread of English, with its sometimes corrosive effects on local languages, has caused much hand-wringing in many non-English-speaking corners of the world. But the implications may be more far-reaching in Indonesia, where generations of political leaders promoted Indonesian to unite the nation and forge a national identity out of countless ethnic groups, ancient cultures and disparate dialects.

The government recently announced that it would require all private schools to teach the nation’s official language to its Indonesian students by 2013. Details remain sketchy, though. In 1928, nationalists seeking independence from Dutch rule chose Indonesian, a form of Malay, as the language of civic unity. While a small percentage of educated Indonesians spoke Dutch, Indonesian became the preferred language of intellectuals.

Each language had a social rank, said Arief Rachman, an education expert. “If you spoke Javanese, you were below,” he said, referring to the main language on the island of Java. “If you spoke Indonesian, you were a bit above. If you spoke Dutch, you were at the top.”

Leaders, especially Suharto, the general who ruled Indonesia until 1998, enforced teaching of Indonesian and curbed use of English. “During the Suharto era, Bahasa Indonesia was the only language that we could see or read. English was at the bottom of the rung,” said Aimee Dawis, who teaches communications at Universitas Indonesia. “It was used to create a national identity, and it worked, because all of us spoke Bahasa Indonesia. Now the dilution of Bahasa Indonesia is not the result of a deliberate government policy. It’s just occurring naturally.”

Anna Surti Ariani, a psychologist who provides counseling at private schools and in her own practice, said some parents even displayed “a negative pride” that their children spoke poor Indonesian. Schools typically advise the parents to speak to their children in English at home even though the parents may be far from fluent in the language.
Uchu Riza — who owns a private school that teaches both languages — said some Indonesians were willing to sacrifice Indonesian for a language with perceived higher status. “Sometimes they look down on people who don’t speak English,” she said.

She added: “In some families, the grandchildren cannot speak with the grandmother because they don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. That’s sad.”

Read More: The New York Times

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

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 

Most cinemas in Spain’s northeast Catalonia region stayed shut Monday to protest a proposed law that would force them to show 50 per cent of foreign films in the local Catalan language, rather than in Spanish, an industry group said.

The vast majority of movies in Catalonia, whose capital is Barcelona, are shown dubbed into Spanish, while Catalan-dubbed films represent just 3 per cent of the market, said Pilar Sierra, secretary general of the Catalan Cinema Company Guild, which called the protest.

The regional government says the legislation being debated in the regional parliament promotes the Catalan language.

Catalonia prides itself on having a distinct culture and language. Spanish and Catalan are the region’s two official languages but the government’s linguistic policies in recent years, such as obliging all school and university teaching to be conducted in Catalan, has been criticized by some who claim it discriminates against other Spaniards.

The guild argues that quotas would likely worsen the sector’s economic problems.

The law will make it hard for theatres showing films in Catalan to attract moviegoers and this will lead to closures and job losses, Sierra said.

“We’re in favour of promoting more films in Catalan, but not by imposition,” said Sierra, adding that the bill proposes fines of up to C75,000 ($104,000) for violations.

She added that U.S. films account for 80 per cent of those seen in Catalonia and that the guild believes major U.S. distributors would likely send in fewer films to avoid the extra bother and expense of dubbing them into both Spanish and Catalan.

The strike is expected to be heeded by the guild’s 70 theatres, which operate 525 of the region’s 740 screens.

The regional government hopes to pass the law before elections are called later this year in Catalonia.

Read more: The Canadian Press

The word ‘simples’ is poised to gain an entry in the Oxford English Dictionary thanks to a television advertising campaign starring an animated meerkat. The slogan has been named word of the year by the compilers of the OED.

The wordsmiths admitted the campaign by meerkat Aleksandr for a price comparison website helped push the word ‘simples’ into everyday conversation in Britain. Susie Dent, of Oxford University Press and a regular on Dictionary Corner on Channel 4 series Countdown, selected her pick of the year for 2009. She said: ‘One word that seems to have captured the public’s imagination in 2009 is the word “simples”.

‘It has appeared on the ‘compare the meerkat’ TV adverts and has quickly become a catchphrase said by anyone when they mean something that is very easy to achieve.’

Elsewhere in 2008, the world economic crisis provided the phrase ‘credit crunch’ and this year it has been followed up by ‘the great recession’ said the OED. It has also given rise to the phenomenon of the Zombie Bank, a financial institution whose liabilities are more than its assets but can keep going thanks to taxpayer bailouts.

Lack of money also created the ‘staycation’ which means a holiday in the UK rather than abroad. This was boosted by the Met Office promising a ‘barbecue summer’ which failed to materialise, yet the phrase itself has ended 2009 as one of the words or phrases of the year.

Social networking has provided the language with the verb to ‘defriend’ – or ‘unfriend’ to Americans – which means to take someone off a list of friends on Facebook.

And then there is ‘Tweetup’, a play on ‘meet up’ where people get together physically after contacting each other on the social networking site Twitter.

The words will not immediately get in to the next edition of the Oxford English Dictionary but go on a ‘waiting list’ with other phrases like jeggings – a mix of jeans and leggings. Compilers from Oxford University Press, publishers of the OED, wait to see if the new words and phrases become permanent fixtures in the language or if they simply disappear again.

Others on the waiting list include ‘paywalls’ – part of a website which is not accessible without paying a subscription’. And from the great MPs’ expenses scandal comes ‘redact’, an old word meaning to censor or obscure and resurrected to describe the habit of blocking out ‘sensitive’ information on what politicians bought with taxpayers’ money.

Miss Dent added: ‘Only a tiny percentage of words will ever gain entry into an Oxford dictionary and the waiting list of words is long.’

Top 10 words of 2009:
1. Simples
2. Unfriend/defriend
3. Great Recession
4. Staycation
5. Tweetup
6. Zombie Bank
7. Barbecue summer
8. Jeggings
9. Redact
10. Paywalls

Read more: Daily Mail Online