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Según algunos reportes, los Estados Unidos tendrán mas hablantes del español en todo el mundo en el año 2050 si la población de latinos aumentan como hoy en día. Aunqué el numero de hispanoparantes puedan aumentar tan rápidamente, es probable también que el uso del español pueda disminuir un poco y el uso de inglés aumente como las encuestas indican hoy en día. Esto es porque los adolecentes y niños prefieren usar inglés cuando no sea absolutamente necesario hablar español.

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With 41 million native speakers and 12 million bilinguals, the United States is already the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, according to a new report (link in Spanish). It is already ahead of Colombia and Spain, and just behind Mexico.

"If we would add the 9.7 million of undocumented immigrants to the total number of Hispanics on the census, the number of potential speakers of Spanish in the United States would rise to about 62 million people," said Instituto Cervantes, a cultural organization that promotes the Spanish language.

It could soon be far more. If the growth projections for the Latino population stay as they are, the US will be the largest Spanish-speaking country in the world by 2050, the study predicts. Hispanics will reach 132.8 million-and 30% will use Spanish as their mother tongue.

But this isn't guaranteed. More American Latinos are fluent in English and so the number of people who speak Spanish in their personal life is actually decreasing slightly. For example, the Pew Research Center found that the percentage of people older than five who speak Spanish at home has dropped, from 78% in 2000 to 73% in 2013. Young Latinos increasingly prefer to consume news and entertainment in English, as well.

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By 2050, the US could have more Spanish speakers than any other country

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With 41 million native speakers and 12 million bilinguals, the United States is already the second-largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, according to a new report (link in Spanish). It is already ahead of Colombia and Spain, and just behind Mexico. "If we would add the 9.7 million of undocumented immigrants to the total number of Hispanics on the...

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Aquí es un artículo sobre como Univision ha visto un aumento de las personas que ven este canal de television. Gracias al numero de hablentes del español aumentando y el hecho de que realmente solamente hay dos caneles principales en español (Univision y Telemundo). Los cuatro caneles principales en inglés (Fox, NBC, ABC, CBS) aseguran que el éxito de Univision (y Telemundo) sea sostenido.

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Spanish-language television reached a new milestone in America. Univision finished first among broadcast networks during July sweeps in two highly sought-after demographics: 18- to 49-year-olds and 18- to 34-year-olds. According to Nielsen, between June 27, 2013, and July 24, 2013, Univision averaged 1.8 million viewers ages 18 to 49 nightly, beating out English-language networks FOX, NBC, CBS and ABC, all of which have been struggling with declining audiences for decades.

This is the first time that Univision has won any sweeps period among this important demographic (though Univision has been tops in daily primetime ratings many times before). CBS is still No. 1 for overall viewership.

Much of Univision's success has been built on its entertainment offerings; programs such as the telenovela "Amores Verdaderos" outperform English-language competition regularly. But its success is also built on news. In big city markets that have sizable Hispanic populations-such as Los Angeles, New York and Houston-it has the most watched local news shows.

On the surface, Univision's growth may seem to not square with a new Pew Hispanic Center report that shows a growing share of Hispanics are getting their news in English. But because Hispanics are such a fast growing part of the U.S. population, the number who speak Spanish and who watch television in Spanish has risen even as the share who get their news in Spanish has declined. Univision's success (and Telemundo 's too) speaks to the growth in the nation's Spanish-speaking market-today a record 35 million Hispanics speak Spanish at home, up from 10 million in 1980.

At the same time, the language usage patterns of the nation's Latino population are changing as immigration slows and the young Latinos born in the U.S. enter adulthood. A record 31 million Latinos now speak English proficiently, up from 8 million in 1980. Our studies show that among Latinos born in the U.S., significant majorities get their news in English, watch television shows in English, listen to music in English and even think in English.

However, our studies also show that Latinos value bilingualism. Fully 95% of U.S. Latinos think it's important for future generations to speak Spanish. And today's young Latinos are more likely than older Latinos to have heard their parents emphasize the importance of speaking Spanish and the importance of being proud of their heritage.

In response to all these trends, news organizations such as NBC Latino and FOX News Latino have launched English-language news outlets targeted to the Hispanic market. Univision is taking similar steps, with its Univision News Tumblr (in English) and a new English-language cable network that it plans to launch later this year with ABC News, called Fusion.

Topics: Television, Hispanic/Latino Identity, News Media Trends, Ethnic Media

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What Univision's milestone says about U.S. demographics

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Spanish-language television reached a new milestone in America. Univision finished first among broadcast networks during July sweeps in two highly sought-after demographics: 18- to 49-year-olds and 18- to 34-year-olds. According to Nielsen, between June 27, 2013, and July 24, 2013, Univision averaged 1.8 million viewers ages 18 to 49 nightly, beating out English-language networks FOX, NBC, CBS and ABC, all of which have been struggling with declining audiences for decades.

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Esto es un video que habla de cómo se ven los hablantes del español aquí en los Estados Unidos. Aunqué no hay un idioma oficial, algunas personas que solamente hablan inglés piensan lo contrario y les gusta este hecho. Debido al numero de los hablantes del español aumentando cada día, esto les da miedo a algunas personas. Según este video, esto es porque no les gusta que no puedan entender quando hay alguien que está hablando en un idioma desconocido, especialmente español.

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Tengo aquí un artículo verdadermente fascinante; habla de quien exactamente está hablando el español aquí en los Estados Unidos. Como sabemos, español es el idioma más hablado en los Estados Unidos después de inglés, pero lo que me sorprende es que el idioma más hablado por las personas que no son hispánicas. Estas personas usualmente tiene un origen de África o de Italian, Alemania o un otro lugar en Europe y esto me hizo pensar que hay tantos tipos de personas que viven aquí en los Estados Unidos y que alguien puede hablar cualquier idioma.

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A record 37.6 million persons ages 5 years and older speak Spanish at home, according to an analysis of the 2011 American Community Survey by the Pew Research Center.

Spanish is, by far, the most spoken non-English language in the U.S. The next most spoken non-English languages are Chinese (with 2.8 million speakers), Hindi, Urdu or other Indic languages (2.2 million), French or French Creole (2.1 million), and Tagalog (1.7 million).

The number of Spanish speakers in the U.S. has grown rapidly in recent decades, reflecting the arrival of new immigrants from Latin America and growth in the nation's Hispanic population. Today 34.8 million Hispanics ages 5 and older speak Spanish at home.

However, not all Spanish speakers are Hispanic. According to our analysis, some 2.8 million non-Hispanics speak Spanish at home today. That places Spanish at the top of the list of non-English languages spoken by non-Hispanics along with Chinese and ahead of all other languages.

(The U.S. Census Bureau measure of non-English language use captures how many people say a language other than English is spoken in the home but does not capture how well or how often the language is spoken).

Who are the 2.8 million non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home? Some 59% trace their ancestry to non-Spanish European countries such as Germany, Ireland, England and Italy. An additional 12% say they are of African American descent. Nonetheless, about one-in-five (18%) non-Hispanic Spanish speakers trace their heritage to a Spanish-speaking country. By comparison, among the non-Hispanic U.S. population ages 5 and older, about two-thirds (64%) trace their ancestry to non-Spanish European countries, 13% say their ancestry is African American and 1% trace their heritage to a Spanish-speaking country.

Nine-in-ten (89%) of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers were born in the U.S., a share similar to that for all non-Hispanics ages 5 and older (91%).

The racial composition of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers mirrors that of the U.S. non-Hispanic population. Overall, three-quarters (77%) of non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home are white, 14% are black, and 9% say they belong to some other racial group. Among the non-Hispanic U.S. population ages five years and older, 76% are white, 14% are black, and 9% are some other race.

Many non-Hispanic Spanish speakers reside in a household where at least one other member is Hispanic. Overall, 26% of non-Hispanic Spanish speakers live in these types of households. By comparison, just 3% of all non-Hispanics ages 5 and older live in such households.

Three-in-ten (28%) non-Hispanics Spanish speakers who are married live with a Hispanic spouse. By comparison, only 2% of non-Hispanics are living with a Hispanic spouse.

When it comes to English proficiency, eight-in-ten (80%) non-Hispanics who speak Spanish at home say they speak English "very well", 11% say they speak English "well", and 9% say they speak English "not well" or do not speak English. This compares with 96% of all non-Hispanics 5 years and older who speak English only or speak it "very well", 2% who speak English "well", and 2% who speak English "not well" or do not speak English.

Topics: Hispanic/Latino Demographics, Language

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Spanish is the most spoken non-English language in U.S. homes, even among non-Hispanics

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A record 37.6 million persons ages 5 years and older speak Spanish at home, according to an analysis of the 2011 American Community Survey by the Pew Research Center. Spanish is, by far, the most spoken non-English language in the U.S.

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Esta es una lista de vocabulario de judeo espanol. La he elejido porque pensaba que era muy interesante ver las diferencias de judeo espanol y el espanol mas estandard. Viendo tantas palabras que no necesariamente llevan un origin de espanol. Como mencion es el libro de textos, hay tantas influencias que vienen de otros idiomas y esto es muy obvio segun esta lista que tiene su origen al lado de la palabra en judeo espanol.

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Vocabulary of the Judeo-Spanish language

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Como menciona en este capitulo, no hay solamente un espanol que sea corecto. De hecho, debido a ser un idioma hablado en tantos lugares en el mundo, hay tambien tantas variaciones del espanol en el mundo. Este articulo habla de como es muy dificil saber ciertos modismos y frases regionales que nunca se dice en otras partes. E aqui es el problema en aprender el espanol, depende en donde estas o con quien hablas, el espanol va a variar.

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Este articulo habla de judeo espanol y su probabilidad de tener un mas grande importancia en nuestro mundo como tenia hace tantos anos. Segun este articulo, parece que judeo espanol va a ser extinto en algunos anos. Pero, tambien dice que puede ser que debido a un nuevo interes en este idioma que no sea extinto. Basicamente, hay un movimiento de rivival de este idioma.

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When a language becomes extinct, the culture of the people who spoke it dies. According to some experts, that will be the fate of what was the most widely spoken of all Jewish languages: Ladino. Every year, several languages around the world disappear, just like species of birds and animals. Ladino is slated to join them.

Every few years, the United Nations agency UNESCO produces a Red Book of Endangered Languages. Yiddish is listed as "endangered"; Ladino as "seriously endangered." Apart from a small group of enthusiasts and academics, the Jewish world has taken little notice of Ladino's demise.

What is Ladino? Where is it from? Why is it important? And why is it ignored by the Jewish world?

The development of Ladino was similar to that of YiddishLadino, also referred to as Judeo-Spanish, Spanyolit, Judezmo, Hakitia and various other terms, began its life in 1492 when the Jews were expelled from Spain. Some refer to it as a "fossilized" language, implying that it is an antique that has not changed since 1492. That is not true.

When the 150,000 to 300,000 Jews left Spain, they took with them their languages. They took Hebrew, the language of prayer and study. Like Yiddish, it was not used at home or in the streets. The language of daily use was Castilian Spanish as it was spoken in the late 15th century.

From Spain, the Jews traveled to Holland, England, Morocco, and towns and cities throughout the Ottoman Empire. Cut off from the influence of the Spanish of Spain, which also changed through the centuries and was modernized, Ladino maintained its 15th century roots, and also changed, but in a different way. Its changes were influenced by the many countries and cultures in which Spanish Jews settled.

In this way, the development of Ladino was similar to that of Yiddish, which developed over the centuries with constant infusions of other languages wherever Jews lived. Ladino borrowed from Greek, Turkish and French. Yiddish developed into a distinct language, not simply a dialect of German, though remaining a Germanic language. Ladino also meets the criteria of a distinct language, and is not merely a dialect of Spanish. Like Yiddish, Ladino was heavily influenced by Hebrew, which remained the language of study and prayer.

With the Ladino-speaking Jews having settled so widely, Ladino gradually developed two dialects. Oriental Ladino was spoken in Turkey and Rhodes and reflected Castilian Spanish. Western Ladino was closer to northern Spanish and Portuguese and was spoken elsewhere in Greece, as well as in Macedonia, Bosnia, Serbia and Romania.

Like Yiddish, Ladino was written with Hebrew letters, except that Ladino used the Rashi script. The Rashi script was, in fact, originally a Ladino script to separate Rashi's commentary from the Torah. It was only at the beginning of the 20th century that Ladino began to be written using the Latin alphabet, like most European languages.

At one time, an estimated 80 percent of Diaspora Jews were Ladino-speakingSince the Expulsion, Ladino has been spoken in North Africa, Egypt, Greece, Turkey, the former Yugoslavia, Bulgaria, Romania, France, Israel, the United States and Latin America. At one time, an estimated 80 percent of Diaspora Jews were Ladino-speaking. However, the Holocaust wiped out about 90 percent of all the world's Ladino-speakers.

For many years, Israel discouraged the use of both Ladino and Yiddish in favor of Modern Hebrew. There has also been assimilation with Ashkenazi Jews and with non-Jews, and the enormous disruption of Jews from Arab countries. In countries hike the United States, Jewish life has been dominated by Ashkenazis with a Yiddish background, often to the detriment of those speaking Ladino. Mere remnants remain, thought to be somewhere between 150,000 and 200,000 Ladino speakers, most of whom are not fluent, though a 2005 study suggested that only 110,000 Ladino-speakers exist, not one speaking only Ladino.

The Yiddish of the Sephardim

It is often said that Ladino is the "Yiddish" of the Sephardim. This is not exactly true, even though there are similarities. Some believe that, because at least in Israel there are now more Sephardim than Ashkenazim, Ladino will make a comeback. But while the word "Sepharad" refers to Spain, just as "Ashkenaz" refers to Germany, a high proportion of so-called Sephardim are not of Spanish origin, and Ladino was never in their history, including Jews of Yemenite, Kurdish, and Bukharan background.

The question is whether Ladino will become extinct. While scholars will still be able to read Ladino, once a language is no longer "living" it ceases to contribute to the cultural, social and intellectual development of a people. This is certainly true with Anglo-Saxon and Aramaic, and is likely to occur to Scots Gaelic.

The reality is that most Ladino-speakers are over 50 years of age, and many of them (according to studies) do not speak it well. This means that in about 30 years, Ladino will be dead.

A Ladino Revival

There are efforts being made to keep Ladino alive. Sephardic music, including Ladino songs, boasts a wider audience than ever before. There are Ladino cultural festivals, and the five major Israeli universities all teach Ladino and have departments concentrating on Sephardic studies, including a major world center at Bar Ilan University and the center for Ladino culture at Ben Gurion.

Major American rabbinical schools have largely ignored LadinoA few European universities have similar activities, but in the United States the only university regularly teaching it is Tufts University. There, Prof. Gloria Ascher is one of the world's leading Ladino specialists. Major American rabbinical schools have largely ignored Ladino, though Yeshiva University is making an effort to revitalize it. Some Spanish and Portuguese synagogues give classes in Ladino, but even the Sephardic organizations do not have any major activity in revitalizing the language.

The recent establishment of the Ottoman-Turkish Sephardic Culture Research Center in Istanbul may become a catalyst in changing this situation. Israel, which has the largest number of Ladino-speakers in the world, has formed the National Authority for Ladino. The Maale-Adumim Institute for Ladino has also been established in Israel with the sole purpose of preserving the language. Kol Israel also broadcasts in Ladino. The Sorbonne in Paris has opened a Department of Judeo-Spanish, and there is renewed academic interest in Spain. The Spanish Embassy in Tel Aviv takes a particular interest in the preservation of Ladino. The Ladino Preservation Council was established in 2002.

One of the most unique efforts to establish a worldwide community of Ladino-speakers is the Ladinokomunita, an internet site where approximately 700 Ladino-speakers worldwide socialize via the internet in Ladino. The weekly Turkish Jewish paper also publishes one page in Ladino.

Ladino, Yiddish and the Future

While Yiddish is still regarded as endangered, the current thought is that it will not die out. It seems to have reached a plateau in its decline. Unlike Ladino, there is a Yiddish population which is still large enough to keep the language going. The real strength in the preservation of Yiddish however, lies in the Hassidic movement. Yiddish is still used as a daily language in most Hassidic communities, and many Hassidic yeshivahs use the language as a daily means of communication and teaching. Because the Hassidic communities have a considerably higher birthrate than the general Jewish population, there is a young Yiddish generation to replace those who are dying out or who have disappeared. This is despite the virtual disappearance of Yiddish theatre, with a handful of exceptions like the Folksbiene in New York, and Yiddish popular publishing.

Enormous effort will be required to teach and use the languageLadino is not in the same position. Because the Hassidic movement arose exclusively in the Ashkenazi world, there is no equivalent in the Sephardic world which uses Ladino as its means of communication or education. Similarly, it would be rare to find a school that teaches in Ladino.

The result is that if Ladino and its rich culture are to be handed on to future generations of all Jews, not just Sephardim, an enormous effort will be required to teach and use the language, even in a secondary way. The zealous academics and other enthusiasts will not be enough.

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When a language becomes extinct, the culture of the people who spoke it dies. According to some experts, that will be the fate of what was the most widely spoken of all Jewish languages: Ladino. Every year, several languages around the world disappear, just like species of birds and animals.

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Con este articulo, pensaba que podria ser parte de un differente capitulo en nuestro libro de texto pero habla de dialectos en este capitulo tambien, basicamente en este articulo, dice que hablar regularmente en un dialecto no muy parecido al original idioma puede tener el mismo efecto positivo como hablar un otro idioma.

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Brussels is a melting pot of languages and dialects. Credit: Till Westermayer, CC BY-SA

There has been a lot of research to back up the idea that people who use two or more languages everyday experience significant advantages. The brain training involved in having to use a different language depending on the context and speaker is credited with enhancing attention and memory skills - as well as better recovery after stroke and even later onset of the symptoms of dementia.But there is another - often hidden - source of brain-training in language use which many of us are not even aware of: dialects.

Bi-dialectalism - which simply means the systematic use of two different dialects of the same language - is widespread in many parts of the world. In the US, millions of children grow up speaking African American Vernacular English at home as well as mainstream American English at school. The Arab-speaking world is bi-dialectal too. Similar situations arise in many parts of Europe, such as the German-speaking parts of Switzerland - where school children may only feel comfortable to talk about school subjects in High German, but switch to Swiss-German for everyday conversation. The Flemish-speaking parts of Belgium, and parts of Italy and Spain, also speak regional varieties as well as the standard variety.

What is interesting to emphasise is that what we call "the language" of a country, such as Italian, is just one of a cluster of linguistically related varieties that for cultural, historical and political reasons was chosen as the standard variety. People who speak two varieties of the same language are often aware of only the "standard" variety and don't realise the regional variation they are speaking is a formal dialect, as they may feel it has negative associations.

But what our research suggests is that for the human mind, the difference in the distance between dialects and languages might not be important at all and that people who speak two dialects may share a cognitive profile with people who speak two languages.

English accents and dialects. Credit: Maunus at English Wikipedia (based on Hughes & Trudgill, 1996), CC BY

All Greek to some people
Working with Kyriakos Antoniou and colleagues at the University of Cyprus and the Cyprus University of Technology we studied the cognitive performance of children who grew up speaking both Cypriot Greek and Standard Modern Greek - two varieties of Greek which are closely related but differ from each other on all levels of language analysis (vocabulary, pronunciation and grammar).

The study consisted of 64 bi-dialectal children, 47 multilingual children and 25 monolingual children. Comparisons between the three groups were performed in two stages and the socio-economic status, language proficiency and general intelligence of all children taking part were factored into the analyses.

Participants had to recall digits in the reverse order of presentation. That is, That is, if presented with "three, nine, five, six" they had to recall "six, five, nine, three" - a test that measures their ability to hold and manipulate information in memory.

Modern Greek dialects. Credit: Pitichinaccio via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY

Somewhat to our surprise, multilingual and bi-dialectal children exhibited an advantage over monolingual children in a composite cognitive processes score based on tests of memory, attention and cognitive flexibility.

Interestingly, another recent study investigated the educational achievement of some Norwegian children who are taught to write in two forms reflecting two different Norwegian dialects. Using data from standardised national tests, including tests in reading and arithmetic, the children who were taught to write in both dialectal forms had scores higher than the national average.

This suggested that advantages previously reported for multilingual children could be shared by children speaking any two or more dialects. That is, the advantages of bilingualism arise with any combination of language varieties that differ enough to challenge the brain. They could be dialects of the same language, two related languages such as Italian and Spanish, or as diverse as English and Mandarin Chinese. Systematically switching between any two forms of language, even quite similar ones, seems to provide the mind with the extra stimulation that leads to higher cognitive performance.

What our research suggests - contrary to some widely held beliefs - is that, when it comes to language, plurality is an advantage and in this respect dialects are under-recognised and undervalued. This kind of research can make people appreciate there is an advantage to bi-dialectalism - and this may be important when we think about our identity, how we educate children and the importance of language learning.

Benelux languages. Credit: Gruna_1, CC BY

In the future
We are now retesting and extending our hypotheses on a larger scale in collaboration with researchers at the University of Brussels. Belgium offers an ideal testing ground - dialects of Dutch such as West Flemish are spoken alongside more standard versions of Dutch and French. The new study includes larger samples and new measures to better understand the effects of bi-dialectalism on cognitive and linguistic development and their relation to bilingualism.

It is also important to emphasise that the research on bilingualism has focused on a relatively narrow range of cognitive skills. But welcome steps towards widening our understanding of the effect of bilingualism are underway. In our research we are also investigating the effects of bilingualism on understanding implied meaning in conversation - in other words, whether the experience of anticipating which language a speaker will use makes bilingual and bi-dialectal children more adept at reading the speaker's intentions more generally - and understanding the real meaning of what they say, specifically. Our preliminary findings suggest that this is indeed the case and we hope to substantiate this in the near future.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

Source:: The Conversation

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Speaking dialects trains the brain in the same way as bilingualism

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There has been a lot of research to back up the idea that people who use two or more languages everyday experience significant advantages.

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Mientras inglés no es una lengua romance, podemos adivinar cómo inglés cambiará en en futuro si vamos a la historia de latín y su evolución a todas las lenguas romances que hay hoy. Este artículo recuenta que debido alla presencia de latín en tantos lugares, empezó a cambiar gradualmente hasta que no eran la misma lengua. El autor dice que esto puede pasar con el inglés porque es muy parecido a latín con respeto a su gran precencia.

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One way of predicting the future is to look back at the past. The global role English plays today as a lingua franca - used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages - has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.

Having been spread by the success of the Roman Empire, Classical Latin was kept alive as a standard written medium throughout Europe long after the fall of Rome. But the Vulgar Latin used in speech continued to change, forming new dialects, which in time gave rise to the modern Romance languages: French, Spanish, Portuguese, Romanian and Italian.

Similar developments may be traced today in the use of English around the globe, especially in countries where it functions as a second language. New "interlanguages" are emerging, in which features of English are mingled with those of other native tongues and their pronunciations.

Despite the Singaporean government's attempts to promote the use of Standard British English through the Speak Good English Movement, the mixed language known as "Singlish" remains the variety spoken on the street and in the home.

Spanglish, a mixture of English and Spanish, is the native tongue of millions of speakers in the United States, suggesting that this variety is emerging as a language in its own right.

Meanwhile, the development of automatic translation software, such as Google Translate, will come to replace English as the preferred means of communication employed in the boardrooms of international corporations and government agencies.

So the future for English is one of multiple Englishes.

Looking back to the early 20th century, it was the Standard English used in England, spoken with the accent known as " Received Pronunciation ", that carried prestige.

But today the largest concentration of native speakers is in the US, and the influence of US English can be heard throughout the world: can I get a cookie, I'm good, did you eat, the movies, "skedule" rather than "shedule". In the future, to speak English will be to speak US English.

US spellings such as disk and program are already preferred to British equivalents disc and programme in computing. The dominance of US usage in the digital world will lead to the wider acceptance of further American preferences, such as favorite, donut, dialog, center.

What is being lost?

In the 20th century, it was feared that English dialects were dying out with their speakers. Projects such as the Survey of English Dialects (1950-61) were launched at the time to collect and preserve endangered words before they were lost forever.

A similar study undertaken by the BBC's Voices Project in 2004 turned up a rich range of local accents and regional terms which are available online, demonstrating the vibrancy and longevity of dialect vocabulary.

But while numerous dialect words were collected for "young person in cheap trendy clothes and jewellery" - pikey, charva, ned, scally - the word chav was found throughout England, demonstrating how features of the Estuary English spoken in the Greater London area are displacing local dialects, especially among younger generations.

The turn of the 20th century was a period of regulation and fixity - the rules of Standard English were established and codified in grammar books and in the New (Oxford) English Dictionary on Historical Principles, published as a series of volumes from 1884-1928. Today we are witnessing a process of de-standardisation, and the emergence of competing norms of usage.

In the online world, attitudes to consistency and correctness are considerably more relaxed: variant spellings are accepted and punctuation marks omitted, or repurposed to convey a range of attitudes. Research has shown that in electronic discourse exclamation marks can carry a range of exclamatory functions, including apologising, challenging, thanking, agreeing, and showing solidarity.

Capital letters are used to show anger, misspellings convey humour and establish group identity, and smiley-faces or emoticons express a range of reactions.

Getting shorter

Some have questioned whether the increasing development and adoption of emoji pictograms, which allow speakers to communicate without the need for language, mean that we will cease to communicate in English at all? 😉

The fast-changing world of social media is also responsible for the coining and spreading of neologisms, or "new words". Recent updates to Oxford Dictionaries give a flavour: mansplaining, awesomesauce, rly, bants, TL;DR (too long; didn't read).

Clipped forms, acronyms, blends and abbreviations have long been productive methods of word formation in English (think of bus, smog and scuba) but the huge increase in such coinages means that they will be far more prominent in the English of 2115.

Whether you ? or h8 such words, think they are NBD or meh, they are undoubtedly here to stay.
By Simon Horobin, Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
This article was first published on The Conversation.

More on language
Twitter: which language dominates the Twitterverse? Rise of the geek

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How will English change in the next 100 years?

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One way of predicting the future is to look back at the past. The global role English plays today as a lingua franca - used as a means of communication by speakers of different languages - has parallels in the Latin of pre-modern Europe.

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Aunque no es un artículo, me gustó esta página porque hay tantas respuestas a preguntas sobre los cambios que ocurieron desde latín a español. Hay muchos verbos irregulares con partecipios irregulares también y esto es debido a su forma original de latín o del español más antiguo. También hay una interesante respuesta a una pregunta de por qué desde español antiguo y latín a español moderno se añadó ’y’ como en las palabras: doy, soy, voy y estoy.

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Aquí es algo que tiene mucho que ver con este capítulo porque describe los cambios de latíno a español con respeto al modo de subjuctivo. Se explican las similaridades entre el subjuctivo presente, imperfecto 1, imperfecto 2 y pluscuamperfecto. También hay comparaciones entre todos los modos de subjuctivo entre las lenguas romances principales (español, italiano y francés). Como el vocabulario de estas tres lengas han cambiado tanto desde su existencia como latín, las formas de subjunctivo son casi uguales.

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Subjunctive: Evolution from Classical Latin to Spanish

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In Spanish the stem of the first person singular present indicative is generally the stem in the present subjunctive. Spanish forms the present subjunctive by dropping the ending of first person singular present indicative and adding the above personal endings to stem:

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Como el rol del modo de subjuntivo no han cambiado mucho desde latín a español, la forma en la que se hacen los conjugaciones de verbos tampoco han cambiado mucho. Se muestran estos conjugaciones de verbos al lado con latín y porsupuesto son muy parecidos los cambios.

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BY DEREK CZAJKA ("Languages of the World")

Readers of this blog are doubtless aware of the notion of language families. Many of the world's languages belong to a family of related languages. When languages are said to belong to a family, the implication is that these languages all descended from a common ancestor. Given sufficient data, it is often possible to reconstruct forms found in this common ancestor, by comparing forms found in extant descendants, and, with luck, forms attested in older languages that are now extinct. A longer explanation of this phenomenon, replete with examples, may be found, among many other places, in any basic historical linguistics textbook, any introductory linguistics textbook that contains a section on historical linguistics, or any textbook that deals at length with language families, such as the book currently in press from the principal author of this blog.

The comparative method, the technique of comparing related languages and attempting to derive possible proto forms, has proved to be an invaluable resource for those who study the historical relationships between languages. A great deal is now known about the language known to us, though presumably not to those who spoke it, as Proto-Indo-European, a language that, to our knowledge, was never written down. Similar efforts have been made, though perhaps not with quite the same amount of loving detail, with many other language families throughout the world. For all of its power, though, it is important to recognize that the comparative method has its limits. In order to demonstrate a little of both the potential and the limitations, I will examine two verbs in five Romance languages. One, the verb that means 'to sing', is a regular verb in all the languages shown here. The other, the verb meaning 'to do' or 'to make', has varying degrees of irregularity in the languages considered. For the sake of brevity, I will only consider the present indicative forms of these verbs. I will be looking at five Romance languages: French, Italian, Portuguese, Romanian, and Spanish. I will then include the forms of these verbs in classical Latin. Verb conjugations are courtesy of Verbix. I will provide these conjugations as they are spelled, but I will make remarks about pronunciation. The pronunciations were taken from the text-to-speech engines for the respective languages provided in the Apple iPhone and/or Google Translate. While this method of gleaning pronunciations is, perhaps, not the most scientific one, it is useful in cases where I have no direct experience with the languages in question (in the cases of Portuguese and Romanian), and is one computer-generated pronunciation made with consultation of native speakers more than linguists often have available when making linguistic comparisons.

To sing
p# French Italian Portuguese Romanian Spanish Latin
1S chante canto canto cânt canto cantō
2S chantes canti cantas cânţi cantas cantās
3S chante canta canta cântă canta cantat
1P chantons cantiamo cantamos cântăm cantamos cantā́mus
2p chantez cantate cantais? cântaţi cantáis cantā́tis
3P chantent cantano cantam cântă cantan cantant

Given the forms from the five modern languages, and asked to come up with forms from the protolanguage, you would probably come up with answers that are reasonably close to the Latin versions. There might be a few problems with vowel height in a couple forms, but these things are to be expected. However, there are a number of things that might lead you astray, and a couple things that you would miss altogether. One thing that makes the task easier is that I presented the words orthographically, and not phonetically. Had I done the latter, the task would have been a bit more difficult. In particular, French would have become all but useless to the task, since four of the six forms-all of the singular, plus the third-person plural-would resemble each other. French orthography provides some corroborating evidence for the sibilants at the end of the second-person endings and the first-person plural. It would be very difficult to account for these sibilants if they were not found in the proto-language. However, without the evidence from French orthography, a few might note the geographical closeness of Spanish and Portuguese, and draw the conclusion that something went a bit funny in Iberia.

Losing French orthography would also get rid of any chance to reconstruct the final -t in the third-person plural. As it is, none of these languages leaves behind any trace of the -t suffix in the third-person singular. In the case of the plural, one might be far more tempted by the Italian -ano, especially considering that it is, after all, pronounced. Anyone considering this option, however, would also need to consider the fact that we already have evidence that final -o in Italian also appears in Spanish and Portuguese. At the very least, a person hypothesizing a *-ano in the proto-language would do well to search for a verb in this conjugation where the stem ends in n. Another trap in Italian is the extra "i" that appears in the first-person plural. The way to avoid this one is to look at other verb conjugations, and see that -iamo seems to be a near universal suffix, even in cases where other languages have differing endings (compare, for example, Italian dormiamo and Spanish dormimos).

Another feature that is entirely absent from these forms is vowel length. In the Latin forms, long vowels are marked by macrons. All forms except the third-person forms have long vowels on the endings. However, even in a more conservativ language like Spanish, there is no difference between the vowels in cantas and in cantan that would suggest the change in vowel length in classical Latin.

To do
p# French Italian Portuguese Romanian Spanish Latin
1S fais faccio faço fac hago faciō
2S fais fai fazes faci haces facīs
3S fait fa faz face hace facit
1P faisons facciamo fazemos facem hacemos fácimus
2p faites fate fazeis? faceţi hacéis fácitis
3P font fanno fazem fac hacen fáciunt

AN obvious question that arises from the modern language forms is, just how regular was this verb in the proto-language? Italian and French give us the impression that it's pretty irregular. Is there a consonant in the verb stem? It looks like there might be, sometimes, but only scattered through a few forms. In Spanish and Portuguese, however, the verb seems very close to a regular -er verb. It's not quite there, but it's close. Spanish has this slightly bizzare alternation between a voiced velar stop or fricative and a voiceless dental or alveolar fricative, but apart from that little oddity, it does what one would expect if one were familiar with the language. In Romanian, as well, the verb seems fairly ordinary. It does help us understand this rather unsettling alternation of the medial consonant in Spanish. Seems as though it may have been the result of palatalization. Observe that Romanian makes a similar alternation with /t/ in the verb 'to sing'. Precisely how this palitalization led eventually to dental and alveolar fricatives in Spanish, French, and Portuguese is interesting, but beyond the scope of this article. In our small sample, more of the languages treat this verb as approximately regular, than very irregular, as in French and Italian. If the balance were tipped the other way, we might be tempted to attribute the more regular froms to regularization based on analogy. However, if we did this, we would have to ask why these languages opted for waht seems to be the rarer form when making the analogy. If, instead, we assume that the verb was more regular in Latin, but became irregular in French and Italian, we must come up with an explanation as to why they became so irregular. In order to answer this question, we would need more cognates, to see if this consonant disappeared in other words.

One thing to note about this verb is that the French forms shed some more light than they did for 'to sing'. In both the third person singular and plural, we see the final -t. While in citation form, this "t" is not pronounced, it appears on occasion, especially when followed by a vowel. We also see the remnants of the intervocalic t in the second-person plural, which had vanished without a trace from 'to sing'. Finally, French is the only language that hints at the back vowel in the third-person plural. Admittedly, it's not a very good hint, since a front high vowel was converted to the same back close-mid vowel in the first-person singular, but it is worthy of note nonetheless.

An obvious criticism of this exercise is that I should not expect the modern Romance languages to echo classical Latin. The Roman empire was, after all, a large one, and it may be that some of the features of classical Latin, such as vowel length, or the final t in the third person, never existed at all in Gaul or Iberia or Eastern Europe. To these naysayers, I say, you're absolutely right. However, this is one of the points of the exercise. Applying the comparative method to the Romance languages, especially if you use more than just the languages named after nation states, can tell you a lot about the historical ancestor of those languages. However, it can only take you as far as those modern languages allow. Imagine, if you will, construction Proto-Romance from only the modern Romance languages, Proto-Germanic from the extant GErmanic languages, Proto-Hellenic from modern Greek and maybe a few minority languages, and so forth. It would be much more difficult to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European. The reason we've been so successful at that enterprise is that we have ancient languages available, that were much more similar to each other than their modern descendants. However, this is the same reason that we have to stop comparison at Proto-Indo-European. It may be possible that Indo-European is related with other languages in its region, but it would be incredibly difficult to find them if all we have for inputs to the comparative method are outputs from a previous cycle. There is simply too much lost in transmission.

* Verbix does not list any verb forms for the second-person plural in Portuguese. This is likely because Portuguese, like many varieties of Spanish, has done away with the original forms from Latin in favor of newer pronouns. The forms shown here are from Wiktionary, and have not been confirmed in any other source.

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Comparing Verb Conjugations in the Romance Languages - Languages Of The World

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BY DEREK CZAJKA ("Languages of the World") Readers of this blog are doubtless aware of the notion of language families. Many of the world's languages belong to a family of related languages. When languages are said to belong to a family, the implication is that these languages all descended from a common ancestor.

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Aquí habla de la forma de hablar del político Donald Trump en comparación de otros políticos. Si estamos de acuerdo de lo que él dice o no, es importante fijar que la manera en la que habla es muy precisa y hay razones de su forma de hablar. Cuando él está presentado una pregunta por un entrevistador, su respuesta siempre está corta con un enfasis de una palabra específica que deja la persona en algun modo sin capaz de responder una vez más. Él no habla los otros políticos, las oraciones que dice realmente a menudo solamente contienen un verbo, sujeto y objeto directo, usualmente eso es todo así que no hay muchas sílabas. Debido a esta diferencia entre los otros politicos y él, él tiene apoyo muy fuerte.

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Barton Swaim worked for Rep. Mark Sanford (R) when Sanford was governor of South Carolina, from 2007 to 2010. Swaim is author of "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics."
Almost every political commentator in America has now written at least one piece attempting to explain the mystery of Donald Trump's appeal. Most have dealt with the man's demeanor, his talent for attracting media coverage and his disdain for party and intellectual elites. Some of these I find cogent.

The thing I find most distinctive about Trump, though - and perhaps it's at least a component of his success so far - is the structure of his language.

Everybody senses that Trump doesn't speak like other politicians. But how is his speech different, exactly? Is it just the swagger, the dismissive tone and clipped accent? Maybe in part. Trump does seem emotionally engaged in a way none of his competitors do; he is perpetually annoyed - exasperated that things aren't as they should be - but somehow also good-humored about it. (Chris Christie and John Kasich seem perpetually annoyed, too, but there is nothing funny or cheerful about their versions.)

To get at what makes Trump's language different, take a look at the shape of his sentences. They don't work the way modern political rhetoric does -- they work the way punchlines work: short (sometimes very short) with the most important words at the end.

That's rare among modern politicians, and not simply because they lack Trump's showmanship or comedic gifts. It's rare because most successful modern politicians are habitually careful with their language. They are keenly aware of the ways in which any word they speak may be interpreted or misinterpreted by journalists and partisan groups and constituencies and demographic groups.

And so in important situations - situations in which they know a lot depends on what they say or don't say - their language takes on (at least) two peculiar characteristics. First, their syntax tends to abstraction. They speak less about particular things and people - bills, countries, identifiable officials - and more about "legislation" and "the international community" and "officials" and "industry" and "Washington" and "government."

Second, their sentences take on a higher number of subordinate clauses and qualifying phrases - "over the last several years," "in general," "in effect," "what people are telling me," and so on. This is the kind of language you use when you're aware that your words might be misinterpreted or used against you.

When used well, it conveys competence and assures listeners that the speaker thinks coherent thoughts and holds reasonable positions. It suggests that the speaker cares about the truth of his claims. But politicians are frequently too careful with their language, and this conscientiousness can begin to sound like deceit or cowardice. When they rely too heavily on abstractions, when they avoid concrete nouns, when all their statements seem always hedged by qualifying phrases, they sound like politicians, in the worst sense of the word. To my ear, anyway, Hillary Clinton sounds this way almost all the time.

Whether used well or poorly, however, the language of a typical modern politician has a distinctive sound to it. It sounds complex and careful -- sometimes sophisticated, sometimes emotive, sometimes artificial or over-scripted, but always circumspect and inevitably disingenuous.

Trump's language is from another rhetorical tradition entirely. Consider his hour-long media availability on Sept. 3, just after he'd signed a "loyalty pledge" that he wouldn't run as a third-party candidate if he loses the GOP nomination. Some of his answers last only a few seconds, some are slightly longer, but almost all consist of simple sentences, grammatically and conceptually, and most of them withhold their most important word or phrase until the very end. Trump's sentences end with a pop, and he seems to know instinctively where to put the emphasis in each one.

Near the beginning of the news conference, he says: "I don't need money. I don't want money. And this is going to be a campaign, I think, like no other. I'm not controlled by lobbyists. I'm not controlled by anybody."

This is not the language of a typical politician.

Someone asks Trump about New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie's (R) remark that he, Christie, didn't need the chairman of the Republican National Committee to meet with him in order to beg him to sign a loyalty pledge. Another politician - a politician wanting to take a shot at Christie - might have answered, "Well I'm not sure why anybody would need Gov. Christie to sign a loyalty pledge, given his standing in the polls right now."

That would have gotten a chuckle. But Trump worded his answer far better:

"Well, you don't have to be met when you're at 2 percent."

His comedic instinct, I think, told him it was worth some awkward wording at the beginning of the sentence ("you don't have to be met") in order to put the words "2 percent" at the very end. Pop. Hardy laughter.

Trump's lengthier answers, too, involve mostly short, grammatically uncomplicated sentences, with very few of the complicating phrases you hear from an ordinary politician who's trying hard not to say something obviously false or stupid. Oftentimes his answers, when transcribed one sentence per line, read like free verse poetry. Asked a question about Jeb Bush, for instance, Trump replies:

Jeb Bush is a very nice man.

I'll be honest; I think he's a very nice person.

I think he's a very low-energy person, and I don't think that's what the country needs.

I hear that he's going to spend a lot of money on negative ads on me, and honestly -- look, he's getting the money from special interests.

He's getting the money from lobbyists and his donors.

And they're making him do it because he's crashing in the polls.

So I don't know what's gonna happen.

If he spends $20 million or $25 million on negative ads, I don't know.

I know that my life will continue.

I just don't know.

I mean, nobody's ever spent money on ads against me.

But he probably has to do that, although it would not be the way I would do it.

His sentences get even shorter when he lapses into his campaign boilerplate. Politicians do this all the time. When the question is general enough, they move quickly from answering it to expatiating on general themes. But when Trump does it, his sentences contract to little more than a subject, a verb, and usually a direct object. Most range between five and fifteen syllables.

Our country could be doing much better.

We have deficits that are enormous.

We have all bad trade agreements.

We have an army that the head [Gen. Raymond Odierno] said is not prepared.

We have a military that needs help, and especially in these times.

We have nuclear weapons that - you look at "60 Minutes" - they don't even work.

The phones don't work.

They're 40 years old.

They have wires that are no good.

Nothing works.

Our country doesn't work.

Everybody wins except us.

We need victories in this country.

We don't have victories anymore.

Our country will be great again, but right now our country has major problems.

The words themselves are mostly preposterous. Other than "We have deficits that are enormous" and the one about Odierno, they range between laughable exaggeration and nonsense. What makes them effective in their way is that they don't sound like political speech. Politicians in modern democracies just don't talk this way.

Trump makes no effort - or seems to make no effort - to measure the effect of his propositions on different constituencies. He seems genuinely unaware that anybody might try to pick them apart. He makes no effort to hedge his statements or phrase them in such a way that they are at least defensible. Indeed, you don't feel you're listening to a politician at all. You feel you're listening to a man who has rejected the conventions of electoral politics altogether -- someone who's opted out of the whole charade.

The result, for probably the great majority of people who follow politics, is alternately comical and horrifying. But for people who've grown weary of politicians using vague and convoluted language to lull or impress their listeners, to preserve their options and to avoid criticism, Trump sounds refreshingly clear and forthright. I don't share their view, but I find it hard to blame them.

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donald trump; speech; the fix; barton swaim

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How Donald Trump's language works for him

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Barton Swaim worked for Rep. Mark Sanford (R) when Sanford was governor of South Carolina, from 2007 to 2010. Swaim is author of "The Speechwriter: A Brief Education in Politics." Almost every political commentator in America has now written at least one piece attempting to explain the mystery of Donald Trump's appeal.

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Aquí habla de la forma de hablar de la política Sarah Palin, ex-gobernador del estado de Alaska. Menciona que ella realmente siempre está hablando muy complicada y no habla frases simples. Dedibo a su sintaxis muy extraña, ella confunde las funciones de ciertas palabras quizá porque ella está intentando a representarse más inteligente y con una buena dicción.

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Sarah Palin has been mocked a lot for the way she talks, especially in her strange and rambling endorsement speech for Donald Trump. But her speeches on the campaign trail aren't simple; they are actually incredibly complicated.

Her unusual style was on display at a Trump rally on Monday afternoon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. "When both parties, the machines involved, when both of them hate you," she said at one point, "then you know America loves you and we do love he who will be the next president of the United States of America, Donald J. Trump!"

Let's break that last part down: "We" love not just Donald Trump, or even just Donald J. Trump, but "he who will be the next president of the United States of America."

Mrs. Palin relies heavily on this particular kind of dependent clause. "He is one who would know to negotiate," she said of Donald Trump in her speech endorsing him on Jan. 19. Later in that speech, she spoke of "our own G.O.P. machine, the establishment, they who would assemble the political landscape."

Mrs. Palin is also a big fan of the participial phrase. "And that blank check too," she said on Monday, "making no sense because it's led us to things, oh gosh, to pay the bills then, we have had to uh, print money out of thin air."

In this case "making no sense" and everything that follows appear to modify "blank check"; though it can be a little hard to tell with Mrs. Palin, the participial phrase seems to function as an adjective. Elsewhere in her speech Mrs. Palin got more sophisticated.

"Politics being kind of brutal business," she said, "you find out who your friends are, that's for sure."

Here, "politics being kind of brutal business" defines the circumstances under which the action occurs. It looks like a construction that will be familiar to anybody who took Latin in school: the ablative absolute.

An ablative absolute in Latin is a particular kind of clause that, according to one definition, "modifies the whole sentence as an adverb modifies the action of a verb." An example, courtesy of The Latin Library: "His verbis dictis, Caesar discedit." Translation: "With these words having been said, Caesar departs."

In fact, a lot of what Sarah Palin says sounds like it's been poorly translated from the Latin. With her "he who" and "one who," she'd sound almost Ciceronian if it weren't for the holes in her logic and the way those complicated sentences sometimes dribble off into vaguely sinister, possibly offensive nonsense.

Maybe Mrs. Palin or her speechwriters think the convoluted sentence structure makes her sound smart. Maybe they think it makes her sound heroic, like the orators of the past. Or maybe all those extra clauses are just a really good way to load up a sentence with praise - or insults. Here's Mrs. Palin using both a dependent clause and a participial phrase to attack President Obama on Jan. 19:

And he, who would negotiate deals, kind of with the skills of a community organizer maybe organizing a neighborhood tea, well, he deciding that, "No, America would apologize as part of the deal," as the enemy sends a message to the rest of the world that they capture and we kowtow, and we apologize, and then, we bend over and say, "Thank you, enemy."

I honestly am not sure what's going on in this sentence. What I do know is that Sarah Palin has this in common with Roman orators: She loves to talk trash.

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Sarah Palin has been mocked a lot for the way she talks, especially in her strange and rambling endorsement speech for Donald Trump. But her speeches on the campaign trail aren't simple; they are actually incredibly complicated. Her unusual style was on display at a Trump rally on Monday afternoon in Cedar Rapids, Iowa.

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Este artículo describe algunas frases que la gente en various partes de los Estados Unidos usan que no son corects con respecto a la sintaxis. Hay un programa a Yale University sobre los varios variaciones de inglés no de acento, no de lexicón pero de la sintaxis. No han sido ningun estudio sobre estas variaciones entre inglés y este proyecto espera lograr una nueva vista a estas diferencias.

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"Here's you a piece of pizza" may sound like an alien way of speaking to some - unless of course you're one of the linguists working on the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, in which case, it's just one of the "fascinating" variations of the English language that they look forward to studying each and every day.

The project, which is currently funded by a two-year National Science Foundation grant, explores the diversity found in varieties of English spoken in North America by documenting the subtle - but systematic - differences in syntax, the study of how phrases and sentences are put together.

The project began in 2010, shortly after Raffaella Zanuttini, professor of linguistics, came to Yale. She had almost 20 years of experience working in what is known as 'micro-comparative syntax', an approach in which one compares languages that are minimally different from one another, with the goal of reaching a detailed understanding of their syntactic structure. She had a vision of extending this approach to the study of English spoken in North America, a domain that had not yet been studied in a systematic way, and eventually creating a syntactic atlas of North American English.

This research plan was embraced by her colleague Larry Horn, professor of linguistics and philosophy, a scholar with broad interests who had already been teaching a course called "Dialects of English." They formed a research team, combining their expertise and research goals, and started the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, inviting both undergraduate and graduate students as collaborators. In 2012 Jim Wood joined the Department of Linguistics as a post-doctoral associate and took a leading role in the project, "infusing it with new ideas and methodological innovations," notes Zanuttini.

According to the linguists, the project has several missions. "On the theoretical side, as syntacticians, we are hoping to get a better sense of how English varies," notes Wood, who is a lecturer in linguistics. "That will give us a deeper insight into how language works in general. That's our scientific goal. There is a gap in the study of syntactic variation in American English, and we want to learn as much as we can about the syntax of English, and of human language more generally, from this perspective."

To understand the syntax of human language, linguists sometimes compare languages that are radically different from one another (like Navajo and English), and sometimes compare languages that are minimally different from one another. This project looks at the minimally different varieties of English spoken in North America.

"Unlike variation in phonology (often referred to as 'accent') and in the lexicon ('skillet' vs. 'frying pan' or 'soda' vs. 'pop'), variation in grammatical systems within English has for the most part not been systematically investigated," Horn says.

"We want to rectify this gap by accumulating information about sentences that exhibit syntactic variation. Such variation may be found among speakers who live in a certain geographical region, or who belong to a certain age group, or to a particular social or ethnic group " notes Horn. Examples of these constructions are included on the project's website.

Another goal of the project is to create an awareness of dialect variation in a way that is non-judgmental and interesting.

"Language is fascinating, and I think we should find a way to share the things we discover with the public," says Wood. "One way of connecting with the public is by looking at the language that they speak and that is around them every day and try to instill them with that sense of fascination. It's not about right and wrong; it's about the excitement of looking at all of the different ways you can put sentences together."

Wood says that the study of linguistics "has been very eloquently described as the most humanistic of the sciences and the most scientific of the humanities. It's an intersection between the two."

The humanistic component of this project is that the researchers are not interested in what is considered to be correct - or prescriptive - grammar, but in what people do naturally. "The notion of correct is something that is artificially placed on a system that exists, sort of like putting your fork on the left side of the dish versus the right side, whereas the kind of language we are interested in is just what people do naturally," says Wood.

"Independent of what is considered to be correct," says Wood, " there is a set of mental rules that people are using to form their sentences. We are not really aware of these rules because they are internalized. We hear someone say something, we acquire that rule, and we apply it. What we are trying to do with this project is to understand such rules, and how they relate to other rules in that person's mental grammar."

Zanuttini adds that there is also a social implication to this research. "Often people are convinced that there is a right way of speaking a language and a wrong way of speaking that language. From the point of view of a linguist, that is really off the mark for many reasons," she says. "It is important that people who criticize others for how they speak realize that they are really using language as a way of conveying a social prejudice. If they hear the Queen of England pronounce a word without an 'r', they think it's fancy. But if they hear somebody from the North End of Boston, or someone from Brooklyn who comes from a working-class background pronounce the same word without an 'r', they think that person is beneath them."

"We linguists can see through this, because we have a more scientific approach to language," says Zanuttini. "We believe that creating an awareness of what we consider to be basic facts about language can have a positive social effect, by making people aware that they are expressing a negative evaluation of others. However, we are not saying that it's not useful for people to also have command of the standard, that is, the prescribed variety of English."

"It wouldn't be doing anyone any favors to say just forget about learning standard English and do what comes naturally all the time," says Wood. "We all style-switch all the time. The way I am talking in this environment is different from how I would talk at home. Being able to function in different aspects of society often entails that kind of code-switching."

"We want to see more success in literacy education, and success in finishing education, and to see people be able to achieve their goals," says Wood. "I think it's the view of a lot of linguists that the way to do that isn't by prescribing that saying this is wrong while saying that is right, but by introducing the concept that the grammar of a language really exhibits variation. And that's why we need to learn standard grammar as a separate thing."

"We would never encourage someone to go to a job interview and not speak the variety of English that is considered the standard, the most appropriate variety for that context in that community," says Zanuttini. "Rather, we encourage people to gain mastery of the standard variety, while at the same time also taking pride in other varieties of English that they might speak."

"When you get rid of the judgment side of it," says Wood, "this topic is just fascinating. All of the different forms that you encounter when you hear people from different regions speak are very interesting. We are constantly editing and updating the site. It's a constantly evolving project."

During the past year members of the project have been conducting nationwide surveys using an online crowdsourcing platform asking for people's judgment on sentences. They plot the results on a map.

One of the most interesting discoveries that the group has encountered are presentative sentences like "Here's you a water bottle."

"That sentence just floored me," says Wood. "It seemed very alien and different to me. The overall pattern was very clear: In the South people found that sentence to be completely normal, while in the North, no one thought it was normal. It was pretty stunning, and it turns out you can do it with 'where' as well. 'Where's me a screwdriver?' or 'Where's me a place to eat around here?'"

"Grammar is always changing," says Wood. "Why not celebrate that we don't speak a static language that is in a book, but a fluid thing that is always changing and evolving? It's part of what it means to be a human who speaks a language. And the next person over is just going to speak it a little bit differently."

Adds Horn, "We are very much engaged in an uphill battle to chronicle - and educate non-specialists about - the marvelously diverse character of the English language."
(Image by Michael S. Helfenbein)

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Project explores the 'marvelously diverse' ways we speak English

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"Here's you a piece of pizza" may sound like an alien way of speaking to some - unless of course you're one of the linguists working on the Yale Grammatical Diversity Project, in which case, it's just one of the "fascinating" variations of the English language that they look forward to studying each and every day.

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En este artículo, menciona cómo los pilotos usan Aviation English, una forma del inglés pero solamente para los pilotos y controladores aereos. Con respeto a la sintaxis, la manera en la que que este idioma quita todas las ambiguidaded del inglés original. Se cambian algunas palabras ingléses a una forma diferente para que una palabra sea distinto de una palabra que suena similar. Por ejemplo, five y nine, son muy similares pero esta nueva manipulada forma de inglés asegura que cualquier confusion no exista. La importancia de no tenere confusion es muy alta porque han sido acidentes debido a confusion de la lengua.

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The most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport.

That's a standard joke among pilots, who know even better than the flying public that aviation is the safest mode of transportation.

But there are still those headlines and TV shows about airline crashes, and those statistics people like to repeat, such as:

Between 1976 and 2000, more than 1,100 passengers and crew lost their lives in accidents in which investigators determined that language had played a contributory role.

True enough, 80% of all air incidents and accidents occur because of human error. Miscommunication combined with other human factors such as fatigue, cognitive workload, noise, or forgetfulness have played a role in some of the deadliest accidents.

The most well-known, and widely discussed, is the collision on the ground of two Boeing 747 aircraft in 1977 in Tenerife, which resulted in 583 fatalities. The incident was due in part to difficult communications between the pilot, whose native language was Dutch, and the Spanish air traffic controller.

In such a high-stakes environment as commercial aviation, where the lives of hundreds of passengers and innocent people on the ground are involved, communication is critical to safety.

So, it was decided that Aviation English would be the international language of aviation and that all aviation professionals - pilots and air traffic controllers (ATC) - would need to be proficient in it. It is a language designed to minimise ambiguities and misunderstandings, highly structured and codified.

Pilots and ATC expect to hear certain bits of information in certain ways and in a given order. The "phraseology", with its particular pronunciation (for example, "fife" and "niner" instead of "five" and "nine", so they're not confused with each other), specific words ("Cleared to land"), international alphabet ("Mike Hotel Foxtrot") and strict conversation rules (you must repeat, or "read back", an instruction), needs to be learned and practised.

In spite of globalisation and the spread of English, most people around the world are not native English speakers, and an increasing number of aviation professionals do not speak English as their first language.

Native speakers have an advantage when they learn Aviation English, since they already speak English at home and in their daily lives. But they encounter many pilots or ATC who learned English as a second or even third language.

Whose responsibility is it to ensure that communication is successful? Can native speakers simply speak the way they do at home and expect to be understood? Or do they also have the responsibility to make themselves understood and to learn how to understand pilots or ATC who are not native English speakers?

As a linguist, I analyse aviation language from a linguistics perspective. I have noted the restricted meaning of the few verbs and adjectives; that the only pronouns are "you" and sometimes "we" ("How do you read?"; "We're overhead Camden"; how few questions there are, mostly imperatives ("Maintain heading 180"); and that the syntax is so simple (no complement clauses, no relative clauses, no recursion), it might not even count as a human language for Chomsky.

But, as a pilot and a flight instructor, I look at it from the point of view of student pilots learning to use it in the cockpit while also learning to fly the airplane and navigate around the airfield.

How much harder it is to remember what to say when the workload goes up, and more difficult to speak over the radio when you know everyone else on the frequency is listening and will notice every little mistake you make?

Imagine, then, how much more difficult this is for pilots with English as a second language.

Supplied

Everyone learning another language knows it's suddenly more challenging to hold a conversation over the phone than face-to-face, even with someone you already know. When it's over the radio, with someone you don't know, against the noise of the engine, static noise in the headphones, and while trying to make the plane do what you want it to do, it can be quite daunting.

No wonder student pilots who are not native English speakers sometimes prefer to stay silent, and even some experienced native English speakers will too, when the workload is too great.

This is one of the results of my research conducted in collaboration with UNSW's Brett Molesworth, combining linguistics and aviation human factors.

Experiments in a flight simulator with pilots of diverse language backgrounds and flying experience explored conditions likely to result in pilots making mistakes or misunderstanding ATC instructions. Not surprisingly, increased workload, too much information, and rapid ATC speech, caused mistakes.

Also not surprisingly, less experienced pilots, no matter their English proficiency, made more mistakes. But surprisingly, it was the level of training, rather than number of flying hours or language background, that predicted better communication.

Once we understand the factors contributing to miscommunication in aviation, we can propose solutions to prevent them. For example, technologies such as Automatic Speech Recognition and Natural Language Understanding may help catch errors in pilot readbacks that ATC did not notice and might complement training for pilots and ATC.

It is vital that they understand each other, whatever their native language.

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Clear skies ahead: how improving the language of aviation could save lives

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The most dangerous part of flying is driving to the airport. That's a standard joke among pilots, who know even better than the flying public that aviation is the safest mode of transportation.

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En este artículo se trata de las palabras compuestas en alemán. Alemán es una lengua que es muy conocida por sus palabras muy largas. Se dice que este tipo de palabras es lo que causa frustración a los aprendedores de alemán porque se crean estas palabras como “ad hoc” y también practicamente sin pensarlo. También se hablan de los afijos y de como los hablantes nativos saben mejor en cómo usarlos.

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A few years ago, it was reported that German had 'lost' its longest word - the 63-letter monstrosity Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungs-
aufgabenübertragungsgesetz.

The cause of this 'loss' was a law change in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: in 2013, the 'beef labelling supervision duties delegation law', as is the term's literal English translation, was officially repealed, thus rendering its name obsolete.

Endless opportunities

Now, Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz had arguably never been a word someone would have come across all that often in everyday conversation. In fact, it isn't even included in the German dictionary. The longest and second longest German words they record are Kraftfahrzeug-Haftpflichtversicherung ('motor car liability insurance') and Donau-Dampfschifffahrtsgesellschaft ('Danube steamboat shipping company') respectively. (The Duden hyphenates both words, although omitting the hyphen is also grammatically correct.)

But Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz nonetheless still serves as a prime example of the ability of Germanic languages to combine a seemingly unlimited number of lexemes to form one single word. It is this particularity that non-native speakers often find most amusing about German.

The Awful German Compound Words

In an essay entitled The Awful German Language, American writer Mark Twain thoroughly mocked the German penchant for endlessly complex compound words: "Some German words are so long that they have a perspective," he wrote. However, compound words also exist in English, but, as a general rule, they are often written as separate entities, even though they convey a single unit of meaning, e.g. English table tennis translates to Tischtennis in German.

Perhaps one of the biggest challenges learners of German face is the fact that, because they're often made up ad-hoc, many German compound words are not listed in the dictionary - something that Twain also lamented: "The dictionary must draw the line somewhere [...] because these long things are hardly legitimate words, but are rather combinations of words, and the inventor of them ought to have been killed." Here understanding how compounding (or composition) - one of the most productive word formation processes in the German language - works can help.

Two types of compounds

Compounds are formed of at least two stems, and can combine any parts of speech (noun + noun, adjective + adjective, verb stem + noun, etc.). There are generally two types of compounds that can be identified: the determinative compound and the copulative compound. The determinative compound is the most common one. It is made up of a semantic head, the right-hand component of the lexeme, which also determines the grammatical category and gender of the word. The meaning of this head is restricted by the qualifying element that precedes it.

An example of a determinative compound is the noun Handschuh. Here the feminine noun Hand ('hand') and the masculine noun Schuh ('shoe') form a masculine compound noun with the meaning 'glove'. As the word formation of Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungsaufgabenübertragungsgesetz shows, determinative compounds can get quite lengthy. However, the number of words combined may be limited by a person's cognitive ability, i.e. the more elements a lexeme consists of the harder it is to understand.

Less common is the copulative compound. This type of compound is characterized by a coordinate, rather than a subordinate, relationship between the components, e.g. the adjective bittersüß ('bittersweet'). This means that the order of the combining elements of a lexeme can be varied, e.g. rotbraun ('red brown') or braunrot ('brown red') - unless they are lexicalized and thus a fixed part of the dictionary ( bittersüß is more idiomatic than süßbitter). The copulative compound always combines the same parts of speech (e.g. adjective + adjective, noun + noun).

The Fugenelement

Approximately 30% of all compounds include a Fugenelement ( FE), literally 'gap element', which is a bound morpheme that connects the individual stems with each other. In German, these are -e-, -s-, -es-, -n-, -en-, -er-, and -ens-. (When no Fugenelement is visible within the word, linguists assume the existence of a null morpheme Ø - an invisible affix.) Fugenelemente have historically evolved from inflectional suffixes of genitive attributes, e.g. des Tages Licht ('the day's light') merged into Tageslicht ('daylight').

Today, the Fugenelement has lost its inflectional function and there are no fixed rules to follow when it comes to its usage. The decision regarding which one to use when is usually made according to the speaker's Sprachgefühl ('feeling for language'), i.e. a native German speaker should intuitively know how to use them correctly.

Etymological fun

While the length of some German compounds is certainly impressive, the longest ones often come out of a legal context and are therefore not very interesting otherwise. Looking at the literal translations of some more common German compound words can actually be more fun for a non-native speaker - here are some examples:

However, one of my favourite compounds has always been Maulwurf ('mole') - because its history shows how people can unintentionally contribute to a change in the meaning of a word by misinterpreting its etymology.

In Old High German, this little guy was defined as an animal that threw up tiny hills of earth. People called it mūwerfo, literally 'hill-thrower', from mūha, 'hill', and werfan, 'to throw'. The name was later reinterpreted to Middle High German moltwerf, imitating molt(e), from Old High German molta,'earth, dust', and changing its meaning to 'earth-thrower'. (A similar formation survives in the English regional mouldwarp.) When the word molt(e) died out, people couldn't understand the meaning of moltwerf anymore. The word molt(e) was thus reinterpreted once more - this time in imitation of the slightly similar mūl, 'snout' - ultimately turning the animal from an 'earth-thrower' into a 'snout-thrower'.
Do you know a language that uses composition to form new words? Let us know your favourite long words in the comments!

The opinions and other information contained in OxfordWords blog posts and comments do not necessarily reflect the opinions or positions of Oxford University Press.

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Words with a perspective: German compound words | OxfordWords blog

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A few years ago, it was reported that German had 'lost' its longest word - the 63-letter monstrosity Rindfleischetikettierungsüberwachungs- aufgabenübertragungsgesetz. The cause of this 'loss' was a law change in the state of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern: in 2013, the 'beef labelling supervision duties delegation law', as is the term's literal English translation, was officially repealed, thus rendering its name obsolete.

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Aquí, se habla se las relaciones entre el género y de cómo los hablantes nativos de tal lengua percibe palabras especificas. Decubieron que palabras femeninas fueron relacionadas con adjetivos mas parecidas con belleza, gloria... Basicamente todo lo que es realcionado con mujeres. Esto es cierto para los hombres también, las palabras masculianas son realiciadas con obscuro, pesado, útil, peligroso.

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If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns -even inanimate objects- have grammatical gender. Russian, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all examples of such languages. In French, wine and chocolate are masculine. In Arabic, soup and the calendar year are feminine. Speakers of these languages must take care to mark gender with definite articles and pronouns. They also must alter adjectives and even verbs for gender agreement.

As it turns out, a language's grammatical gender can have significant and surprising effects on cognition. In one study, for example, Russian speakers were asked to personify the days of the week. They consistently personified the grammatically masculine days (Monday, Tuesday, and Thursday) as males and the grammatically feminine days (Wednesday, Friday, and Saturday) as females. When asked why they did this, they were unable to explain themselves.

So linguistic gender can spill over into other mental processes, leading us to judge and categorize inanimate and abstract nouns as truly having a gender, even though we logically know better. But the Russians in this study were tested in their native language. Can grammatical gender influence speakers' cognitive processes when they're speaking another language entirely?

In 2002, researchers set out to answer that question. They created a list of 24 objects that have opposite genders in Spanish and German; in each language, half of the objects were masculine and half were feminine. Speaking English and using materials written in English, the researchers asked a group of native Spanish speakers and a group of native German speakers -all of whom were proficient in English- to generate three adjectives for each item on the list.

Across the board, object gender influenced the participants' judgments. For example, the word "key" is masculine in German and feminine in Spanish. German speakers in the study tended to describe keys as hard, heavy, jagged, metal, and useful. Spanish speakers, on the other hand, used words such as golden, intricate, little, lovely, and tiny when describing keys. The word "bridge" is feminine in German and masculine in Spanish. Sure enough, German speakers described bridges as beautiful, elegant, fragile, pretty, and slender, while Spanish speakers said they were big, dangerous, strong, sturdy, and towering.

In the same study, German and Spanish speakers looked at picture pairs. Each pair included a picture of a person and a picture of an object. The participants rated how similar the two pictures were. There were no written labels, and participants did not speak during the task. Both Spanish and German speakers judged pairs to be more similar when the grammatical gender of the object matched the biological sex of the person in the picture. A pair consisting of a bridge and a man, for example, seemed quite similar to a Spanish speaker but not similar at all to a German speaker.

As these studies show, grammatical gender can influence people's thinking, even when they're speaking a language with no grammatical gender to speak of -and even when they're not speaking any language at all!

Many of us like to believe we live in a post-sexism world, with the worst of gender prejudice behind us. But if gendered conventions of language can influence our thoughts -making a key seem prettier or a bridge seem sturdier- then it seems we are not yet free of gender stereotypes. Small, unnoticed features of language can influence our thoughts, sometimes in big ways. Knowing that, imagine how else language, culture, and society might affect our thoughts, feelings, and behaviors. Mind-boggling, isn't it?
Sources Cited:
Boroditsky, L., Schmidt, L., & Phillips, W. (2003). Sex, Syntax, and Semantics. In Language in mind: Advances in the study of language and cognition, ed. D. Gentner & S. Goldin-Meadow, pp. 61- 80. Cambridge University Press.

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Masculine or Feminine? (And Why It Matters)

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If you've ever studied a foreign language, you know that in many languages, nouns -even inanimate objects- have grammatical gender. Russian, French, Spanish, and Arabic are all examples of such languages. In French, wine and chocolate are masculine. In Arabic, soup and the calendar year are feminine.

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Nos presenta en este artículo que un grupo de investigadors internacionales con concentración en la lingüística han descrubrido que los monos tiene sus propio sistema de comunicación. Descubrieron algunos raíces que son muy comunes en el “habla”, estos son “hok” and “krak”. Aunque tiene esta forma de comunicación, es importante que explicar que es probable que no tengan un vocabulario y que su uso es realmente para cuidarse y sobrevivir.

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Study examines different calls, analyzing the structure and placement

Call combinations may describe nature of a threat, and degree of danger

Calls may have their own regular meanings independent from the others

And, they might change depending on the environment, researchers say

Linguists and primatologists have joined forces to create the groundwork for 'primate linguistics,' helping to decipher the meanings behind monkey speech.

The comprehensive study examines the calls of different species, analyzing the structure and placement of these vocalizations, and explains what individual calls and sequences mean.

While the language of primates may not be as complex as our own, researchers say these animals demonstrate linguistic capabilities that are both 'exciting and sometimes challenging.'

The study, led by an international team of researchers, was published recently in the journals Natural Language & linguistic Theory, and builds on earlier research.

'We can now study the form and meaning of monkey calls using methods from theoretical linguistics,' explains Philippe Schlenker, a senior researcher at institute Jean-Nicod within France's National Center for Scientific Research (CNRS) and a Global Distinguished Professor at New York University.

'Using this approach, we can compare one monkey species to another and see, for instance, that some of their calls have been preserved over three million years.'

Researchers say there is evidence of primate morphology, the structure of calls, in Africa's Campbell's monkeys.

These monkeys differentiate between roots - in particular, the researchers note, 'hok' and 'krak' - and suffixes, including 'oo.'

The way these calls are combined allows Campbell's monkeys to describe the nature of a threat, and the degree of danger.

Saying 'hok' will indicate a serious aerial threat, like an eagle, while 'hok-oo' is more general.

For these monkeys, the term 'krak' is often related to a leopard sighting, but can act as a general alert call when there is no leopard around.

The researchers also examined the syntax of primate calls - how they form sentences.

In 'primate semantics,' Campbell's monkeys used 'boom' calls.

These often come in pairs, but typically appear at the beginning of a call sequence.

For Putty-nosed monkeys, however, 'pyows' are a general alert call, while 'hacks' are related to an eagle sighting.

When combined, with a small number of 'pyows' followed by a small number of 'hacks,' the monkey will essentially say 'let's move.'

Previous studies have compared these types of sequences to idioms in the human language, but the new research suggests this may not be the case.

Instead, the researchers say there may be some degree of regularity in the 'pyow-hack' sequences.

Similar issues can be seen when examining the call sequences of the South American Titi monkeys.

These monkeys used two types of calls - A and B - to alert others of predator type and location.

According to the researchers, 'raptor in the canopy,' (e.g. AAAA...), 'raptor on the ground,' (e.g. AAA...BBBB...), 'cat in the canopy,' (e.g. ABBBB...), and 'cat on the ground' (e.g. BBBBB...) allow for four distinct sequence types.

These calls may have their own regular meanings independent from the others, and might change depending on the environment.

An 'A' call may signal serious danger overhead, while a 'B' call may say 'there is an alert.'

The researchers note that it's important to analyze monkey languages separately from the concepts of human languages, and simple meanings and structures should usually be assigned.

But when it comes to a linguistic tool called 'implicature,' the researchers say they've found 'illuminating' evidence.

This tool is seen when the meaning of a word is 'enriched' when competing with a more informing alternative.

In the Titi monkeys, a general alert call ('B') may compete with another, more specific call ('A'), meaning 'serious danger up.'

If the threat lines up better with the specific call, as in the instance of a predatory bird overhead, the monkeys prefer this alternative over the general version.

The researchers also say that the comparisons of speech between different species can reveal information on the family tree stretching back millions of years.

The Campbell's 'boom' calls can be seen among several species that diverged millions of years ago, for example, and plotting those which do and do not use this pattern suggests the most recent common ancestor used these as well.

According the researchers, this study provides the stepping stones for 'evolutionary monkey linguistics,' and could help to explain how their communication evolved over millions of years.

'The findings show that methods from linguistics can illuminate communication systems beyond human language,' Schlenker says, 'and in the future they might find further domains of applications beyond primates.'

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Researchers reveal the first 'primate linguistics' guide

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Study examines different calls, analyzing the structure and placement Call combinations may describe nature of a threat, and degree of danger Calls may have their own regular meanings independent from the others And, they might change depending on the environment, researchers say Linguists and primatologists have joined forces to create the groundwork for 'primate linguistics,' helping to decipher the meanings behind monkey speech.

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Se presenta el origen y la evolución de la palabra “usted”en este artículo. Mientras otras lenguas tienen una forma para mostrar formalidad, español es un poco mas fuera del normal porque tiene su propia palabra para mostrarla. Algunas veces se ve “Vd.” in vez de “Ud.” o “Usted”. Que significa ’v’? De hecho, ’Usted’ empezó con ’vuestra merced’ y se transformó en una palabra compuesta ’vuesarced’ y luego ’vusted’, y finalmente es ’Usted’.

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To understand why ustedis abbreviated as Vd.we need a quick lesson in the etymology of the word, and the story of that pronoun also answers another question about Spanish, namely why the second- person pronoun usted (those used when talking to somebody to refer to that person) uses third-person verbs (those used to refer to someone other than the speaker and listener).

Usted had its origins during the colonial era, where it was common to address nobility and other people held in esteem (or people who thought they were held in esteem) as vuestra merced, meaning "your mercy." Vuestra merced was used in much the same way as "your honor" is used in English today, with third-person verbs, i.e., we say "your honor is" rather than "your honor are." It began as an extremely formal type of address, eventually becoming the standard way of addressing people in higher positions as well as persons who aren't friends or family.

As is often the case with much-used terms, vuestra merced became shortened over the centuries. It changed to vuesarced to vusarced and eventually to vusted, which you may still hear, especially among older speakers, in some regions. Vd. was adopted as an abbreviation for that word or earlier forms and remains in use today, although Ud. is more common.

Spanish speakers tend to soften their consonants, so vusted eventually gave way to today's usted (which in some areas has its last letter softened so it sounds like usté). Like the earlier vuestra merced, it still uses third-person verbs (i.e., usted es for the formal "you are" but tú eres for the familiar/informal "you are").

As all living languages do, Spanish continues to change, and these days usted itself is being heard less often. In a change that has its parallels in English, much Spanish usage is becoming more informal or egalitarian. Whereas at one time, strangers were frequently addressed as usted, it is common in some areas, especially among younger people, for peers to immediately address each other as tú. On the other hand, there are areas in which usted is used even among family members, and others where is preferred over tú for family or close friends.

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To understand why ustedis abbreviated as Vd.we need a quick lesson in the etymology of the word, and the story of that pronoun also answers another question about Spanish, namely why the second- person pronoun usted (those used when talking to somebody to refer to that person) uses third-person verbs (those used to refer to someone other than the speaker and listener).

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Me gustó este artículo muchísimo por sus mensajes positivos del aprendizaje del un otro idioma cuando uno llega a la edad adulta. En este artículo se revelan las circunstancias en las que uno puede aprender una lengua casi como un hablante nativo. La llave es mantenerse con ella, y hablar diariamente con alguien que sabe esa lengua muy bien. Esto es relevante a nuestra clase no solamente porque esto obviamente tiene mucho que ver con el periodo crítico para aprender un idioma, pero también porque nos da información y consejos en cómo podemos nosotros sumergirnos en el nuevo idioma.

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Scene 1. A small classroom, nighttime. A man stands alone in the middle of a circle of students. He approaches one young pupil and grabs the pair of headphones dangling around his neck. A petite woman in a pink dress shouts "Vouloir!" The man grins, bows, and returns to his seat.

Tonight I'm one of 14 adult students at Act French, where instructor Manisha Snoyer teaches French language through drama. For the current exercise, everyone takes turns acting out a different French verb until someone guesses it correctly. Vlad, a muscular 30-something who's come to the class with his giggly wife, has been trying to pantomime the word "vouloir," or "want," hence the staged headphone robbery.

A few weeks earlier, I'd read about some study findings suggesting that, under the right circumstances, adults can learn to speak a foreign language like natives. I'd always assumed that after adolescence, it was pretty much impossible for people to learn a second language really well, and these results seemed exciting. So, armed with a foreign language vocabulary that included "bella note," " nants ingonyama," and "supercalifragilous" (thanks, Disney), I set off to find the most effective and least conventional ways that adults learn new languages.

These Words of Mine: Can Adults Really Learn Foreign Languages?

For a long time scientists thought only kids could achieve high proficiency in a foreign language Critical period effects in second language learning: the influence of maturational state on the acquisition of English as a second language. Johnson, J.S., Newport, E.L. Cognitive Psychology 1989;2(1):60-99.. Even today, there's evidence that some aspects of second language acquisition get harder as we age. After age 12, it's almost impossible to get that Italian accent when professing your love in Venice; post-15, it's difficult to achieve native-like grammar.

But the results of this latest research, led by Michael Ullmann and Kara Morgan-Short, leave some hope for us geezers out of high school. The study compared two groups of people (average age mid-20s) learning an artificial language: one through explicit training, similar to standard classroom methods, and the other through implicit training, similar to immersion. After six months, the groups performed equally on proficiency tests. But brain scans revealed something surprising: The group that learned through immersion-like training showed brain activity similar to native speakers, while the group stuck translating "see spot run" didn't. According to Morgan-Short, these results mean that the immersion group might be able to use the language better in stressful situations (Dónde esta el baño?!) and retain the language better than the explicitly-trained group.

To me these results were incredibly interesting for two distinct reasons. First off, they suggest that it is in fact possible for adults to attain native-like proficiency in a foreign language. And second, they're evidence that language immersion, or being in a place where people speak only the language you're learning, may be the absolute most effective way for adults to learn a new language Erard, Michael. Babel No More: The Search For the World's Most Extraordinary Language Learners. New York, NY: Free Press, 2012..

I started looking around for research on adult foreign language learning, even techniques that didn't necessarily involve immersion. As it turns out, adults are not only capable of achieving native-like proficiency in a foreign language; they may have an easier time learning second languages than kids do. In 1970, Hungarian translator Lomb Kató published How I Learn Languages (the English version came out in 2008), in which she discusses the benefits of learning a language as an adult. In The Art and Science of Learning Languages, published in 1996, Eric Gunnemark suggests adults are generally literate, understand abstractions, and have decent attention spans (oh, and did you see my latest tweet?) - all skills that come in handy when learning a new language. In terms of study habits, adults usually organize their time better than kids do.

On the other hand, there are a lot of non-neurological reasons why it can be hard to learn a language as an adult. Florence Leclerc-Dickler, Chair of Foreign Languages at the New School in New York City, said adults can be "very concerned" about pronouncing words correctly and want to fully understand the grammatical structure before they start speaking. "Kids do it in a much more natural, spontaneous way," she added.

One way to help adult language learners get over their shyness about speaking is to let them sing instead. Right now Leclerc-Dickler is writing an adult French textbook based on songs about an American couple that travels to Paris. Leclerc-Dickler isn't the first to use music in a foreign language curriculum (my friend still has nightmares about singing "I'm a Little Teapot" in front of our college Hebrew class), but she says her textbook will make music the "backbone of the [teaching] method."

Through music, students can start humming and singing without focusing too much on pronunciation and structure, Leclerc-Dickler said. "So it helps adults be less self-conscious. ... Eventually the idea is to go from singing to speaking."

At El Taller Latino Americano on New York's Upper West Side, founder Bernardo Palombo uses a similar method of language instruction. Palombo teaches one adult beginner class only in song, using melody and repetition to help students learn Spanish. I met with Palombo on a Monday night in a little classroom covered almost completely in bright, glittery paintings and children's handwriting. We were talking about his music class when he pulled out a spiral notebook and drew a picture of a human body, which he proceeded to divide down the middle. One half, he told me, represents the "logical" part of the brain, and the other is the "non-logical" part. Learning a language, he said, should tap into that non-logical part, which is exactly what he thinks music does. For adults and children, he said, music can be an incredibly useful teaching method.

Like music, drama could help adults feel more comfortable learning new languages. Snoyer trained as an actress in France and founded Into This City, the boutique language school where she teaches Act French, in 2009. "There are lots of similarities between learning how to act and how to express yourself in a foreign language," she said, since each one is ultimately about communication. Students in her class practiced a scene from a French play and when a middle-aged woman in glasses and a sweater almost whispered her lines from the corner of the room, Snoyer stopped her and advised, in English: "Communicate! That means you're not looking at the page."

Things were slightly mellower during Literature Night at El Taller, where I was one of four students including a peppy ESL teacher and a retired high school French instructor. During a vocabulary exercise, students theorized about the difficulties of exact translation from English to Spanish. Instructor Alexandra Castaño chimed in periodically, but the discussion took place largely between the students, shouting explanations across the table as though discussing philosophy.

"The only way adults can learn language," Palombo told me later that night, "is if they are also a teacher."

During Literature Night, Castaño and her students spoke pretty much exclusively en Español. But when we broke mid-way for wine and cheese, we lapsed almost immediately into English. While this new research suggests immersion is the most effective way to learn a new language, I could see that it was difficult to create an immersive environment without heading straight for a foreign country.

At Middlebury College in Vermont, Michael Geisler runs the Language Schools, where students participate in immersion programs for Chinese, German, and other languages. Geisler told me there's nothing more effective than cutting yourself off from your native tongue; immersion is "the most efficient, really the fastest way" to learn a foreign language. The program at Middlebury is tough: All students are required to sign the Language Pledge, in which they promise not to speak anything but the language they're learning, at risk of being kicked out.

Ullman and Morgan-Short's research suggests there's science behind these scary-sounding rules. According to Ullman, his results mean that, in the long term, immersion is probably more effective than classroom training. But don't swap your Spanish language class for a ticket to Mexico just yet: Ullman said this research "doesn't mean that classroom training isn't useful." In fact, he suggested classroom training could even be "better [than immersion] for learning a language initially."

Over the course of my research, I learned language education isn't so much a battle between immersion and classroom training; almost all methods of instruction have their downsides. At a Hebrew conversation group on the Upper West Side, one woman who'd just started an online tutorial broke out in a sweat when someone asked her anything that didn't have to do with books, waiters, or strawberries. During a Hebrew Meetup earlier that month, I felt tears spring to my eyes when someone asked me a seemingly simple question, then turned immediately to his fluent neighbor and joked, "Hee lo mevinah." (It means "she doesn't understand," and I did.)

Immersion programs have some potential disadvantages, too, like the fact that they typically take up a lot of time and money. (An eight-week session at Middlebury's Chinese School costs almost $10,000, compared to the language classes I visited, which ranged from four weeks for $140 to about $600 for six weeks.) Immersion programs can also be intimidating, turning even the most eager students into professional pantomimes. During college my friend spent a summer doing a Chinese immersion program in Hangzhou, a city in Eastern China. It took him weeks of talking mostly to himself to work up the confidence to speak to his classmates.

Still, he told me over Skype that the experience was well worth the struggle: "Language is never easy, but doing it as intensively as possible for as long as you can bear is the only way to jump the initial hurdle."

Express Yourself: Learning More Than a Language

When it comes to foreign language education, mishaps are inevitable. But there's something liberating about showing up every week to the same place and becoming someone else for the night - someone who speaks French, or Spanish, or Hebrew, who doesn't have the same worries about work or family, who laughs at her mistakes, and is always open to learning something new. Every few weeks, the Act French group goes on a cultural outing in the city - dining at a Haitian restaurant or touring a French museum - and for Snoyer, these experiences justify the challenges of running her own business. Spending time with the "truthful, creative people" she meets in her classes is always, she said, the most rewarding part of teaching.

Foreign language learning can also be unpredictable, anything but a routine set of drills and measurable progress. After the Act French class I lingered outside the classroom to talk to Snoyer. Around us a group of French interns shouted "Adieu" as they bounded down the stairs into the night.

In the newly empty hallway, we sat down and I asked if she really thought drama was the best way to learn a foreign language.

Second best, she answered without hesitation. The best way to learn a foreign language is to meet a native speaker - she smiled broadly - and fall in love.
Did you learn to speak a second language as an adult? How'd you do it? Tell us in the comments below.

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Adults Can Learn New Languages, Here's Why

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Scene 1. A small classroom, nighttime. A man stands alone in the middle of a circle of students. He approaches one young pupil and grabs the pair of headphones dangling around his neck. A petite woman in a pink dress shouts "Vouloir!" The man grins, bows, and returns to his seat.

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Cuando yo estaba leyendo en el libro sobre la lengua pidgin y cómo se transforma en una criolla no creía que el libro tuviera mucha información de cómo se hace esta tranformación en realidad. Entonces, yo busqué más informacion en cómo se forma una criolla, dónde se forma y por qué, y también características y información relevante de las criollas en los Estados Unidos.

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Creole - Language Information & Resources

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Information and Resources for Creole - One of more than 150 languages and dialects translated & interpreted by ALS International

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Obviamente este artículo no es en inglés ni en español, es en italiano. Pero si lo traduce con el enlace para traducir un sitio web abajo (espero que funcione), hay una historia de una lengua pidgin que se llama Sabir o Lingua Franca. Esta lengua ha existido desde el siglo once hasta los 1800’s. Una lengua pidgin, como nuestro texto dice, es una lengua que está desarrollada en una area donde no hay una lengua en común por lo cual ellos crean una lengua más sencilla. Esta pidgen Sabir fue hablada en el Mediterraneo (principalmente en África) por los comerciantes y su estructura gramatical y palabras vienen del Italiano antiguo pero más luego incorporaron palabras francesas, españolas y portuguéas.

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Proprio quando poteva servire, è sparita. La Lingua Franca del Mediterraneo, madre di tutte le lingue franche (almeno per i linguisti) ha funzionato per diversi secoli, mettendo in contatto le popolazioni che si affacciavano sul mare. Dai primi secoli del secondo millennio fino al 1800 è stata parlata, nei porti e sulle coste, da marinai e commercianti di ogni nazionalità. Era semplice, limitata e rozza. Tutti capivano, però, e in questo modo funzionavano gli affari.

Si chiama così perché è la "lingua dei franchi", nome con cui le popolazioni nordafricane definivano tutti i popoli europei (un'abitudine che sopravvive ancora oggi: vedi alla voce faranji), ma in realtà era piena di parole proveniente dall'italiano, in particolare dal Lombardo e, in seguito, dal Veneziano. Nei secoli ha assunto numerose parole portoghesi e spagnole, in aggiunta a termini greci, turchi, arabi, berberi e francesi. Era parlata dai commercianti, ma era anche corrente tra gli schiavi di Malta (nel cosiddetto bagnio) e tra i corsari del Maghreb. Lo parlavano anche fuggitivi europei che trovavano riparo ad Algeri.

Era una lingua a disposizione di tutti, semplice e limitata. Serviva a capirsi per scambiare merci e trattare affari. Niente di eccessivo. Soprattutto, era di tradizione orale. Nei secoli si è diffusa di bocca in bocca per ogni porticciolo del Mediterraneo, usata sulle tolde delle navi e, come scriveva nel 1612 l'arcivescovo di Palermo Diego de Haedo, "non c'è casa ad Algeri dove non sia parlata".

La tradizione è finita quando l'Europa ha deciso di mostrare i muscoli, cioè di colonizzare i Paesi africani, nel 1800, esportando le proprie lingue nazionali (e non solo quelle). Da quel momento, si è smesso di parlare Lingua Franca (o Sabir, come dicevano - per distinguersi come al solito - i francesi), disperdendo un patrimonio culturale che, adesso, quando i popoli del sud del Mediterraneo e quelli del nord del Mediterraneo tornano a incontrarsi, in contesti non più commerciali ma, purtroppo, ben peggiori.

Qualche traccia, però, resta. A livello orale, sopravvive in una conta fanciullesca a Gerusalemme, ad esempio: le parole senza senso che i bambini si scambiano per scegliere chi sta dentro e chi sta fuori sono, in realtà, antichi numeri di Sabir (e, tra l'altro, sono molto simili ai numeri italiani). Rimane nel nome di Capo Gardafui ("guarda e fuggi"), in Somalia, e ha lasciato segni nel Polari (che deriva da "parlare"), uno slang usato da artisti circensi, attori, banditi, marinai, prostitute e omosessuali che, a sua volta, è finito negli anni '60 del 1900.

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Quanto ci vorrebbe oggi una Lingua Franca per il Mediterraneo

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Proprio quando poteva servire, è sparita. La Lingua Franca del Mediterraneo, madre di tutte le lingue franche (almeno per i linguisti) ha funzionato per diversi secoli, mettendo in contatto le popolazioni che si affacciavano sul mare. Dai primi secoli del secondo millennio fino al 1800 è stata parlata, nei porti e sulle coste, da marinai e commercianti di ogni nazionalità.

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El periodo crítico y sus varios aspectos que están en las páginas 22-24. En este artículo se presenta información enfocada en la adquisición de un idioma que fue aprendido después del periodo crítico para aprender un idoma. La escritora no duda que hay una relación entre el éxito de los jóvenes que aprenden un otro idioma antes de pasar el periodo crítico. Sin embargo, ella dice que esta percepción de un límite puede hacer que los estudiantes en la secundiaria o a la univerisidad crean que no es realmente posible aprender un otro idioma.

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The Myth of Missed Opportunities
A popular misconception regarding second-language learning is that there is a window, or critical period, for learning a second language that shuts down around the onset of puberty. In his article, "Is There a 'Child Advantage' in Learning Foreign Languages?" Brad Marshall points out the harm this misconception can cause. Adults may become doubtful of their ability to learn a new language. Their teachers may become skeptical too, tending to "plod through their classes feeling there is little hope of success." When it comes to learning a foreign language, many believe that the adult brain is in "a state of shutdown" relative to the child's "neurological state of readiness."

Early Foreign Language Instruction is "Not a Magical Tool"
In The Age Factor in Second Language Acquisition, David Singleton concedes that in second-language instruction, "younger = better in the long run." But this is a general rule with plenty of exceptions. The exceptions include the 5 percent of adult bilinguals who master a second language even though they begin learning it when they are well into adulthood, long after any critical period has presumably come to a close.

Both research and the informal observations of those who are in daily contact with second-language learners suggest that an early start in a second language is neither a strictly necessary nor a universally sufficient condition for the attainment of native-like proficiency. Given the enormous variation in people's experience of second languages-even (or especially!) in the classroom-this ought to be a truism.

As John T. Bruer, author of The Myth of the First Three Years, states: "One of the dangers of the...emphasis on critical periods, is that it prompts us to pay too much attention to when learning occurs and too little attention to how learning might best occur." Marshall agrees, pointing out that learning a foreign language in elementary school-what most researchers generally agree is the ideal time-is not a "magical tool for creating perfect second-language speakers." Timing, in other words, is not everything.

Many assume that critical learning periods apply not only to second-language learning, but to other school subjects, like math and reading. Such beliefs, writes Bruer, have "raised needless concerns among educators." For instance, once a critical period is over, is "lost academic ground" irrecoverable? Such concerns arise from a simplistic and over-generalized application of critical periods to learning. The extreme view that children must learn a foreign language "early or not at all" grows out of popular images of critical periods as closing abruptly, like windows slamming shut.

Foreign-Language Learning and Critical Periods
The question of whether or not there is a critical period for learning a foreign language is not easily answered. But there is certainly no specific age at which the window of opportunity closes completely. As with the visual system, the language system consists of several features, and is not, as Singleton writes, a "monolith." Certain features of the language system may be more related to distinct critical periods than others. According to Ellen Bialystok and Kenji Hakuta, authors of In Other Words, "The controversy over the optimal age for learning a second language really hinges on the acquisition of a subset of possible linguistic features and functions."

The Grammar-Learning Window Never Completely Closes
Although acquiring the grammar of one's first language does seem to be subject to a critical period which ends around puberty, the issue of whether or not there is also a critical period for second-language grammar acquisition is more complex. In The Myth of the First Three Years, Bruer does not state that there is a critical period for second-language grammar learning; instead, he claims that there "may be some maturational constraints on second-language grammar learning."

Bialystok and Hakuta complicate the response to whether or not there is an optimal age for second-language grammar acquisition even further. They point out that learning some linguistic features, like tense, seems to be affected by age; yet other linguistic structures, like word order, "are resistant to any effect of the learner's age." In their book In Other Words, Bialystok and Hakuta state that syntax "remains accessible throughout life, even though the circumstances of our lives may muddy that access." Overall, "the amazing human ability to learn grammar," they argue, "remains with us as long as we remain human."

Phonological Acquisition Is Age-Sensitive
Unlike grammar learning, second-language phonological acquisition is subject to a sensitive period. The decline in "unaccented learning" of a foreign language is progressive, however, and not characterized by a predictably abrupt change. According to a study by James Flege, similar and not entirely novel sounds are the ones that are affected by age. In other words, new sounds are easier to pronounce with native-like accuracy than sounds that are similar but not identical to those found in one's first language.

According to Bruer, "we know almost nothing about the stages within the critical period for phonological learning...." We do know, Bruer continues, that "the system remains plastic and able to tune itself to a second phonology...until early in the second decade of life."

Vocabulary Learning Has No Critical Period
Of vocabulary acquisition in one's first language, Singleton writes, "there is no point at which vocabulary acquisition can be predicted to cease." There is also, Singleton suggests, no critical period for learning vocabulary in a second language.

According to the results of a study by Helen Neville using brain recordings, semantic information seems to be processed in the same way by both speakers of English as a second language and native English speakers throughout life. In The Myth of the First Three Years, Bruer relates this consistency in how we acquire vocabulary throughout life to brain maturation: "how we process vocabulary does not change with brain maturation, as one would expect it would if it were a form of time-limited, experience-expectant learning. It seems instead that the neural circuitry we need to process semantic information and learn vocabulary comes on-line early in development and does not change as we mature."

Conclusion: "Younger = Better in the Long Run"
It may be that the image of a window slamming shut as an analogy for the effect of age on one's ability to acquire a foreign language should be replaced by Bruer's analogy of a reservoir that "gradually evaporates." This analogy suggests a progressive rather than abrupt decline in ability over time. Regarding critical periods in second-language acquisition, Bialystok and Hakuta suggest that the difference between child and adult learners is more quantitative (or a matter of degree) than qualitative: "Overall...the evidence of a critical period for acquiring a second language is, at best, confusing." Although the evidence, argue Bialystok and Hakuta, indicates that the learning process is the same for both adults and children, and that second-language learning is not necessarily subject to biological critical periods, they do state that "on average, there is a continuous decline in ability with age."

Older beginners often show an initial advantage over younger beginners in learning a new language; however, over time the younger beginners usually overtake the older beginners. There seems then to be, according to Bialystok and Hakuta, a "tortoise-and-the-hare effect"; or as Singleton has put it, "younger = better in the long run." For this reason, we should by no means discount the importance of learning a second language early. As Bruer states, "The brain and early childhood literature is correct to emphasize that second-language learning is increasingly important and that often American schools provide too little language instruction too late."

What should be questioned or re-evaluated are the underlying assumptions that side-step the issue of how best to teach foreign languages. The "age at which one first encounters a second language," explains Singleton, "is only one of the many determinants of the ultimate level of proficiency attained in that language." We must not neglect other considerations, including what neuroscience is now telling us about how second languages might best be taught and learned.

References
Bialystok, Ellen, and Hakuta, Kenji. In Other Words. BasicBooks, A Division of HarperCollins Publishers, Inc., 1994.

Bruer, John T. The Myth of the First Three Years. The Free Press, A Division of Simon and Schuster Inc., 1999.

Marshall, Brad. April 16, 2000. Is there a 'child advantage' in learning foreign languages? Education Week. Vol. 19, number 22, pages 39, 41.

Singleton, David, and Lengyel, Zsolt. The Age Factor in Second Language Acquisition. Multilingual Matters Ltd., 1995.

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Is There a Critical Period for Learning a Foreign Language? - Brain Connection

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The Myth of Missed Opportunities A popular misconception regarding second-language learning is that there is a window, or critical period, for learning a second language that shuts down around the onset of puberty. In his article, "Is There a 'Child... Continue Reading →