“I’m proud to be a linguist.” – CoLang 2014

Tags

endangered languages, language diversity, language revitalization, languages, linguistics, Native American

I’m back after two of the most exhausting, exhilarating, challenging, and rewarding weeks I’ve had in quite a long time.

CoLang (i.e. the Institute for Collaborative Language Research) took place at the UT-Arlington, under wide Texas skies.

Oh yes, we are definitely in Texas

UTA campus

The participants and instructors came from colleges, universities, indigenous communities, and development organizations.  They were from all over the US and Canada, Australia, Nigeria, Pakistan, Mexico, China, Japan, and Iraq (and those were just the people I managed to meet!)  I met someone who documents languages on Vanuatu; someone else who has a community development project in Ecuador; someone else is working to document the languages of Zapotec immigrants living in central California; someone else who is developing language programs for her own tribe in Iowa.

The courses kept us all plenty busy during the day, and every evening there was something to participate in, including sharing nights, public lectures, and of course, Star Wars in Navajo (!)

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

I had personal triumphs, such as when the instructors of my Audio class listened to a practice recording my partner and I had made and said things such as “wow” and “the quality of this is so good, I would use this.”  I had personal struggles, such as time spent desperately searching for something caffeinated, or running out of minutes on my phone plan because I couldn’t stop giving my husband long detailed updates.

On the last day of the institute, several participants who had received scholarships to attend got up to say thank you and to talk about their experiences.  They all talked about how important this work of documentation and revitalization is, and how transformative the time at CoLang had been.  One undergraduate looked at the auditorium full of people and said, “You all make me proud to be a linguist.”

And that’s what I wanted to say too.  Because at the end of all of it, the courses and the training were important, of course; I certainly learned a lot.  But the richest part of the whole thing was meeting and making friends with so many kind, interesting, smart, creative, selfless people.  You go to this thing and you learn about work being done, and you watch partnerships form, and you find buddies and allies that you might not have ever met otherwise.  I feel so honored to have had that opportunity.

Thank you to UTA photographer Robert Crosby for this!

Mark your calendars for CoLang 2016 at the University of Alaska Fairbanks!  🙂

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

 

The language of summer

Tags

Arabic, language learning, languages, summer

For the past couple of summers, this is how I spent two evenings a week: I would leave my office at 5:30, walk through downtown DC, pushing my way through traffic and thick swampy heat, usually stopping at obligatory name-brand coffee store for something iced to revive myself, until I got to a pretty little building with a courtyard and made my way into a classroom with the air conditioning on full blast.  In the classroom, I’d take my seat, open my notebook, and spend the next two hours with one of the language loves of my life – Arabic.  To this day the Arabic language is all tied up in my memory with the sensation of humid heat outside and a slap of freezing air inside, the taste of an iced caramel macchiato, the buzz of a city on a summer night when I finally left to go home.  Similarly, this first stretch of summer swelter gives me an itch to get back into the Arabic classroom.  For various reasons I won’t, unfortunately, be studying Arabic this summer, at least not in a formal classroom setting.  But I have other language-y things planned that I’m also really excited about (I’ll tell you more about that next week!)

Summers are the time a lot of us slow down, explore hobbies, learn new things.  Recommended reading lists for summers are often filled with looooong novels, books that aren’t necessarily “important” but are hypnotizing.  We finally get time to savor things a little bit more – those of us who are students or who work in schools are particularly sensitive to this.  Summers are for indulging.

So what languages are you indulging in this summer?  Are you studying a new language just for fun?  Are you trying to pick up a few phrases you’ll need for an upcoming trip?  Or trying to stick with a language you’ll get back to once the semester starts back up?

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

Nowoo3 Hall and the politics of naming

Tags

Arapaho, Colorado, endangered languages, language, language policy, languages, Native American, sociolinguistics

This month’s issue of Harper’s Magazine included the publication of a letter sent to the Campus Planning Board at the University of Colorado-Boulder in November of last year.

The letter pertained to two dormitories on the campus that were due to be renamed.  The Board had proposed renaming the dorms after two prominent historic chiefs of the Arapaho nation, the original owners of the land on which the University sits.  The two chiefs in question are commonly referred to in the modern day as Niwot and Little Raven.  However, members of the faculty of the Native Studies program at CU argued that it was “culturally chauvinist” to use these names instead of the names given to the chiefs in their native Hinono’ei, or Arapaho language.  In the Arapaho language, “Niwot” would properly be spelled Nowoo3, and “Little Raven” is just a direct translation of the Arapaho name Houussoo. In the case of “Niwot,” the chair of the linguistics department (one of the authors of the letter) argued that we would never think to name something after a French leader and insist on transliterating it into English spelling just because the spelling makes it confusing to pronounce – it would be like writing Sharl duh Gahl on something, which he said would look pretty stupid.  Similarly translating Houussoo into English is not something we typically do with European languages, or else we’d have things in DC named after Stone the Child instead of Pierre l’Enfant, for example (goodness, doesn’t that give you a different sense?)  The letter argued that such a naming policy further serves to “primitivize” native languages and native peoples.

This plea caused some controversy, of course.  Amongst quite a lot of accusations of “PC Police” and comments ranging from vaguely to wildly racist, there were some cogent counterpoints.  One argument I thought was particularly on point is that the Arapaho language, unlike the French of Charles de Gaulle or Pierre l’Enfant, did not have an orthography in the 1800s when these two chiefs were in power – that is, Chief Nowoo3 or Niwot or Na-wath (roughly the correct pronunciation) never saw his own name written down, so it is hard to say that Niwot is really a “misspelling.”  While that is true, the Arapaho language has developed a written form since then, and strong efforts are being made to document the language (in its specific, non-English orthography) and to revitalize it (see here, for example.)  Deliberately ignoring these efforts, and more importantly deliberately ignoring the spelling conventions of thousands of currently living members of the Arapaho tribes, does indeed strike me as being thoughtless at the very least.

The translation of Houussoo to “Little Raven” seems even more difficult to defend.  It’s hard to understand any objections to this point.  And in case you thought there was no harm in translating native North American names into English, I’ll give you my favorite example: a prominent leader of the Oglala Lakota in the 19th century had the Lakota name Tȟašúŋke Kȟokípȟapi, and is almost always referred to in American history books as Young Man Afraid of His Horses.  “Young Man” is a rough translation of the first name, and “Afraid of His Horses” is pretty close to the last name, but the overall impression is of a puny Plains Indian so wimpy he’s scared of his own horses.  A more accurate translation of the name is something like They-Fear-Even-His-Horses.  Now that sounds more like a strong military and diplomatic leader.  But his name, his real given name, is Tȟašúŋke Kȟokípȟapi.

I would argue that the one underlying objection to “Nowoo3 Hall” is just laziness, plain and simple.  I’m not immune to it – before I did some reading I was left scratching my head as to how in the world you would pronounce that.  We Anglophones, especially we American Anglophones, can be pretty lazy and resistant when it comes to learning how to pronounce anything in any other language (let alone learning another language.)  But is laziness a good enough reason for cultural insensitivity?  The CU faculty point out that other universities have named buildings after native leaders in native orthographies – the Muwekma-tah-Ruk residential hall at Stanford, the Kanonhsesne residential community at UMass Amherst, and the very loveliest example I’ve ever seen, the Xwi7xwa Library at the University of British Columbia (I’m still pondering the pronunciation of that one.)

Both of the CU residence halls were due for a renaming ceremony in April, but I’ve been poking around and I can’t find any news about what was decided, and the CU website still lists the halls under their old names (Kittredge Central and Kittredge West.)  What do you think they board should decide?

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

Pop Quiz! Languages from Embassy Day

Tags

Australia, language diversity, language families, languages

In my last post I told you about how I got to spend my Saturday visiting embassies open all around DC, part of the Around the World Embassy Tour.  I said that the seven countries whose embassies I visited represented over 800 living languages total.  How much do you know about the languages of those countries?  Take today’s Pop Quiz to find out!

As a reminder, the embassies I visited were: Australia, Bolivia, Brazil, Mozambique, Peru, the Philippines, and South Africa.

QUESTIONS:

1. Portuguese is the official language of two of the countries.  Which two?
2. Quechua and Aymara are indigenous languages spoken in which two countries?
3. Ibanag, Cebuano, Spanish, and English are among the 181 languages spoken in this country.  Which one?
4. Bantu languages are spoken in which two countries?
5. These two countries each boast over 200 living languages.  Which two?
6. What is the most widely spoken language in the country whose artists created these? (Looking back at my last post will help a little here!)

BONUS: I ran out of time before I could visit the embassy representing the country with the most living languages represented.  Which country’s embassy would that be? (Hint: the embassy of Papua New Guinea did not participate in this year’s tour.)

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ANSWERS:

1. Brazil and Mozambique
2. Bolivia and Peru
3. The Philippines
4. Mozambique and South Africa
5. Australia and Brazil
6. Tagalog

BONUS: Next year I will be sure to visit the embassy of Indonesia, which represents speakers of over 700 different living languages.

***

How did you do?  Was there anything you were surprised to learn?  Which country’s embassy would you most want to visit if you could?

 

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

Around the World in Washington, DC

Tags

Australia, Bolivia, embassy day, language diversity, languages, Washington DC

This weekend, I took advantage of one of the perks of living in Washington, DC:

Embassy Day!

The Around the World Embassy tour is organized by Cultural Tourism DC and is wildly popular.  This year embassies and ambassadors’ residences representing 53 nations participated!  In one afternoon you can visit all of the continents of the world.  Entrance to the buildings is free and every country takes advantage of the opportunity to showcase their very best in food, dancing, artwork and crafts, costumes, commerce, tourism…anything you can think of.  As a lover of languages and a dedicated armchair traveler (as well as an obsessive hoarder of travel brochures), this is one day I make the most of!

First I waited in line for the chance to finally (sort of) visit Australia.

The embassy volunteers kept the people in line happy by handing out samples of Vegemite and beef sausage, as well as free sunscreen.  Once inside I sampled Australian wine, nibbled on lamb, and said hello to some skinks and geckos on display.  (I also unashamedly made off with a temporary tattoo of the Australian flag.)

Next I headed to the Philippines, where I watched people getting dressed up for some dancing and checked out the display of elaborately carved fruit and vegetables.

Then there was Peru, where the sounds of panflute wafted through the windows as I watched a weaver at his loom.

I headed into the embassy of Mozambique to look at some traditional artwork

and then headed up to the embassy of the Republic of South Africa, where I sampled some remarkably spicy food and took too many pictures of the Nelson Mandela statue.

Bolivia had a nonstop dance party going on out front

as well as an entire hall dedicated to quinoa.

I ended my day at the residence of the ambassador to Brazil.

I had wanted to go into the embassy of the Republic of Iraq, but so did everyone else it seems – the line was around the block!

Maybe next year…

***

In one day I visited seven different countries!  By my calculation, the countries I visited represent over 800 living languages.  Isn’t that amazing?

(By the way, if you’re in the DC area and you missed this weekend’s embassy tours, next weekend the European embassies will be participating in the EU Openhouse tour, also organized by Cultural Tourism DC.)

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

Ancient Languages blog carnival

Tags

ancient languages, blogs, classical Greek, classical languages, Greek, Homer, languages

My post on Monday was part of a blog carnival about ancient languages.  The full list of other participants is here!

There are so many interesting insights into what we can learn from ancient texts in their original languages.  My personal favorite is this one, discussing sound patterns in the first few lines of The Odyssey.  But there are many more great blog posts (especially if you love Greek like I do!)

Check them out and have a happy Friday!

Pop Quiz! Which language do you hear?

Tags

Danish, German, Hebrew, Irish, languages, Spanish, speakers

One of my favorite things about writing this blog is getting to listen to the audio clips of our Featured Speakers.  I am always looking for additions to this feature, so if you speak a language that I haven’t had a chance to spotlight yet, or you know someone else who does, please get in touch with me!  We love hearing other languages!

Today’s pop quiz comes directly from our speakers, but I’ve made it a little trickier – each clip is only about ten seconds of the original audio (wouldn’t want it to be too easy, would you?)  See if you can recognize the language, and then check out the links to hear the original and read the interviews with the speakers!

MATCHING: Which language is being spoken in the following clips?  Your choices are:

• Azerbaijani
• Chinese (Mandarin)
• Danish
• German
• Hebrew
• Indonesian
• Irish
• Italian
• Japanese
• Spanish
  (note not all of the choices will be used!)

***
ANSWERS:

1. Azerbaijani
2. (Mandarin) Chinese
3. German
4. Danish
5. Irish
6. Italian
7. Japanese
8. Hebrew

How did you do?  Have you studied any of the languages in those clips?  Do you speak a language you’d like to share?

 

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

What makes a language difficult?

Tags

applied linguistics, difficulty, French, Greek, language, language learning, languages

When I was researching for last week’s Pop Quiz, I came across this article from the Economist, subtitled “In Search of the World’s Hardest Language.”  The author examines different ways that languages can be difficult.  For instance, English spelling is pretty irregular, but French “gives it a run for it’s money” – no one who has ever studied French would argue for a one-to-one correspondence between spelling and pronunciation.  Latin and Greek get a nod for being much more highly inflected than English (remember that scene from Monty Python?)  Then there are difficult sounds, such as the Scottish “ch”, the German umlaut, or the “much more exotic vowels” of Chinese.  (I would like to point out here that he’s getting “vowels” and “tones” mixed up in his discussion – tones are of course difficult for nonnative speakers, but they’re linguistically a separate issue than vowels, strictly speaking – see the discussion here if you’re interested.)  The author also lists languages with difficult consonant inventories, such as Ubykh with its purported 78 distinct consonants, and of course my favorite, the languages with a glorious array of click consonants.  There are languages with complex morphology, for instance marking for not only gender, number, and case, but also noun class; there are agglutinating languages such as Turkish, where single words can contain dozens of syllables as the morphemes pile up.

I bring this up because I am curious as to what each of you would say makes a language “difficult,” in terms of learning them as non-native speakers.  I have a strong suspicion it depends on each person’s unique skills and personality.  Some people have a musical ear and can pick up pitch and tone much easier than others.  Some people are analytical and can sense, and then use, complex grammatical patterns, while the rest of us scratch our heads.  I also imagine it has a lot to do with your native language(s) and with your previous language learning experience.  The author of the Economist article notes that “Languages tend to get ‘harder’ the farther one moves from English and its relatives,” which seems like a fairly intuitive rule of thumb for monolingual Anglophones.  But if you grew up in a bilingual English/Tamil household, that could strongly affect what you find “difficult” about learning a third language.  And if you’ve already taken some courses in, say, Arabic, the intricacies of related languages like Hebrew are probably a lot less daunting.

The author of this article selected Tuyuca as the “hardest language,” mostly as a consequence of its detailed and complex system of marking verbs for evidentiality – in Tuyuca, you have to add a bit at the end of each verb to indicate how you came to know the information you are sharing in the sentence (did you see it yourself?  did someone tell you about it?)   That’s certainly a lot to deal with every time you utter a sentence, especially if you’ve never had to do it before.  But does that make it the hardest?

What qualities do you find the most difficult about a language?  What’s the most difficult language you’ve tried studying?  What features do you find aren’t so difficult for you, that might present problems for other people?

I’d like to write more about difficulty in language learning, but first I wanted to get your thoughts!

 

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

Pop Quiz! Endangered language projects

Tags

endangered languages, language death, language revitalization, languages, Native American

The Endangered Language Fund was founded in 1996 and has been providing grants to individual researchers, tribes, and museums, with the goal of supporting language documentation and preservation projects.  Looking through their list of “Language Legacies Project” grants awarded over the years demonstrates not only how geographically diverse (and numerically daunting) critically endangered languages are, but also how intelligently and creatively individuals can be when confronting the problem of language loss.

In honor of the fine work of the Fund and its grantees, today’s Pop Quiz focuses on the grants awarded in 2013.  (Try not to click over and cheat!)

Question – In which countries will the work of these grants be conducted?

1. “The Hupa Language Materials Project”, which will help digitize existing documentation and produce new digital media productions in the Hupa language, which has fewer than five native speakers remaining?
2. A project to generate a trilingual ethnobotanical database in French, English, and Ménik, the language of the Bedik people?
3. A project to build a vocabulary corpus and audio recordings in the understudied Zihuateutla Totonac language?
4. A project to record naturally-occurring speech patterns in conversation in the Cahuilla language, a member of the Uto-Aztecan family?
5. A study of the current status of the severely endangered Bantu language known as Dhaiso?
6. “An Introduction to Linguistics for Community Members of Valley Zapotec”?
7. A project to document the Xikrin dialect of a language (sometimes called Kayapó), which will include interviewing speakers who were born before contact with Western civilization?

BONUS: The project titled “Phonetic Features of Hatkoy” will be conducted with speakers of a dialect of the East Circassian language.  Originally native to the North Caucasus region, this dialect is now only spoken in diaspora, and is under pressure from which dominant language?

 

Answers:

1. The US.  The Hupa (or Hoopa) tribe lives in northern California.
2. Senegal, near the Senegal-Guinea border.
3. The Puebla State of Mexico.
4. The US, in the mountains and valleys of southern California.
5. This study will be conducted by visiting five villages in northeastern Tanzania.
6. This work will be the culmination of a five week field trip to Oaxaca State, Mexico.
7. Mato Grosso state in central Brazil.

BONUS: Turkish.  Due to the large number of diaspora Circassians in Turkey, the Turkish state broadcasting company has aired programs in a dialect of Circassian for ten years.

***

Take a look at the descriptions for each of the 2013 grantees – if you’re anything like me you’ll find them pretty inspirational!  And if you do feel inspired, maybe consider supporting the fund!

 

Copyright Allison Taylor-Adams.  See About for details.

A Polyglossic reading list

Tags

books, Goodreads, languages, linguistics, list, reading

Are you as much of a bookworm as I am?  A few years ago I joined Goodreads, and I’ve started having that infinitely-increasing to-read-list problem.  You know, the problem where for every book you read, you discover three more that you simply can’t live without?  Not that it’s a very bad problem to have…

I’m pretty obsessed with lists, and with books, and I’m also pretty obsessed with languages.  So I came up with a great idea – I started a listopia list of language books!  I called it “Books for Language Lovers,” and I started it with ten books about everything from creoles to invented languages to language endangerment, and even included a really nice little book about language and mind that I was assigned for a psycholinguistics class.

If you’re on Goodreads, you can add your favorites to this list!  You can also vote for books you’ve already read that are on the list, so over time the books will get a rank-order – we’ll be able to see which book is most loved!  And of course, my hope is that you’ll find some recommendations and new discoveries, and that your additions will cause my own to-read list to grow as well.

Enjoy!