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n China last month, Theresa May attended the launch of the British Council's English is Great campaign, intended to boost interest and fluency in our national language. This might sound like Donald Trump's notorious "Make America great again", but comes in fact from a stronger position. Beyond doubt, the use of English is greater than ever, and far more widespread than any other language in the world. All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn; it is also, uniquely, in practical use worldwide. The British Council reckons that English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people, a quarter of the world's population. It is taught from primary level up in all China's schools; it is the working language of the whole European Union.

On the news service France 24, English is used more prominently than French. Its use is required of all airline pilots and control towers, 24/7. And it is seen as an essential cachet for progress in some amazing places: for example, 14 years ago, the prime minister of Mongolia - a country with no historic links to an English-speaking power - decreed it should replace Russian in all schools as part of his aspiration to make Ulaanbaatar a centre for telephone call services. One in six Russians claims to speak it. English is clearly the language of choice for those with global aspirations, whatever their political stance towards Anglo-Saxon powers.

This global acceptance of English, now far beyond the zones of influence of the British empire or the United States' backyard, has effectively grown up in just a century - neatly, and a little paradoxically, since the 1919 treaty of Versailles. In deference to the US, this was the first international treaty written in English; but it also turned out to mark the incipient decline of the world's greatest English-speaking institution, the British empire. From a language point of view, however, British power had the good fortune to be succeeded by its cousin in North America, so that the usual historic lag, as political command leads on to linguistic imitation, was disguised. Even as Britain began to decline economically, its established position was reflected by increased take-up of English as the language to learn.

But all this while, especially from the 1920s to the 1990s, the focus of US expansion was changing, moving from North America to the world, leading to influence on trade, engineering, telecommunications, mining, media, science and finance, as the dollar moved to replace sterling as the world's reserve currency. This was followed by the digital information revolution, creating new fortunes based in Silicon Valley at the turn of the 21st century. These were all positive for the world role of English (a role founded by Great Britain), but should have been expected to peak later, in the growth of soft power and the increased popularity of American culture.

When circumstances change, dominant languages fall. And the change is clearly coming

It is this lagged growth of English, reflecting US influence hitherto, that we are now experiencing. Yet it is happening in a 21st century when other nations, particularly in Asia but also in South America and Africa, are far outpacing the US (let alone Britain and the European Union) in economic growth rates. This is an amazing juncture in world history. And two questions arise. Is the position of English a real asset to the states that speak it natively? And is the language likely to hold this position in the pecking order indefinitely?

Considering the windfall benefits of English as one's own language, some immediate advantages are undeniable. It has given direct access to the world's principal medium of communication: good for having an inside track on "news we can use", as well as facilitated access for well-educated anglophones to influential jobs. It has also put us in a position to charge some kind of rent for allowing others admission to this linguistic elite: hence the massive earnings from teaching English as a foreign language (now well over £2bn in the UK alone, reaching £3bn by 2020), and global markets for English-language publishing (£1.4bn in exports in 2015). This is another spin-off from Britain's recent history of dominance, like the siting of the Greenwich meridian, giving daily opportunities for global trades between Asia and America, or the association of investment, and hence global finance, with the City of London.

But special knowledge of a language is an asset that wastes all too soon when it becomes global property. World English will have just a historic connection to Britain or the US, and knowing it well is no longer exclusive to native speakers. Even the short-term windfall advantages came with a moral hazard. Presumption of entitlement can breed complacency at home, as well as resentment abroad - all too evident in the current "negotiations" on Britain's divorce from Europe.

It is hard to credit the vulnerability of a language such as English - which has spread, unbidden and unplanned, far beyond its homeland, and is even claimed to be the "language of freedom". But this in itself is nothing new. Transnational lingua francas, once established, always give off an aura of permanence. Yet when circumstances change, they fall. And the change is clearly coming.

And so the natural expectation will be that after the new powers, such as China, India or Brazil, establish themselves economically, politically (and probably militarily), their linguistic and cultural influence too will come to be felt, among those who want to do business with them, and then with one another. But as with all newly dominant languages, there will be a lag.

If centred on China, say, the world may be less enthusiastic for "the hidden hand" of Adam Smith's free markets. If other centres emerge, the result may be more mixed, asserting local Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu traditions. Evolving translation technologies may make languages largely interchangeable, pushing national cultures into the background. Whatever, there will be no special deference to the current English-speaking tradition.

Something like this, after all, is what happened in the 17th century, when the newly global power France won a role for French as a common language for civilised Europe: French - with strong Enlightenment overtones - replaced Latin itself, which had held that role for 15 centuries. In a different way, it is what happened in the 19th century, when the imperial interlopers Russia and Britain abolished Farsi in their Asian domains. Before that, Farsi had been pre-eminent for 800 years as the language of Muslim culture, trade and politics.

For English, therefore, its current peak is likely to be as good as it will ever get, its glory as a world language lasting just a couple of centuries - almost a flash in the pan, not yet comparable with those forerunners Latin or Farsi. And on present form, its fall is likely to coincide with the latest rise of China, whose documented history has run for three millennia. Chinese, too, is great.

Nicholas Ostler is the author of Empires of the Word, and The Last Lingua Franca. He chairs the Foundation for Endangered Languages

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Have we reached peak English in the world? | Nicholas Ostler

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One of Britain's greatest strengths is set to diminish as China asserts itself on the world stage, says author Nicholas Ostler

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Want to say "Hello," but don't know the local language? Try waving your hand. Such gestures, common among humans, are also surprisingly similar among chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest great ape relatives. Now, a new study has identified numerous gestures that mean the same thing to both species. That suggests these signals have biological underpinnings and could be inherited from our last common ancestor.

Gestures, signals often used to get someone's attention or ask for or stop something, are not technically languages. They don't have specific linguistic and grammatical rules or accepted vocabularies. But gestures still have meaning: Among chimpanzees, for example, scientists have documented that many of their movements- from mouth stroking to request food or arm raising to request grooming -are used to elicit specific responses from other chimpanzees. Researchers have now found something similar in bonobos, great apes closely related to chimpanzees but with longer legs, pink lips, and long hair that's parted in the middle on their heads.

Scientists started by shooting and analyzing videos of wild bonobos in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. When a bonobo made a common gesture that brought a consistent, satisfying response from others, it was added to the list. For example, when one bonobo looked at another while loudly scratching one arm, the second often responded by grooming the first. Because the first bonobo was almost always satisfied by this response, the researchers concluded that a "big, loud scratch" is a request for grooming. The scientists next compared the bonobo gestures to those of chimpanzees, and found that their repertoires overlapped by about 90%, significantly more than "would be expected by chance," says lead author Kirsty Graham, a comparative psychologist at the University of York in the United Kingdom.

The similar gestures with similar meanings are probably part of "an old repertoire that's biologically inherited," says Graham, whose team reports its findings today in PLOS Biology. It's likely that humans share in this, too, as many people seem to readily understand what the animal wants.

But some gestures are clearly learned or altered, not simply inherited, like the very exaggerated arm raise that Shiba, one male bonobo, made while simultaneously thrusting out his chest. He seems to do it to emphasize his request to another bonobo-and it works.

Because a high percentage of the gestures and meanings are shared by bonobos and chimpanzees, the researchers suggest that the same gestures with the same meanings may have also been used by the last common ancestor ( Pan-Homo) of these great apes and humans. All three species, the scientists hypothesize, use these gestures (although human gestures do require further study) because they are inherited biologically. Alternatively, the apes could have evolved the gestures and their meanings independently, but the researchers consider this an "unlikely" scenario.

The study may raise more questions than it answers, however, says Richard Moore, a cognitive scientist at Humboldt University in Berlin. The paper, he notes, analyzes only "broadly categorized gestures" that would be " potentially comprehensible between [the two] species," and does not demonstrate that bonobos and chimpanzees actually understand each other's gestures. Moreover, the study does not include small, but important details that might differ between the two species' gestures or vocalizations they might add when gesturing and that would make it more difficult for a bonobo to correctly interpret a chimpanzee's gestures or vice versa.

Still, Moore says, "The data are interesting and a good starting point for future research." Graham's team is now launching a study to see how people respond to the apes' gestures to find out how many of these humans understand, and whether they overlap with gestures we commonly use.
*Correction, 28 February, 10:15 a.m.: An earlier version of this post misstated the location of the wild bonobos.

doi:10.1126/science.aat4455

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Want to say "Hello," but don't know the local language? Try waving your hand. Such gestures, common among humans, are also surprisingly similar among chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest great ape relatives. Now, a new study has identified numerous gestures that mean the same thing to both species.

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Did you know you're speaking an Indigenous language when you say many Australian place names?

Parramatta, Woolowin, Goodooga, Canberra, Bondi, Murwillumbah, Ballarat, Eucla, Tallebudgera and Yackandandah.

2019 has been declared the International Year of Indigenous Languages and the ABC is getting involved with a project called This Place.

This Place invites Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people to create a short video about a place name, and the story behind it.

Over the past two years on Word Up, we've met speakers who talk about certain places and the meaning of their language names.

These are the places that name us.

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Did you know you're speaking an Indigenous language when you say many Australian place names? Parramatta, Woolowin, Goodooga, Canberra, Bondi, Murwillumbah, Ballarat, Eucla, Tallebudgera and Yackandandah. 2019 has been declared the International Year of Indigenous Languages and the ABC is getting involved with a project called This Place.

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What could the many synonyms in the English language possibly have to do with social disconnection? And what does jargon, a kind of language that nobody likes but can't stop, won't stop using, have to do with manipulating meaning?

Perhaps nothing at all... or perhaps they can be stark reminders that words aren't all created equal. The language choices we make can have profound repercussions for how we engage with the world, and the world with us.

How Language Reflects Life

Recent research tells us that the very technologies designed to connect people, such as social media, often end up disconnecting us from experiencing the simple pleasures of being human in the natural world. Modern life online can be lonely. Language sometimes reflect this.

As life grows increasingly more complex, it requires an ever-evolving, specialized language, another kind of social technology, to explain all the shadowy online things on which we spend our precious time, social interactions that are virtually real, yet somehow not quite real. Language naturally changes, and yet many of the trends of words, catchphrases, sound bytes that are produced and promoted over others can also give us a niggling sense of disconnection, or even of being played, where the emotional impact of meaning itself can also seem virtually real, yet not quite real. Through language, trivial things can be made to seem more important than they are, while more significant things can be overlooked-or deliberately obscured.

Consider the wild debate over how the Oxford Junior Dictionary for children removed infrequently used nature terms like "chestnut," "lark," "buttercup," and "clover," and replaced them with seemingly more relevant contemporary technical jargon, such as "block-graph," "analogue," "chatroom," and "mp3 player," thereby prizing an "interior, solitary childhood" over one spent playing outside in the woods and fields.

English probably has more synonyms than any other language.

Does it matter? Why be up in arms about this news at all, as many prominent writers and readers were? In general there's nothing wrong with new words entering the language. This decision was made based on usage studies from largely children's texts and corpora, so shouldn't we all move with the times and trust in an objective science? Or could data be biased?

As the uproar shows, in some vague, indescribable way, we feel something when we see the first group of words that we may not with regards to the second. Is it just cultural, poetic, or linguistic prejudice that makes us like a some words, and not others? Or is there some other story behind why some words seem to alienate us?

The English Language's Split Personality

It may have something to do with the strange bipolar nature of English, lexically torn between two languages. The English language is at its heart a Germanic language. And yet, after the Norman Conquest, Norman French became the language of the elite ruling class. This caused a huge influx of Latinate words to enter the language at high levels of society, such as government, law, education and business. French was the language of power.

This had a profound effect on the emerging Modern English language. As a result, English has this split personality of two opposing lexicons-one from the Germanic/Anglo-Saxon side of the family tree and the other from the French/Greco-Latinate interloper-existing side by side (and uncomfortably glaring at each other at family reunions).

Because of this, English probably has more synonyms than any other language, with many redundant pairs that mean essentially the same thing, like flood/inundation, snake/serpent, inside/interior, friendly/amiable, bloom/flower, answer/respond, cow/bovine, gift/present to name just a few. But words are not all about meaning. Though they may mean the same things, the ways and the contexts in which they're used are very different, as well as the assumptions we implicitly make when one is used and not the other.

Germanic origin words tend to be the short words, usually describing simple human needs, nature, life and relationships ( births, deaths, love, sun, moon, earth, water), while Latinate words are all the big long ones- more polysyllabic, abstract, formal, and fancy. It's thanks to both linguistic strands, as well as other borrowings, that English has such a richness of vocabulary, with clear jobs for both classes of words.

Style guides, plain language advocates, and teachers often follow George Orwell's dictum to "never use a long word where a short one will do."

Together with conventional Latin and Greek scientific usage, Latinate forms by now make up a majority of English vocabulary... and that number might be increasing, thanks to jargon.

Where Jargon Fits In

Originally used in more formal, intellectual and abstract contexts, Latinate words have held onto their prestige and their power. So when we coin new words to describe new things (and old things), especially if we want to sound smart, precise, and scientific, we overwhelmingly reach for a Latinate form, not a Germanic one. Instead of just talking, we now also have dialoguing (even if we wish we didn't). Some studies have shown that though users of this more formal language might be seen as competent, listeners often view them as distant and unapproachable, while speakers that use more Germanic forms are often seen as flexible and might be more likely to "help you out of a jam."

This is perhaps because most of the words we absorb as babies and first learn as children are still the little Germanic words, and they also happen to be the ones that are still most commonly used. So we develop this long-lived, deep-rooted familiarity with their meanings and their senses in a way that we don't with Latinate words, which can often seem detached and disconnected from any emotional reaction to a word's meaning. While we worry about disastrous " flood" warnings, our French friends might have the same kind of emotional panic about imminent " inundations." English has borrowed the same word but it certainly doesn't feel the same. Likewise, snakes might give you the shivers, while serpents don't threaten you in quite the same way. Short, Germanic origin words can have a significant impact on how we react to information.

For that reason, style guides, plain language advocates, and teachers often follow is more easily remembered and absorbed than its mysterious scientific name George Orwell's dictum to "never use a long word where a short one will do." Despite advising students to avoid using Latinate forms, a study showed that many instructors often unwittingly violate their own rules, and are swayed by writing that contains more Latinate forms, possibly because of the assumption of this type of language being more educated, precise (e.g. spotty vs occasional mean the same thing but one seems more definitive), and prestigious (a chamber is a lot grander than a room). So while the familiar, shorter words are viewed positively, we may assume the longer words are more important, intellectual, and possibly convey a lot more meaning than we can really grasp. A nature term like the flower forget-me-not directly borrowed from German Vergissmeinnicht myosotis (from the Greek for the just as picturesque mouse ear).

This matters, because Latinate words can seem more distant and a little unreal. Ultimately, their meanings can be more easily manipulated and abused without us understanding instinctively what's happened-such as when jargon is used in euphemisms or doublespeak (when it's designed to deliberately mislead) or other circumlocutions. This happens all too frequently in politics, government, bureaucracy, the military, and corporate life-all areas of concentrated social power.

Take these poor, unloved, deliberately evasive and confusing examples of jargon from the U.S. government's own site on plain language:

It's easy to see how the shorter, plainer version may pack more of an emotional punch, something a government bureaucrat or military spokesperson might want to avoid.

How Jargon Can Exclude and Obscure

It turns out that, far from being objective, jargon-outwardly a sober, professional kind of talk for experts from different occupational fields-has always carried with it some very human impulses, placing power and prestige over knowledge. A doctor, for example, might inappropriately use jargon in explaining a diagnosis to a patient, which prevents the patient from participating in their own care. This quality of jargon attracts those that might want to obscure biases, beef up simplistic ideas, or even hide social or political embarrassments behind a slick veneer of seemingly objective, "scientific" language without being challenged.

Latinate forms happen to lend themselves well to new terminology like this, especially technical jargon, for those very perceptions of precision and prestige, as well as detachment. But this detachment comes with a price. The alienness and incomprehensibility of new jargon words we're unfamiliar with might sometimes make us a mite uncomfortable. It can sound inauthentic, compared to other innovative language change, from slang to secret languages. There are all kinds of innovative speech used by certain groups not just to share information easily, or to talk about new ideas, but also to show belonging and identity-and to keep outsiders out.

Jargon, as useful as it is in the right contexts, can end up being socially problematic and divisive when it hides and manipulates meanings.

It's one of the reasons people hate jargon with a passion and have been railing against it for years, H. W. Fowler called it centuries even. "talk that is considered both ugly-sounding and hard to understand." L.E. Sissman is a little more subtle. Sissman defines jargon as "all of these debased and isolable forms of the mother tongue that attempt to paper over an unpalatable truth and/or to advance the career of the speaker (or the issue, cause or product he is agent for) by a kind of verbal sleight of hand, a one-upmanship of which the reader or listener is victim."

Jargon, as useful as it is in the right contexts, can end up being socially problematic and divisive when it hides and manipulates meanings from those who need to receive the information. This negative reception hasn't stopped jargon that apes scientific language from being widely produced, by economists, academics, entrepreneurs, journalists... and probably even poets. Jargon has now become the devil's corporate middle management's language, making information harder to share and receive. It has seeped into almost every facet of a complex modern life, giving us new buzzwords not even a mother could love, with terms like self-actualization, monetize, incentivize, imagineering, onboarding, synergize, and the like. And there's so much more where that came from.

When Jargon Becomes Dangerous

William D. Lutz talks about how jargon and doublespeak can often be carefully designed to cover up embarrassing or secret information. For example, a commercial airline that had a 727 crash, killing three passengers, was able to pass off the resulting three million dollar insurance profit on its books as "the involuntary conversion of a 727," which was unlikely to be questioned by confused shareholders whose eyes would probably have glazed over from the cumbersome legal jargon.

Words aren't equal just because they mean the same thing, especially when the stakes are high. It's not simply a matter of knowing or not knowing the meaning of these words, or if they accurately describe facts, but what Sally McConnell-Ginet calls the conceptual or cultural baggage, the hidden background assumptions the language carries with them, the 'ologies and 'isms that pretend to be something they're not. Most recently in politics, the Kavanaugh confirmation hearings showed how deftly legal terminology can be wielded to avoid or plausibly deny or confuse clear facts. For example, denying knowledge of stolen documents is literally not a lie if you steadfastly assume they aren't stolen, despite textual evidence to the contrary. The statement "I am not sure that all legal scholars refer to Roe as the settled law of the land" literally defers to a fact, the meaning of which is true. The conceptual baggage the statement carries with it, however, strongly suggests the writer does not disagree with the opinion.

Linguist Dwight Bolinger suggests that this is exactly the kind of heinous abuse of meaning that makes linguistic activism critical, shining a spotlight on these egregious cases where lies are hidden by omission or avoidance of the truth in jargon, euphemism, doublespeak, and other linguistic trickery.

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What could the many synonyms in the English language possibly have to do with social disconnection? And what does jargon, a kind of language that nobody likes but can't stop, won't stop using, have to do with manipulating meaning? Perhaps nothing at all... or perhaps they can be stark reminders that words aren't all created equal.

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The know-it-all defends the rules of grammar with the kind of moral fervor usually reserved for politics or religion. More often than not, he gets most worked up about "rules" that aren't rules at all, but misconceptions that grammarians have tried for years to correct. Theodore M.

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History of the Alphabet from ancient hieroglyphs to the modern English Latin script

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History of the Alphabet from ancient hieroglyphs to the modern English Latin script

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Most of us use the letters of the alphabet everyday, but did you ever stop to wonder how their shapes came to be? The history of the alphabet is fascinating, and each of the 26 letters has its own unique story. Matt Baker (of UsefulCharts) has designed a handy poster that documents the evolution of our familiar alphabet from its ancient Egyptian Proto-Sinaitic roots (c. 1750 BCE) up to present day Latin script.

The limited edition Evolution of the Alphabet chart shows how early shapes and symbols eventually morphed to become the ABCs we know today. While some letters are recognizable quite early on, others have little resemblance at all. The letter "A" for example, began as an Egyptian hieroglyphic that looks like an animal head with horns. Through Phoenician (c. 1000 BCE), early Greek (c. 750 BCE), and early Latin (c. 500 BCE) periods, the lines that made "A" eventually simplified to become the symbol we know today.

The letter "C" was originally shaped like a boomerang or hunter's stick. It wasn't until around 500 BCE that it was given its crescent shape, and approximately another 500 years more until the Romans flipped it to the direction it is written today (and also reworked the shape to become "G"). Additionally, one particularly interesting development the chart reveals is how the early Greek letter for "F" actually evolved to also become present-day "U," "V," "W," and "Y."

You can buy the Evolution of the Alphabet chart and check out more of Baker's poster designs on the UsefulCharts website.

Matt Baker (of UsefulCharts) has designed a handy poster that documents the fascinating history of the alphabet.

Evolution of the English Alphabet from r/Damnthatsinteresting

All images via Matt Baker / UsefulCharts.

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Colorful Chart Reveals the Evolution of the English Alphabet From Egyptian Hieroglyphics

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Most of us use the letters of the alphabet everyday, but did you ever stop to wonder how their shapes came to be? The history of the alphabet is fascinating, and each of the 26 letters has its own unique story.

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SIL has developed a mountain metaphor to talk about #language development and endangerment. Take a moment to study the scale in @theEthnologue and understand where languages fit. #IYIL2019 #IndigenousLanguages

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SIL has developed a mountain metaphor to talk about #language development and endangerment. Take a moment to study the scale in @theEthnologue and understand where languages fit. #IYIL2019 #IndigenousLanguages https://t.co/rHM9cN3fYF

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SIL has developed a mountain metaphor to talk about #language development and endangerment. Take a moment to study the scale in @theEthnologue and understand where languages fit. #IYIL2019 #IndigenousLanguages pic.twitter.com/rHM9cN3fYF
— SIL International (@SILintl) January 28, 2019

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SIL has developed a mountain metaphor to talk about #language development and endangerment. Take a moment to study the scale in @theEthnologue and understand where languages fit. #IYIL2019 #IndigenousLanguages https://t.co/rHM9cN3fYF

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SIL has developed a mountain metaphor to talk about #language development and endangerment. Take a moment to study the scale in @theEthnologue and understand where languages fit. #IYIL2019 #IndigenousLanguages https://t.co/rHM9cN3fYF

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SIL has developed a mountain metaphor to talk about #language development and endangerment. Take a moment to study the scale in @theEthnologue and understand where languages fit. #IYIL2019 #IndigenousLanguages

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West Coast Eagle Anthem in Noongar language

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West Coast Eagle Anthem in Noongar language

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We've heard the West Coast Eagle's club song plenty of times since their heart-stopping AFL grand final win in September, but you've probably never heard it sung like this.

The Noongar language group Walyalap Waangkan shared a video on Twitter of their members singing the premiership club's song in the indigenous WA language.
To sing along to the West Coast Eagle's club song in Noongar, watch the video in the player above.
Teacher Sharon Gregory said the song was translated by class members just three years ago.

"Every year we have a singing and yarning session and invite people to sing along with us and share the Noongar language through the songs we write." she said.

"This year we were very lucky to have Kobie Morrison and his choirs, Koondarm and Karnadjil, as well as Mandajil Moorna with others we invited."

Walyalap Waangkan members have been meeting every week for the past six years to learn Noongar.

Ms Gregory said learning indigenous languages was important for people to connect to their culture.

"Aboriginal people were not allowed to speak their language years ago so now in a way we are reviving the Noongar language and sharing with the community," she said.

"In any other country you visit it's important to learn some of their language so why not learn the language and culture where you live."

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Hear the West Coast Eagles club song sung in Noongar

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We've heard the West Coast Eagle's club song plenty of times since their heart-stopping AFL grand final win in September, but you've probably never heard it sung like this. The Noongar language group Walyalap Waangkan shared a video on Twitter of their members singing the premiership club's song in the indigenous WA language.

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Linguistically speaking, Australia is special. With around 250 languages spoken when Australia was first colonized, Australia was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world.

But few people speak our Indigenous languages. As of 2016, only 10% of Australia's Indigenous population spoke an Indigenous language at home. Most Indigenous languages are now "asleep," waiting to be woken up by language revivalists.

Australian languages did not simply fade away; they were actively silenced by governments, schools and missions.

At most missions through the mid-20th century, Aboriginal languages were to be replaced with English. The Commonwealth Office of Education explained its intention in 1953:

The policy of assimilation demands a lingua franca as soon as possible-not only for communication between aboriginal and European but between aboriginal and aboriginal. That lingua franca must be English... There is a need everywhere for a planned, vigorous, and maintained drive for English. Substitution of a new language for the old is not likely to disrupt the traditional social structure of the people any more than the substitution of Christian religion for their old religion and superstitions. In fact the former might assist the latter process.

As linguist Arthur Capell wrote in 1964:

Government policy looks forward to the loss of Aboriginal languages so that the Aborigines may be "assimilated."

In pursuit of this policy, the Commonwealth Government banned Aboriginal languages in schools. It required teachers in mission schools to report on whether and for what reason they used any Aboriginal words. Aboriginal languages were to be forbidden even in the playground. The use of mission dormitories, separating children from families, compounded the attack on language.

This attack was partly based on the idea that Aboriginal languages were deficient and impaired critical thinking. Missionary linguist Beulah Lowe was told in the 1950s that Aboriginal people have " no real language." Linguist Robert Dixon remembered being told in 1963 that Aboriginal languages were " just a few grunts and groans."

As recently as 1969, the Commonwealth government presumed the need for "remedial work" in Aboriginal schools due to the supposed "inhibitory influences" of "bilingualism in education."

Nowadays educators are aware of the cognitive benefits of being multilingual.

Australian languages did not simply fade away; they were actively silenced by governments, schools, and missions.

Translating the Bible

The few Europeans who did learn Australian languages were mostly missionaries. But their approaches were contradictory. On the one hand they directly contributed to the loss of Aboriginal languages by putting children in dormitories, English-only schools and separating families. On the other, missionaries showed a greater concern for languages than other colonizers, due to their drive to translate the Bible.

These efforts to translate the Bible were slow compared to those overseas. The first Aboriginal Bible was completed in 2007 (in Kriol, spoken in northern Australia). The Maori Bible was complete in 1868 and by 1946 the Bible was in 30 Pacific languages.

Translation efforts began in 1824 when Lancelot Threlkeld began learning Awabakal of the Lake Macquarie region and, with his Aboriginal co-translator Biraban, completed an Awabakal Gospel. But disease and violence devastated the community. By 1840 only 16 people were left at the mission.

Other small-scale translation projects followed. German missionaries, perhaps due to their Lutheran tradition of Bible translation or their unfamiliarity with English, made significant efforts. Teichelmann and Schurmann, for example, wrote a grammar of the Kaurna language of the Adelaide region in 1840.

Missionary linguists always depended on Aboriginal co-translators to teach and translate their language. Carl Strehlow at Hermannsburg worked with Moses Tjalkabota. Strehlow was one of the few who acknowledged his Aboriginal partner; we don't know the names of others.

In many places, Aboriginal people used missionaries to have their language and knowledge recorded for future generations. Their foresight is being rewarded. Now, over a century later, their work is being used in language revival projects.

Learning English

Meanwhile, many Aboriginal people quickly learned English, finding it brought them opportunities to defend their interests. They were often gifted linguists. Usually already multilingual when the colonizers came, adding English was relatively easy.

Dispossession of land often meant distinct Aboriginal language communities were thrust together, so Aboriginal people used English, or an English pidgin, as a lingua franca. Some thought it best to keep their language secret from colonizers, perhaps to hide their Aboriginality and the associated discrimination, perhaps to uphold their authority over their cultural knowledge. So they spoke English.

Changing attitudes

By the 1940s, white Australia was realizing Aboriginal people were not doomed to extinction. Instead, they assumed Aboriginal cultures and languages would die out once Aboriginal people assimilated.

Aboriginal linguists and missionaries at Hermannsburg, Ernabella and Milingimbi in central and northern Australia advanced translation in Arrente, Pitjantjatjara and Yolngu Matha and used language in the classroom. Yet as late as 1964, Capell wrote of recording languages so that they "may be handed down to generations who will see them only as darker members of a European culture." Linguistic research was still considered a matter of archiving languages on their deathbeds.

Attitudes began changing in the 1960s. In 1963, Yolngu people presented their Bark Petition to the Commonwealth government. The petition was written first in Gupapyngu with an English translation. Aboriginal languages could no longer be dismissed as "grunts and groans" of little cultural value.

In 1973, the Commonwealth government introduced mother tongue education at select Aboriginal schools. Aboriginal educators increasingly called for and implemented "two-ways" education.

Today it is possible to study Indigenous Languages Education or Yolngu Studies. Or you could learn a word a day through RN's Word Up. Communities are "waking up" languages such as Kaurna and Awabakal. But there is a long way to go. Communities wishing to keep language strong still face barriers of policy, prejudice, funding, and resourcing.
This article is republished from The Conversation under a Creative Commons license. Read the original article.

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The racist history behind the disappearance of Australia's indigenous languages

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Linguistically speaking, Australia is special. With around 250 languages spoken when Australia was first colonized, Australia was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. But few people speak our Indigenous languages. As of 2016, only 10% of Australia's Indigenous population spoke an Indigenous language at home.

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Why do so few Aussies speak an Australian language?

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Why do so few Aussies speak an Australian language?

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Linguistically speaking, Australia is special. With around 250 languages spoken when Australia was first colonised, Australia was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world.

But few people speak our Indigenous languages. As of 2016, only 10% of Australia's Indigenous population spoke an Indigenous language at home. Most Indigenous languages are now "asleep", waiting to be woken up by language revivalists.

Australian languages did not simply fade away; they were actively silenced by governments, schools and missions.

Read more: Some Australian Indigenous languages you should know

At most missions through the mid-20th century, Aboriginal languages were to be replaced with English. The Commonwealth Office of Education explained its intention in 1953:

The policy of assimilation demands a lingua franca as soon as possible - not only for communication between aboriginal and European but between aboriginal and aboriginal. That lingua franca must be English... There is a need everywhere for a planned, vigorous and maintained drive for English. Substitution of a new language for the old is not likely to disrupt the traditional social structure of the people any more than the substitution of Christian religion for their old religion and superstitions. In fact the former might assist the latter process.

As linguist Arthur Capell wrote in 1964:

Government policy looks forward to the loss of Aboriginal languages so that the Aborigines may be "assimilated."

In pursuit of this policy, the Commonwealth Government banned Aboriginal languages in schools. It required teachers in mission schools to report on whether and for what reason they used any Aboriginal words. Aboriginal languages were to be forbidden even in the playground. The use of mission dormitories, separating children from families, compounded the attack on language.

Groote Eylandt Linguistics

This attack was partly based on the idea that Aboriginal languages were deficient and impaired critical thinking. Missionary linguist Beulah Lowe was told in the 1950s that Aboriginal people have " no real language." Linguist Robert Dixon remembered being told in 1963 that Aboriginal languages were " just a few grunts and groans."

As recently as 1969, the Commonwealth government presumed the need for "remedial work" in Aboriginal schools due to the supposed "inhibitory influences" of "bilingualism in education".

Nowadays educators are aware of the cognitive benefits of being multilingual.

Translating the Bible

The few Europeans who did learn Australian languages were mostly missionaries. But their approaches were contradictory. On the one hand they directly contributed to the loss of Aboriginal languages by putting children in dormitories, English-only schools and separating families. On the other, missionaries showed a greater concern for languages than other colonisers, due to their drive to translate the Bible.

These efforts to translate the Bible were slow compared to those overseas. The first Aboriginal Bible was completed in 2007 (in Kriol, spoken in northern Australia). The Maori Bible was complete in 1868 and by 1946 the Bible was in 30 Pacific languages.

Read more: Meet the remote Indigenous community where a few thousand people use 15 different languages

Translation efforts began in 1824 when Lancelot Threlkeld began learning Awabakal of the Lake Macquarie region and, with his Aboriginal co-translator Biraban, completed an Awabakal Gospel. But disease and violence devastated the community. By 1840 only 16 people were left at the mission.

Other small-scale translation projects followed. German missionaries, perhaps due to their Lutheran tradition of Bible translation or their unfamiliarity with English, made significant efforts. Teichelmann and Schurmann, for example, wrote a grammar of the Kaurna language of the Adelaide region in 1840.

Groote Eylandt Linguistics

Missionary linguists always depended on Aboriginal co-translators to teach and translate their language. Carl Strehlow at Hermannsburg worked in with Moses Tjalkabota. Strehlow was one of the few who acknowledged his Aboriginal partner; we don't know the names of others.

In many places, Aboriginal people used missionaries to have their language and knowledge recorded for future generations. Their foresight is being rewarded. Now, over a century later, their work is being used in language revival projects.

Learning English

Meanwhile, many Aboriginal people quickly learned English, finding it brought them opportunities to defend their interests. They were often gifted linguists. Usually already multilingual when the colonisers came, adding English was relatively easy.

Dispossession of land often meant distinct Aboriginal language communities were thrust together, so Aboriginal people used English, or an English pidgin, as a lingua franca. Some thought it best to keep their language secret from colonisers, perhaps to hide their Aboriginality and the associated discrimination, perhaps to uphold their authority over their cultural knowledge. So they spoke English.

Changing attitudes

By the 1940s, white Australia was realising Aboriginal people were not doomed to extinction. Instead, they assumed Aboriginal cultures and languages would die out once Aboriginal people assimilated.

Read more: Friday essay: dreaming of a 'white Christmas' on the Aboriginal missions

Aboriginal linguists and missionaries at Hermannsburg, Ernabella and Milingimbi in central and northern Australia advanced translation in Arrente, Pitjantjatjara and Yolngu Matha and used language in the classroom. Yet as late as 1964, Capell wrote of recording languages so that they "may be handed down to generations who will see them only as darker members of a European culture". Linguistic research was still considered a matter of archiving languages on their deathbeds.

Attitudes began changing in the 1960s. In 1963, Yolngu people presented their Bark Petition to the Commonwealth government. The petition was written first in Gupapyngu with an English translation. Aboriginal languages could no longer be dismissed as "grunts and groans" of little cultural value.

In 1973, the Commonwealth government introduced mother tongue education at select Aboriginal schools. Aboriginal educators increasingly called for and implemented "two-ways" education.

Today it is possible to study Indigenous Languages Education or Yolngu Studies. Or you could learn a word a day through RN's Word Up. Communities are "waking up" languages such as Kaurna and Awabakal. But there is a long way to go. Communities wishing to keep language strong still face barriers of policy, prejudice, funding and resourcing.

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Why do so few Aussies speak an Australian language?

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Linguistically speaking, Australia is special. With around 250 languages spoken when Australia was first colonised, Australia was one of the most linguistically diverse places in the world. But few people speak our Indigenous languages. As of 2016, only 10% of Australia's Indigenous population spoke an Indigenous language at home.

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Why Languages and Dialects are Different Animals

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Why Languages and Dialects are Different Animals

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dench (adjective) definition and synonyms | Macmillan Dictionary

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Define dench (adjective) and get synonyms. What is dench (adjective)? dench (adjective) meaning, pronunciation and more by Macmillan Dictionary

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Oral language case studies - 2M Language Services

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Departments of Health/Human Services, Federal Police, hospitals & other organisations require translations of oral languages to reach CALD communities.

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Welcome to ABC Radio National. Skip to: RN Navigation RN Search RN Content

Big Ideas brings you the best of talks, forums, debates, and festivals held in Australia and around the world, casting light on the major social, cultural, scientific and political issues.

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Welcome to ABC Radio National. Skip to: RN Navigation RN Search RN Content Big Ideas brings you the best of talks, forums, debates, and festivals held in Australia and around the world, casting light on the major social, cultural, scientific and political issues.

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Millennials, in a way, are a firmly bilingual group, thanks in no small part to "textspeak." With the rise of Web 2.0 at the turn of 21st century, instant messaging slang and the bevy of acronyms that resulted have become a de facto marker of age, if not cool-factor. Down under, in the remote village of Lajamanu located in Australia's Northern Territory, recent generations of Indigenous Australian Warlpiri people have created a language much less ubiquitous. Light Warlpiri, a mixed language no more than 40 years old, is spoken almost exclusively by people aged 35 and younger.

Light Warlpiri is made up of a triumvirate of languages: Warlpiri, the indigenous one, Standard Australian English, the colonial one, and Kriol, the English-lexified creole. This blend makes its status as a "mixed language" plain. "Most of the verbs and the grammatical patterns that go along with verbs are from Kriol and English," says linguist Dr. Carmel O'Shannessy. "And most of the grammatical patterns that go along with nouns are from Warlpiri." O'Shannessy is Light Warlpiri's definitive researcher, whose work with the language began as part of her PhD research over a decade ago.

"From 1998-2001 I was living and working in Lajamanu community, not doing any research, but supporting the teaching of Warlpiri in the school's bilingual education program in Warlpiri and English," she says. "I heard a lot of what I thought was code-switching [alternating between languages according to who they were speaking with] ... and thought that it was interesting." With the community's permission, O'Shannessy began researching the way young people were talking as part of her PhD. In 2003, she realized they had developed their own language by systematically melding elements from the two languages they grew up with.

"For a mixed language to develop you have to have bilinguals or multilinguals, who code-switch a lot, in a very systematic pattern, and who have some kind of social reason to create their own way of speaking," says O'Shannessy. "Code-switching doesn't usually lead to this kind of outcome, it's fairly rare."

O'Shannessy is now based at Australian National University in Canberra, and has visited the Warlpiri community of Lajamanu several times since. "The language is split down the middle, with verbs on one side and nouns on the other," she says. "This is pretty interesting because there are not many ways of speaking in the world that have this split pattern between nouns and verbs."

It's not entirely clear why Light Warlpiri developed in Lajamanu when it did, but through linguistic research, scholars have been able to gather how it did. The most prevalent theory is that Light Warlpiri emerged from gaps in understanding between generations within the Warlpiri community. "Adults were code-switching between Warlpiri, the traditional language, and English and Kriol, a relatively new language," O'Shannessy says. "Kriol is a creole language that was created in north Australia from 1908 on, and has most words from English but most grammar and the sound system from Indigenous languages. Somewhat like the creoles in the Caribbean and some of the U.S."

When the code-switching adults were raising their children during the 1970s and '80s, things got even more layered. When speaking to young kids, adults "dropped in pronouns and verbs from English and Kriol into the middle of Warlpiri sentences," says O'Shannessy. "Those little kids processed this as one language, not as switching between languages. They added in some new grammatical patterns, that come from the other languages but are not the same, and then they had their own, new way of speaking." For the younger generation, this adult method of speaking didn't register as code-switching, but instead as its own language, the language that would become their language, Light Warlpiri.

The term code-switching is often applied to the verbal volleying many Black Americans participate in; in some environments, like majority-white workplaces, standard American English is most "appropriate," and in others, like family barbecues or church services, African American Vernacular English (AAVE) becomes more fitting. The reasons behind this oscillation between two different but identifiable ways of speaking are numerous, and Light Warlpiri operates similarly. Socially, code-switching functions as a way "to signal ourselves as members of one group versus another," says O'Shannessy. Additionally, it can be employed to "add flavor to our conversation," and "when the meaning we want to express does not have an exact translation in the other language." Early Light Warlpiri speakers likely drew upon all three factors when using the language. But young members of the community simply grew up with it as a dominant way of talking and so as they conventionalized it over time, it became a "[signal] for being young and from that community."

In the 1920s, the Australian government began forced migration of select Warlpiri people to Lajamanu. Before contact with Europeans, the Warlpiri were hunter-gatherers. The Lajamanu community was ultimately established in 1948, at a place then known as Hooker Creek. Prior to this, the land belonged to a neighboring indigenous community called the Gurindji people. "But the government didn't recognize Aboriginal land ownership so they considered it to be vacant," O'Shannessy adds.

"Code-switching doesn't usually lead to this kind of outcome, it's fairly rare."

Lajamanu is remote; the nearest town is 600 kilometers (373 miles) away. In the mid-20th century, lives were in flux, and "[people] were also working for no pay, just rations, with no choice of work and very little agency in their lives. Their lives were run by the government, they were not free to travel or live or work where they wanted to," O'Shannessy says. Having to start fresh outside of the comfort of relatives, these Warlpiri people were doubly isolated, both from city centers and kin. O'Shannessy says that this remoteness played a role. "Now everyone can talk to each other regularly on a cell phone, but it wasn't like that in the 1950s-1990s."

The small size of this particular town allowed for the rapid sharing of a new language like Light Warlpiri because it was common for everyone to see each other on a daily basis, "so a new way of speaking could quickly spread through the friendship groups of the children, and stop at the boundary of the community." The rapid migration of Warlpiri people to Lajamanu was mirrored in the development of this new language. "With all of this forced change in people's lives, how they used their languages suddenly had to change also. For example, they suddenly had to talk to people whose languages they didn't know, which is how Kriol developed."

Light Warlpiri, mixed-language origin story aside, has a particularly interesting grammatical construction: it has no future tense. Words that have an "-m" suffix indicate an event that has happened previously or is currently happening, but there is no parallel construction in the language for an event that will happen. This single letter word ending is a structural form that does not exist in any of Light Warlpiri's three mother languages (English, Kriol, and "strong" Warlpiri), thus further situating Light Warlpiri as a separate, newly-formed language unto itself.

Today, it's estimated that between 350 and 450 people speak Light Warlpiri (which, it should be noted, is not the whole of the village. According to a 2016 census, the total population was 606, but the community has grown since.) The Warlpiri language is spoken by everyone, but the multilingual older millennials who speak regular Warlpiri, plus English, some Kriol, and Light Warlpiri too, represent the cohort of people who created the mixed language and passed it down to their children. These multilingual members of Lajamanu choose to use Light Warlpiri as their main way of talking as a signal for "being young and from this community," O'Shannessy explains.

Just because a language exists doesn't mean it's yet written, and Light Warlpiri serves as confirmation of this. As it stands, the language is purely verbal because, O'Shannessy says, "the community and I haven't yet worked out a spelling system." This will remain the case until the Warlpiri demonstrate that they even want to formally document their language. (The importance of Dr. O'Shannessy's work is exemplified by the fact that she has been able to track a language in its infancy, rather than upon its imminent death; the fact that Light Warlpiri's first speakers are still living is another boon.) By contrast, the researcher notes, "Warlpiri is written, and has been for some time, and is used in the school and the church and some public documents."

Since Light Warlpiri's first official speakers were very young children, and since the language has only been alive for roughly four decades, the matriculation from verbal use to literary use might take time. In true millennial fashion, however: "People do write on social media, but not yet with a conventionalized way of spelling." As it turns out, Instagram captions may emerge as a definitive 21st century archive-the bridge between a new language being verbally communicated and officially documented.

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Millennial Aboriginal Australians Have Developed Their Own Language

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Millennials, in a way, are a firmly bilingual group, thanks in no small part to "textspeak." With the rise of Web 2.0 at the turn of 21st century, instant messaging slang and the bevy of acronyms that resulted have become a de facto marker of age, if not cool-factor.

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The Bible is, for the first time, being translated into Jamaican patois. It's a move welcomed by those Jamaicans who want their mother tongue enshrined as the national language - but opposed by others, who think learning and speaking English should be the priority.

In the Spanish Town Tabernacle near the capital, Kingston, the congregation is hearing the word of God in the language of the street.

At the front of the concrete-block church, a young man and woman read alternate lines from the Bible.

This is the Gospel of St Luke in Jamaican patois - or more precisely, "Jiizas - di buk we Luuk rait bout im".

The sound of the creole, developed from English by West African slaves in Jamaica's sugar plantations 400 years ago, has an electrifying effect on those listening.

Several women rise to testify, in patois, to what it means to hear the Bible in their mother tongue.

"It's almost as if you are seeing it," says a woman, referring to the moment when Jesus is tempted by the Devil.

"In the blink of an eye, you get the whole notion. It's as though you are watching a movie... it brings excitement to the word of God."

The Rev Courtney Stewart, General Secretary of the West Indies Bible Society, who has managed the translation project, insists the new Bible demonstrates the power of patois, and cites a line from Luke as an example.

'Vulgar' words

It's the moment when the Angel Gabriel goes to Mary to tell her she is going to give birth to Jesus.

English versions read along these lines: "And having come in, the angel said to her, 'Rejoice, highly favoured one, the Lord is with you: blessed are you among women.'"

"Now compare that with our translation of the Bible," says Mr Stewart.

"De angel go to Mary and say to 'er, me have news we going to make you well 'appy. God really, really, bless you and him a walk with you all de time."

Mr Stewart says the project is largely designed to bring scripture alive, but it also has another important function - to rescue patois from its second-class status in Jamaica and to enshrine it as a national language.

"The language is what defines us as Jamaicans," insists Courtney Stewart. It is who we are - patois-speakers."

The patois Bible represents a bold new attempt to standardise the language, with the historically oral tongue written down in a new phonetic form.

For example the passage relating the angel's visit to Mary reads: "Di ienjel go tu Mieri an se tu ar se, 'Mieri, mi av nyuuz we a go mek yu wel api. Gad riili riili bles yu an im a waak wid yu all di taim."

The New Testament has been completed by a team of translators at the Bible Society in Kingston - working from the original Greek - who intend to publish it in time for the 50th anniversary of Jamaica's independence from Britain on 6 August next year.

But some traditionalist Christians say the patois Bible dilutes the word of God, and insist that creole is no substitute for English.

Bishop Alvin Bailey, at the Portmore Holiness Church of God near Kingston, argues that Patois is too limited a language to represent the nuances of Biblical text, and has to resort to coarse expressions to makes its meaning clear.

"I don't think the Patois words can effectively communicate what the English words have communicated," he says.

"Even those (Patois) words that we would want to use to fully explain what was in the original, are words that are vulgar."

Many others see the elevation of patois as a backward step for Jamaica, in a globalised world demanding English.

The vast majority of children arrive at school speaking little apart from the creole of their ancestors, and teachers are under intense pressure from the government to replace it with English.

The head teacher at St Richard's Primary School in Kingston, Jacqueline Williams, says she can understand the policy, because people make up so much of what Jamaica exports.

"If they do go elsewhere they would have to have English as the language of communication," she says. "That's why it is being sold as our first language."

That pressure is felt by even by the smallest of the children in their smart uniforms playing outside the two blocks of brightly-coloured classrooms.

"A little child in our class who can only speak that way... is going to be embarrassed," says Mrs Williams.

"I think that esteem problems can develop because of it."

Stigma

Linguists at the University of the West Indies in Kingston, who have been working on the translation, insist that patois is an authentic language, with its own tenses and consistent grammatical rules.

Dr Nicole Scott claims that the response to declining exam results in English - which has been to reinforce the emphasis on English - is counter-productive.

"Literacy in patois would help the students to appreciate the structures that are used in English," she says.

Dr Scott says the new system of writing used the in patois Bible is critical if language skills are to be taught in creole, and that the Bible holds sufficient sway in Jamaica to act as powerful model.

"I think it will be massively, massively, helpful. People will realise they can hear the word of God in their own language and understand it very well, this same language that has been stigmatised for so long."

Faith Linton, a linguist of almost 80 who was one of the founders of the Patois Bible project, believes the way patois continues to be looked down upon threatens the very future of Jamaica itself.

From the balcony of her old plantation estate house on the north coast of Jamaica, managers once kept an eye on slaves working the sugar cane.

She spoke nothing but patois until she was 12.

"The damage is deeply psychological," she insists. "The patois-speaker feels inferior, full stop.

"Because the model is the white English man, his language and educational standards... and we have not been able to attain it.

"Out of this sense of inferiority will come violence, illiteracy, disturbed behaviour and damaged emotional attitudes. All those spring from the idea that my identity is inferior."

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Jamaica's patois Bible: The word of God in creole

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With the Bible being translated into Jamaican patois for the first time, the country is divided between those who want their mother tongue enshrined as a national language and others for whom English is the priority, reports the BBC's Robert Pigott.

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In 1990, the American Dialect Society named its first "word of the year" - a word (or phrase) chosen by a group of linguists and professors that encapsulates how Americans have been speaking for the past 12 months. The idea was conceived by Allan Metcalf, longtime executive secretary of the ADS.

"I was thinking, every year TIME Magazine chooses a person of the year, and they choose it not by some computer program, but rather the editors and readers making suggestions about who was influential," Metcalf told TIME. "Why couldn't we choose a word of the year?"

Other organizations - like Merriam-Webster and the Oxford English Dictionary - have since joined the tradition. But the ADS was the first.

From "fake news" to "metrosexual" to "Y2K," take a trip down memory lane and check out every word of the year since 1990.

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Every word of the year since 1990 - and the unique story behind why they were chosen

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From "fake news" to "hashtag" to "metrosexual," the American Dialect Society has named a "word of the year" since 1990. Chosen by a group of linguists and professors from around the country, each word encapsulates how Americans have been speaking for the past 12 months.

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Note and Disclaimer

Dijan Saikloun Stori im "unofficial translation" burru Greg Dickson (Wamut). If yu lugunat dijan en im afta 8pm Sadadei, im olwan na. Gu la http://www.bom.gov.au/nt/warnings/ bla det nyuwan Saikloun Stori. Dijan im laswan trensleishin ai garra duwum, dumaji det saikloun im guweiguwei na.

This is an unofficial translation of Tropical Cyclone Advice 50 (5:00pm Saturday March 23). It was written by an accredited Kriol-English interpreter and second-language Kriol speaker who is most proficient in the dialect of Kriol spoken in Ngukurr. It was done quickly and will likely contain some errors. Please do not use in lieu of the official Tropical Cyclone Advice from the Bureau of Meteorology.

*If you are reading this after 8pm Saturday, it is out of date. Please go to http://www.bom.gov.au/nt/warnings/ for the latest Cyclone Advice. This is the last Kriol translation that will be done because the cyclone is weakening and moving away from Kriol-speaking areas.

Saikloun Woning - Saikloun Stori Namba 50

Det midul pat bla Saikloun Treba im antap la len hafwei from Burrulula la Kwinslen Boda. Im bigiswan saikloun (gulum 'severe'). Im garra bi deinjeris du tunait wen im kipgon mubmub la inlen eriya.

Bla Witj Kantri?

Det Kantri gada det brabili woning - From Neithin Riba raitoba la Moningtin Ailen en lorra kantri la det eriya, laik la Golf Kantri en la Bakli: Burrulula, Robinsin Riba, Wollogorang, Mikatha Riba Main, Keip Krofid, Creswel Dauns en Brunet Dauns.

From det laswan Saikloun Stori, thei bin kensilim woning bla kantri from Pot Ropa la Neithin Riba en from Monington Ailen la Bektaun (la Kwinslen).

Im Namba 3 saikloun (1 im wikeswan, 5 im stronggeswan). If det saikloun im antap la yu, det win im blo 120 kilomita per awa raitap la 165 kilomita per awa

Weya det Saikloun na?

Im antap la woda gulijap la len na, la Burrulula eriya.

Weya det Saikloun heding?

Im gulijap la Burrulula bat tharrai Kwinslenwei lilbit. Im mub 21 kilomita eberri wan awa.

Saikloun Treba im im bigwan (gulum 'severe'). Im antap la len na, sanrais from Mikatha Main. Det brabili deinjiris midul pat garra kipgon lusim pawa wen im kipgon mub tharrai la Bakli eriya tunait. Sandei moning im garra bi wikwan en nomo saikloun na, wen im sangudansaid from Brunet Dauns.

Lukat bla ol dismob

Det midul pat bla Saikloun Treba, garra bi brabili deinjeriswan (gulum 'very destructive core') en im mub antap la len hafwei from Burrulula la Kwinslen Boda. Gulijap la det midul pat, det win im blo raitap la 165 kilomita per awa, bat det win stat gudangudan dumaji det saikloun im antap la len na.

Brabili strongwan win (gulum 'destructive winds') weya det win im blo raitap la 130 kilomita per awa, im hepining na gulijap la det midul pat bla det saikloun. Detkain strongwan win stat kamat la Keip Krofid tunait.

If yu jidan la solwada eniweya from Pot Atha la Kwinslen Boda, yu garra lugat brabiliwei ba bigiswan deinjeriswan taid wen det saikloun kipgon. Tunait en alibala tumorra, det taib garra bi mowa biga then det nomul taid, gada bigis weib weya im gin demijim enijing en pudum solwada la len eriya.

Wen det saikloun kipgon mubmub, bigiswan taid garra hepin la Kwinslen du la det eriya from NT Boda raitap la Bektaun. Bigwan weib garra gaman en maitbi pushum solwada antap la len. Enibodi weya thei jidan la det eriya shud sodimat bi meigim alabat kemp seif en bi redi bla album najalot du.

Strongwan Win (gulum 'gales') weya im blo raitap la 100 kilomita per awa bloblo rait nau la kous eriya from Neithin Riba la NT rait oba la Monington Ailen en la inlen eriya du la Golf Kantri.

Detkain Strongwin Win (gulum 'gales') garra stat bloblo la noth pat la Bakli tunait. Tunait en alibala Sandei, yu garra lugat ba detkain strongwan win if yu la Creswel Dauns, Keip Krofid, Robinson Riba, Mikatha Riba Main, Wollogorang en Brunet Dauns.

Bigis rein garra kaman en from alibala Sadadei ola krik en riba garra raning ol oba dis Golf Kantri. Thei bin tok ola riba la Golf Kantri en la Bakli eriya maibti garra fladwoda bambai (gulum 'flood watch').

Bigis Rein garra stat buldanbuldan tharrai la Golt Kantri la Kwinslen said wen det saikloun mub antap la len tumorra. Thei bin pudum woning ba Deintri Riba en Mosmin Riba ba bigis warajarra (flood warning) en thei bin tok ba lugat ba detkain fladwada bambai (gulum 'flood watch') if yu eniweya from Kens la Kowanyama o eniweya la Golf Kantri la Kwinslen.

Wani mela regen yu shud du

If yu jidan eniweya from Alyangula raitdan la Kwinslen Boda - dijan im ba enibodi la Grut en Burrulula du en la Bakli eriya:
- Irrim wanim blijimen en gabmen dalim yu bla du
- Bi redi bla brabili nogud wetha en ba det win ba get mowa biga en ba mowa rein. Jidan la seifwan bilding wen det wetha im brabili nogud.

Bla Kwinslensaid:

If yu jidan eniweya from NT Boda raitap la Bektaun, en la Monington Ailen en Sweers Ailen, yumob shud jidan insaid antil det saikloun bin guwei en den lisin la nekswan stori from gabmen bla wanim bla du.
- Yu gin gajim mowa infameishim from yu kaunsil.
- Bla sabi hau bla hendlim saikloun, yu gin luk la dis Kwinslen websait: www.disaster.qld.gov.au

Nekswan Saikloun Stori

Nekswan Saikloun Stori garra Inggalish garra kamat 8:00pm Sadadei

Note and Disclaimer

Dijan Saikloun Stori im "unofficial translation" burru Greg Dickson (Wamut). This is an unofficial translation of Tropical Cyclone Advice 50 (5:00pm Saturday March 23). It was written by an accredited Kriol-English interpreter and second-language Kriol speaker who is most proficient in the dialect of Kriol spoken in Ngukurr. It was done quickly and will likely contain some errors. Please do not use in lieu of the official Tropical Cyclone Advice from the Bureau of Meteorology.

*If you are reading this after 8pm Saturday, it is out of date. Please go to http://www.bom.gov.au/nt/warnings/ for the latest Cyclone Advice. This is the last Kriol translation that will be done because the cyclone is weakening and moving away from Kriol-speaking areas.

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Note and Disclaimer Dijan Saikloun Stori im "unofficial translation" burru Greg Dickson (Wamut). If yu lugunat dijan en im afta 8pm Sadadei, im olwan na. Gu la http://www.bom.gov.au/nt/warnings/ bla det nyuwan Saikloun Stori. Dijan im laswan trensleishin ai garra duwum, dumaji det saikloun im guweiguwei na.

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Oxford English Dictionary asks teenagers to explain modern slang

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Oxford English Dictionary asks teenagers to explain modern slang

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The venerable Oxford English Dictionary has launched an appeal to teenagers, hoping they can help it get to grips with slippery teenage slang such as "hench" and "dank".

Citing its aim to "record all distinctive words that shape the language, old and new, formal and informal", the OED said that slang terms were "always challenging" for dictionary editors to track. Young people's language today is "particularly elusive", because terms change rapidly and communication methods such as WhatsApp and Snapchat have made it more difficult to monitor the changing vocabulary.

In its youth slang appeal, the dictionary is asking children and teenagers to send in examples of current slang words, either on Twitter at #youthslangappeal or via its website. Adults are also invited to contribute, if they have examples of young people using "words that are completely unfamiliar to you - or familiar words in very unfamiliar ways".

OED senior editor Fiona McPherson said: "Lexicographers are used to observing and recording language change. Yet, there's something particularly innovative and elusive about the way that young people adapt existing vocabulary to make new words, and in doing so create what seems like a secret lexicon to those not in the know. Given that most of us at the OED left our teenage years behind some time ago, who better to help us identify creative new words and meanings than those who created and used them in the first place?"

The OED has been tracking a new sense of the word "bare" for a number of years, it said, citing a 2009 example from Twitter: "Friday is going to be the BUSIEST day of my life I think :) Bare things poppin' off." It will publish an entry for the slang term at the end of the year, with a draft version identifying it as chiefly British slang, meaning "many or much; a lot of". The OED says this usage "appears to have originated in Caribbean English, and evolved from the sense 'nothing but, too much of'".

Other words it will be considering include "dank", meaning "cool or great", and "hench", meaning "fit and muscular". Words used by younger people "often have a bigger story to tell about varieties of English used by particular ethnic or cultural groups, and their influence on the language as a whole", said the dictionary, which will be offering UK state schools free access to the OED online for this academic year in conjunction with its appeal.

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Oxford English Dictionary asks teenagers to explain modern slang

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The venerable Oxford English Dictionary has launched an appeal to teenagers, hoping they can help it get to grips with slippery teenage slang such as "hench" and "dank". Citing its aim to "record all distinctive words that shape the language, old and new, formal and informal", the OED said that slang terms were "always challenging" for dictionary editors to track.

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Language lessons from the happiest place on Earth - Vanuatu and Bislama | Tess Walraven | TEDxBasel

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Before entering the collection, please be aware of the conditions under which it is being made available.

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"We are reading books about dogs. So looked for a Kriol on e on the Living Archive website and found Angriwan Dotdot. Read it aloud to the kids with the (Kriol-speaking) Teacher Assistant who said I didn't need any correction (yay) and you should have seen my kids... They were at such ease... I was asking them to recount and they were recounting with 100% accuracy. Then they asked for more! "Naja Kriol one". So we read Bifo Langa Drimtaim. Such a long story but they didn't care... They were right into it. Such a crazy good feeling. I had kids who rarely speak answering questions. There. Done."
Send us your stories about using the materials in the archive!
This entry was posted in User stories and tagged education, engagement, Kriol, Ngukurr on by .

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Naja Kriol one! | Living Archive of Aboriginal Languages

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Noella Goevas, a teacher at Ngukurr School writes: "We are reading books about dogs. So looked for a Kriol one on the Living Archive website and found Angriwan Dotdot. Read it aloud to the kids with the (Kriol-speaking) Teacher Assistant who said I didn't need any correction (yay) and you should have seen my kids...

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Hawai`i Pidgin translation of the Bible.

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I was 17 when I moved from a small country town to the big smoke of Melbourne in the early 1990s. I was a bundle of awkward innocence cloaked in sensible chino slacks (pleated, with an ironed crease down the front, of course), pearl earrings and smart, bobbed haircut, eager to start my course majoring in piano at university.

Within six months, those conservative threads were cast aside for a paisley op shop dress; the uni course was ditched for an arts degree; and the hairstyle went from Jackie McDonald on Hey Hey It's Saturday to a feeble attempt at copying the mysterious lead in the French art house movie popular at the time, Betty Blue.

I can blame this radical life transformation on many things, but Primal Scream's record Screamadelica had a firm hand in leading me astray.

My innocence was corrupted at my first house party. My first home away from home was an inner-city terrace house, sharing with two of my brothers and a friend. I had the dingy small room at the top of the stairs up the back, with only room for a single bed, lava lamp and a few sticks of Nag Champa incense burning on the windowsill.

My first house party required a soundtrack, so I took my hard-earned cash from my waitressing job at a pasta restaurant to a renowned record store. I perused what seemed like endless shelves with both excitement and shame. It was overwhelming. Growing up in regional Victoria, pre-internet, the only way to find music was from two radio stations, commercial and ABC, and one record store that mostly played country music and the soundtrack to Top Gun - so this inner city Melbourne record store opened up endless possibilities.

I landed on Primal Scream's Screamadelica. Perhaps I was attracted to the almost pop art cover image? It looked like a splattered egg with crazy eyes - which I now interpret as a portrait of singer Bobbie Guillespie on acid, which the band were obviously all on at the time.

I thought I recognised some of the songs from listening to my newly discovered radio stations Triple J and Triple R. Either way, I struck gold. The album was a musical melting pot that combined indie, house, acid, gospel, retro and dub and reeked of party. Familiar yet unfamiliar. It was the future and the past. It was loose. It was a revelation.

The night of my first house party, Screamadelica ruled. Mainly because the only other CD I had was the one that EVEYRONE had: Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. No one cared about a lack of variety in those days. CDs were expensive so we had long attention spans.

I swanned around the party, surrounded by people dressed in chambray or flannelette shirts and button up fly Levi 501s. We smoked cigarettes indoors and drank Sub Zeros. I underage drank a beer or four, which I'd found courtesy of a sneaky party goer who had stashed them in the clothes dryer in the laundry out the back. I never told my housemate that was the reason his dryer never worked again. Sorry Baz.

Screamadelica was the musical gateway drug to the new me. It offered musical forms I understood, mixed in with futuristic acid house beats. A new life began unfolding that was far less prim than the one I'd imagined. I thought I was so cool, waving my arms above my head as I yelled along " we wanna be free, to do what we wanna do, and we wanna get loaded and we wanna have a good time ". Clearly those stolen beers I'd imbibed helped too.

I'm not really one for too much nostalgia. Sometimes listening to records from my past makes me slightly uneasy because they remind me of a not yet fully formed me, wide eyed, enthusiastic, desperate to understand the world. Memories of me in a cheesecloth shirt from Ishka and a wooden necklace that smelt of manufactured jasmine, getting all earnest and maudlin over Jeff Buckley's Grace make me giggle (even though the music still stands up). I took some things and myself VERY seriously in those days.

But I can still listen to Screamadelica today without cringing. In fact, it gives me joy. It reminds me of that not fully formed blank canvas, but in a good way. It makes me feel both old and young, but mostly alive. Still. And that is the point of nostalgia, surely?
* Myf Warhurst hosts lunch on Double J, which is celebrating the 90s through June
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Primal Scream's Screamadelica defined my 1990s - my musical gateway drug | Myf Warhurst

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I was 17 when I moved from a small country town to the big smoke of Melbourne in the early 1990s. I was a bundle of awkward innocence cloaked in sensible chino slacks (pleated, with an ironed crease down the front, of course), pearl earrings and smart, bobbed haircut, eager to start my course majoring in piano at university.

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Language remains an essential part of the fabric of Indigenous identity.

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In this special episode of Word for Word, we explore a language with tens of thousands of speakers, as well as some languages spoken only by a handful of people; novelist Kate Grenville tells the story of an unusual First Fleet lieutenant and his attempts to learn the Gadigal language; and we meet a young Indigenous woman in the remote community of Ngukurr, who is determined to keep her grandmother's language alive.

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From the Australian desert to Buckingham Palace, trace the lives of the Namatjira family as they fight to regain copyright to their grandfather Albert Namatjira's iconic artwork.

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Education resources for schools teachers and students - ABC Education

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ABC Education has 4000+ educational games, videos and teaching resources for schools and students. Free Primary and Secondary resources covering history, science, English, maths and more

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Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

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Parts-of-speech.Info - POS tagging online

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automatic Part-of-speech tagging of texts (highlight word classes)

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How Tasmania’s Aboriginal people reclaimed a language

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How Tasmania’s Aboriginal people reclaimed a language

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Truganini's death in Hobart in May 1876 attracted worldwide attention. She was widely, but wrongly, believed to have been the last Aboriginal person to have survived the Tasmanian genocide. Her demise symbolised the devastating impacts of British imperialism on Indigenous peoples.

Yet Tasmanian Aboriginal people continue to live on the Bass Strait Islands, in rural and urban Tasmania and elsewhere. Their culture, although severely disrupted by the British invasion, persists. Part of this survival is the resurrection of a language, palawa kani, that is used by some Tasmanian Aboriginal people. Recently there have been calls to use the Aboriginal name nipaluna for Hobart, and other places are already using dual names.

National Library of Australia

Across Australia, an estimated 250 Indigenous Australian languages and hundreds more dialects were spoken before the British arrived. The cultural disruption caused by invasion has resulted in more than half of these languages vanishing.

In parts of the country, Aboriginal people and linguists have been working to preserve and restore some of the country's original languages. In this wider context of language preservation and renewal, a reconstructed Tasmanian Aboriginal language has recently emerged. Palawa kani ("Tasmanian Aboriginal people speak"), is based on surviving spoken and written remnants of the island's original languages. The written form of palawa kani has only lower case letters following a decision by the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre to discontinue capitals.

Read more: Explainer: the evidence for the Tasmanian genocide

Word collectors

In 1981, linguists Terry Crowley and Robert Dixon estimated that between eight and 12 different languages, some mutually unintelligible, were spoken by Tasmanian Aboriginal people prior to invasion. They used a variety of colonial records to arrive at this estimate.

Maritime explorers, missionaries and colonial officials wrote Tasmanian Aboriginal words and phrases in their journals. Some, like botanist Allan Cunningham, jotted down lists of words. Others, such as Quaker missionaries James Backhouse and George Washington Walker, also wrote down the lyrics to Tasmanian Aboriginal songs.

Between 1829 and 1834, the Conciliator of Aborigines, George Augustus Robinson, travelled the island with an entourage of Aboriginal people, including Truganini, and white servants. They aimed to capture Tasmanian Aboriginal people who had survived the Vandemonian War, which had been fought between Aboriginal people and the British colonists. Robinson relied on interpreters, but he and his white companions learned some Tasmanian Aboriginal languages. Robinson wrote down over 4,500 Tasmanian Aboriginal words. His white servant, James Gravenor, later spoke some words in Truganini's Aboriginal language at her burial.

Many Tasmanian Aboriginal words continued to be used by those living on the Bass Strait islands. Tasmanian Aboriginal singer Ronnie Summers grew up on Cape Barren Island. He has written, for example, about how "yolla" is an Aboriginal word for short-tailed shearwaters.

South of Hobart, Fanny Cochrane Smith continued to use some of her Tasmanian Aboriginal language. Famously, in 1899 and 1903, she was recorded singing several songs and speaking in this language.

Since the 1990s, Tasmanian Aboriginal people including Theresa Sainty, Jenny Longey and June Sculthorpe have worked to restore language to their community. palawa kani has been built from words and songs passed down Aboriginal families as well as phrases and words recorded in colonial documents. It is a composite language that has been embraced by some, but not all, Tasmanian Aboriginal people.

Reclaiming culture

Today, Tasmanian Aboriginal people are using palawa kani in different contexts. These include educational settings, during ceremonies and at official functions. Digital materials, posters and flash cards have been produced. People are encouraged to use palawa kani in their homes. Language learning is also supported by palawa kani being used in the award-winning animated television series Little J and Big Cuz.

Gradually people living in and beyond the wider Tasmanian community are becoming used to hearing or seeing palawa kani. In 2014, Tasmanian Aboriginal musician Dewayne Everettsmith's debut album Surrender included melaythina, the first song released in palawa kani. More recently, in April 2018, the oratorio A Tasmanian Requiem premiered in Hobart. It included palawa kani, English and Latin. On approaching the ningina tunipri Tasmanian Aboriginal gallery at the Tasmanian Museum and Art Gallery in Hobart, visitors hear palawa kani.

Read more: A Tasmanian Requiem is a musical reckoning, and a pathway to reconciliation

Around Tasmania, some national parks and other significant landmarks now have dual names. Examples include Mt Wellington, near Hobart, which is also known by its Aboriginal name kunanyi and Asbestos Range National Park in the north of the state. The latter was renamed Narawntapu National Park in 2000, prior to the Tasmanian Aboriginal Centre discontinuing the use of upper case letters in palawa kani.

The word nipaluna, for Hobart, came from a word recorded by Robinson on 16 January 1830. The Conciliator wrote in his journal that his Aboriginal informant Woorrady (Wooreddy) told him Hobart was called nib.ber.loon.ne. On 11 July, Robinson recorded the name for Hobart as niberlooner. Different spellings were common in the 19th century for Aboriginal and English words. Those working on palawa kani have had to take these variations into account.

Present day use of palawa kani goes beyond dual place naming. It is also being used as a language of protest. Earlier this year, in February 2018, a television advertisement spoken in palawa kani went to air to protest against the Tasmanian Government's plans to reopen some four-wheel drive tracks in the remote Arthur Pieman Conservation Area in Tasmania's north west.

Despite not all Tasmanian Aboriginal people embracing palawa kani, the reemergence of an Aboriginal language in Tasmania is providing the island's first peoples with a culturally distinctive, unique voice.

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Explainer: how Tasmania's Aboriginal people reclaimed a language, palawa kani

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Truganini's death in Hobart in May 1876 attracted worldwide attention. She was widely, but wrongly, believed to have been the last Aboriginal person to have survived the Tasmanian genocide. Her demise symbolised the devastating impacts of British imperialism on Indigenous peoples.

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Note: Old English Aerobics is being reorganized and rewritten to accompany Peter S. Baker, Introduction to Old English (Oxford: Blackwell, 2003), much of which will also be available on the Web. Watch this space for details. The new organization of the links below reflects the organization of the book.

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Can English remain as the 'world's favourite' language

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Can English remain as the 'world's favourite' language

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English is spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but do the development of translation technology and "hybrid" languages threaten its status?

Which country boasts the most English speakers, or people learning to speak English?

The answer is China.

According to a study published by Cambridge University Press, up to 350 million people there have at least some knowledge of English - and at least another 100 million in India.

There are probably more people in China who speak English as a second language than there are Americans who speak it as their first. (A fifth of Americans speak a language other than English in their own homes.)

But for how much longer will English qualify as the "world's favourite language"? The World Economic Forum estimates about 1.5 billion people around the world speak it - but fewer than 400 million have it as their first language.

How Americanisms are killing the English language

Academics uncover 30 'lost' English words

Davos jargon: A crime against the English language?

Of course, there is more than one English, even in England. In the historic port city of Portsmouth, for example, the regional dialect - Pompey - is still very much in use, despite the challenges from new forms of online English and American English.

English is the world's favourite lingua franca - the language people are most likely to turn to when they don't share a first language. Imagine, for example, a Chinese speaker who speaks no French in conversation with a French speaker who speaks no Chinese. The chances are that they would use English.

Five years ago, perhaps. But not any more. Thanks to advances in computer translation and voice-recognition technology, they can each speak their own language, and hear what their interlocutor is saying, machine-translated in real time.

So English's days as the world's top global language may be numbered. To put it at its most dramatic: the computers are coming, and they are winning.

You are probably reading this in English, the language in which I wrote it. But with a couple of clicks on your computer, or taps on your tablet, you could just as easily be reading it in German or Japanese. So why bother to learn English if computers can now do all the hard work for you?

At present, if you want to do business internationally, or play the latest video games, or listen to the latest popular music, you're going to have a difficult time if you don't speak any English. But things are changing fast.

In California, Wonkyum Lee, a South Korean computer scientist for Gridspace, is helping to develop translation and voice-recognition technology that will be so good that when you call a customer service helpline, you won't know whether you're talking to a human or a computer.

Christopher Manning, professor of machine learning, linguistics and computer science at Stanford University, insists there is no reason why, in the very near future, computer translation technology can't be as good as, or better than, human translators.

But this is not the only challenge English is facing. Because so many people speak it as their second or third language, hybrid forms are spreading, combining elements of "standard" English with vernacular languages. In India alone, you can find Hinglish (Hindi-English), Benglish (Bengali-English) and Tanglish (Tamil-English).

In the US, many Hispanic Americans, with their roots in Central and South America, speak Spanglish, combining elements from English and the language of their parents and grandparents.

Language is more than a means of communication. It is also an expression of identity - telling us something about a person's sense of who they are. The San Francisco poet Josiah Luis Alderete, who writes in Spanglish, calls it the "language of resistance", a way for Hispanic Americans to hold on to - and express pride in - their heritage, even if they were born and brought up in the US.

English owes its global dominance to being the language of what until recently were two of the world's most powerful nations: the US and the UK. But now, especially with the rise of China as an economic superpower, the language is being challenged.

If you are an ambitious young jobseeker in sub-Saharan Africa, you might be better off learning Mandarin Chinese and looking for work in China than relying on your school-level English and hoping for a job in the US or UK.

In the US itself, learning Chinese is becoming increasingly popular. In 2015, it was reported that the number of school students studying the language had doubled in two years and, at college level, there had been a 50% rise over the past decade.

In Uganda, however, all secondary schools must conduct classes entirely in English, and some parents teach their young children English as their first language. In many parts of the world, English is still regarded as a passport to success.

So is the future of English at risk? I don't think so, although its global dominance may well diminish over the coming decades. Like all languages, it is constantly changing and adapting to new needs. Until recently, "text" and "friend" were simple nouns. Now, they are also verbs, as in "I'll text you," or "Why don't you friend me?"

Computerised translation technology, the spread of hybrid languages, the rise of China - all pose real challenges. But I continue to count myself immensely fortunate to have been born in a country where I can cherish and call my own the language of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton and Dickens, even though the language I call English is very different from theirs.

Find out more:

Robin Lustig's four-part documentary series, The Future of English, begins on the BBC World Service on Wednesday, 23 May

You can listen online, on the BBC Radio iPlayer or download the programme podcast

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Can English remain the 'world's favourite' language?

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English is spoken by hundreds of millions of people worldwide, but do the development of translation technology and "hybrid" languages threaten its status? Which country boasts the most English speakers, or people learning to speak English? The answer is China.

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Treaty is more than a white feelgood moment

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Treaty is more than a white feelgood moment

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Early in the night at the 2018 Sydney Gay and Lesbian Mardi Gras party, DJ Gemma dropped the Yothu Yindi classic 'Treaty'. All around me the mostly non-Indigenous crowd responded to the driving beats, the unmistakeable sound of the yidaki, and the call of the late M. Yunipingu's distinctive voice.

The dance floor surged with energy. A friend later commented he'd forgotten how much the track was 'an absolute banger'.

More than a banger though, the 1991 track remains a political anthem, speaking of unceded sovereignty and calling for settler politicians to honour their commitments to treat with Australian First Nations. It is a song of deep political significance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and, as was evident on the Mardi Gras dancefloor, it also moves something in non-Indigenous Australians - and not just their feet.

The negotiation of a treaty or treaties with the Australian state has long been an aspiration for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. For many progressive Australians too, the lack of any formal political agreements with Indigenous peoples is an injustice and an embarrassment that they would like to see rectified.

Some non-Indigenous supporters of treaty negotiations are only now coming to this position, developing new understanding through the failed campaign to 'recognise' Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in the Australian Constitution, and through the position on truth-telling and agreement-making advanced in the 2017 Uluru Statement - the one-year anniversary of which we mark on 27 May.

Others, however, have supported the call for treaty/ies since at least the Treaty '88 campaign and the Hawke government's commitment to negotiating a national treaty after receiving the Barunga Statement. Hawke's backdown on this commitment - with the formal reconciliation process offered as compensation - paved the way for John Howard's definitive rejection of treaty in his claim that 'A unified nation cannot make a treaty with itself.' Such political equivocation - and downright colonialism - remains a source of shame for many.

Both longterm supporters and newcomers to the debate want to address this shame. As the 1992 Mabo case established once and for all, the Australian continent was never terra nullius. The legitimacy of the colonial project on this territory was in question from day one, as both James Cook and Arthur Phillip ignored orders from their king that they take possession of the land only 'with the consent of the natives' (Cook), and 'conciliate their affections, enjoining all our subjects to live in amity and kindness with them' (Phillip).

"The contradiction is between the progressive desire for moral legitimacy, and the political aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, which in many cases are entirely different."

What eventuated was, of course, as far from amity and kindness as can be imagined. Frontier warfare that lasted for over 100 years; massacres and violent dispossession of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples from their land; forced incarceration on reserves and missions; and the mass abduction of Indigenous children in what would eventually become known as the Stolen Generations.

This is not a history of which it is easy to be proud. Despite the claims of certain conservative politicians that colonisation was good for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, evidence of colonialism's manifold harms abounds in daily news reporting and in the Australian government's continuing failure to 'close the gap' in socioeconomic outcomes for Indigenous people.

As a result, many progressives recognise the need to change the terms of the relationship between Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and the Australian state as a means of redressing these harms. Again, however, this is not just benevolence. Progressives also hope that in restoring some degree of autonomy and dignity to Indigenous peoples, providing long-overdue justice and reparation, Australia might restore its own moral legitimacy.

What is not discussed is the way in which this craving for moral legitimacy may also jeopardise any future treaty negotiations. Underpinning the desire for moral legitimacy is an imagined future in which Australia is a unified political community. Rather than dividing Australia, it is hoped that treaty will bring the nation together. In this imagined future, colonialism would be 'complete', something inevitable but unpleasant and now - thankfully - over.

The contradiction, however, is between the progressive desire for moral legitimacy, which requires colonial completion, and the political aspirations of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, which in many cases are entirely different.

Far from concern about settler Australia's moral legitimacy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples seek treaty as a form of recognition for their surviving political difference. They seek self-government, autonomy and jurisdiction over their territories.

Treaties on these terms are unlikely to be acceptable to the settler state. More to the point, they would not provide the longed-for moment of unified nationhood and colonial completion. Treaty/ies will formalise ongoing relations between sovereigns, rather than bringing these sovereigns together under the Australian flag.

The crowd on the dancefloor at the Mardi Gras party enjoyed a feelgood moment. Many progressive non-Indigenous Australians crave that moment in our politics. But we need to be careful. What we crave is really a moment of completion that will always remain elusive, and our craving remains the greatest threat to any meaningful treaty processes between Indigenous nations and the Australian settler state.

Associate Professor Sarah Maddison is Assistant Dean, Research in the Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, co-director of Indigenous Settler Relations Collaboration, and Research Coordinator in the School of Social and Political Sciences at the University of Melbourne.

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Treaty is more than a white feelgood moment

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Progressive Australians want a process that restores a sense of moral legitimacy to the nation. But far from concern about settler Australia's moral legitimacy, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples seek treaty as recognition of their political difference. Treaties on these terms are unlikely to be acceptable to the settler state.

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Recently, I was asked how I imagine a reconciled Australia. Great question. Reconciliation is an attractive concept depicting a bright future, but what does it actually look like? Upon reflection I realised it would involve a society where I didn't have to justify my Aboriginality or feel ashamed of my fair skin which apparently goes against the ingrained, stereotyped perception of what an Aboriginal person should look like. I envision a society flooded with positive representation of my people in the media and on social media, where our Aboriginality does not automatically make us the target of racism and discrimination. Where my culture, the oldest living culture in the world, is respected and not demeaned and belittled as a costume or face-paint worn at Invasion Day celebrations. A society where cultural safety is embraced and systematically embedded instead of vilified and taken out of context so much that it ends up extending the oppression of a marginalised minority. Where consideration goes into intersectionality and the complex challenges for people like myself, who walk two worlds in the queer and Indigenous communities.

On Sunday begins National Reconciliation Week. This period was born from the reconciliation movement, which began officially in 1992. 26 years later, what has changed? Our voices continue to be stifled, our culture disrespected, our identity questioned, our children stolen and our lands desecrated.
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True reconciliation requires a long-term commitment from non-Indigenous Australians to look past their western lens and take the time to reflect on unconscious bias and listen to the truth of our history and experiences. For many non-Indigenous Australians, it can be difficult to identify how to take the first step.

The first step is the easiest: start by actively listening to us. When you seek to learn about our history, our culture and our ways, listen to the whole story. Prepare to learn of our innate trauma and our resilience. To truly listen, practice humility. Understand that we deal with complex layers of trauma and intergenerational trauma through our own experiences and the experiences of our community as our culture is based on the concept of "we" and not "I".

If you engage us to deliver cultural safety training, consider the impact of your actions from haggling the price or dictating what should be in the package. Before we even begin to share our history, culture and our ways, your actions already seek to censor us. Cultural competency is not self-dictated, it is a journey that will shift in alignment with our ever-adapting culture. We know culture is not stagnant. Take the time to type out Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander, instead of resorting to offensive acronyms. Always capitalise Indigenous and Aboriginal. Learn the correct way to acknowledge country and learn the name of the traditional owners of the unceded lands on which you live and work. Support treaty, rebuke racism in all its overt and covert forms. Adopting each of these demonstrates a genuine respect that reveals the validity of your intent. It shows us you're trustworthy and a potential ally. It smashes tokenism.

Tokenistic gestures are commonplace in the daily lives and historical experiences of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Our experiences have taught us to sniff out a gammon (Google it) facade from people who would only interact to enhance their own image, or potentially harm us.

Placing Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander flags in the front entry of your organisation, school, hospital or workplace is quickly revealed as a lacklustre, tokenistic gesture the second that respect is not reflected in the attitudes and behaviours of staff and organisational policies and practices. For too long our communities have endured the ignorance of non-Indigenous people who continue to ask for quantifiable evidence of our identity or fail to simply ask the important question ("are you Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander?") that would determine our Indigenous identity and subsequently inform the correct supports to facilitate our best outcomes.

I challenge all non-Indigenous people to look at what they are doing to contribute to creating culturally safe spaces that celebrate and endorse self-determination for all Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Conduct further research, educate yourself, and find out what you can do to recognise and then adjust your biases.

If every non-Indigenous Australian could attempt that, it would be a great place to start towards proving that reconciliation is more than just an empty concept.

* Guardian Australia is proud to partner with IndigenousX to showcase the diversity of Indigenous peoples and opinions from around the country.
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The first step towards true reconciliation is the easiest | Rebecca Hunt

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Recently, I was asked how I imagine a reconciled Australia. Great question. Reconciliation is an attractive concept depicting a bright future, but what does it actually look like? Upon reflection I realised it would involve a society where I didn't have to justify my Aboriginality or feel ashamed of my fair skin which apparently goes against the ingrained, stereotyped perception of what an Aboriginal person should look like.

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About AirTalk®

Join KPCC's AirTalk with host Larry Mantle weekdays for lively and in-depth discussions of city news, politics, science, the arts, entertainment, and more. Call-in number: 866-893-5722

You've likely started a work email like this: "Happy to hear from you!"

Seems friendly, amicable, professional - right?

What about, "Happy to hear from you."

Does that seem passive aggressive or even rude, even though you are ostensibly "happy" to hear from this person, as you've so explicitly written in your email?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wyRLFWF2v_U
That's probably because we've gotten so acclimated to using exclamation points over email and text that going sans seems wrong. What was once a punctuation mark meant to relay overwhelming excitement is now just a marker of goodwill. In linguistics it's called "verbal inflation" - the idea that once you express a certain level of enthusiasm you have to keep upping the ante so as not to seem like you're dampening the mood.

Some have revolted against exclamation points, scrubbing them from emails once they're written. But it's not just exclamation points that get people agonizing over emails or spending too much time poring over emails received. If you're from an older generation, you might be familiar with the ellipses as a sign off, which once conveyed "let's continue the conversation" but to millennials reads more like a vague and undercutting trail off. Then there's the world of emojis... what they mean alone or in combinations, and whether they belong in the professional world at all.

Do you spend time stressing about over work emails and texts, trying to convey just the right amount of enthusiasm? Have you ever stopped using exclamation points and has it ever gotten you in trouble? What textual tics drive you up the wall?

Guests:

Gretchen McCulloch, linguist who studies the language of the internet; her podcast is " Lingthusiasm," a podcast for people who are enthusiastic about linguistics; she tweets @GretchenAMcC

Deborah Tannen, professor of linguistics at Georgetown University in Washington D.C. and author of the book, " You're the Only One I Can Tell: Inside the Language of Women's Friendships " (Ballantine Books, 2017) which is released today as a paperback

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Textual communication troubles: Are we overusing exclamation points?!!

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About AirTalk® Join KPCC's AirTalk with host Larry Mantle weekdays for lively and in-depth discussions of city news, politics, science, the arts, entertainment, and more. Call-in number: 866-893-5722 You've likely started a work email like this: "Happy to hear from you!" Seems friendly, amicable, professional - right?

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Public lectures page in the Faculty of Arts site.

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Move to Melbourne, and one of the first things you'll learn (maybe besides how to read a tram timetable) is how to say some of our tongue-twister suburb names.

If you've come from the US, you'll learn it's Mel-BEN, not Mel-BORN - same goes with Gisborne.

Those from Perth and Adelaide will be quickly shut down while trying to make Prahran sound posh; "It's Pr-AAN not Pr-AHN!" the black-clad, latte carrying Melburnians will cry.

But where did all this come from? Who decided how these names get pronounced, and was there a decision at all?

Not really, says Professor John Hajek, a linguist from the University of Melbourne.

"People who live in a specific location say the name of the place where they live very often, and so they they get used to a particular way of saying the name, and over time the name tends to shorten or take on specific characteristics," Professor Hajek says.

He says it's hard to know whether there's something about Melburnians that made the names evolve differently than they would have in other Australian cities.

"Australian English is very similar across the country because we're relatively young and very mobile, but I have no doubt that in each city there are place names that only locals know how to pronouce."

Prahran

According to the state government's register of geographic names, Vicnames, the way this southern hipster enclave got its name was all a bit of an accident.

"Named 'Pur-ra-ran' by George Langhorne, Missionary to Aborigines, 1837. The name was a compound of two aboriginal words signifying, 'land partially surrounded by water,' and was given, orally, by Langhorne to Mr. Robert Hoddle, the surveyor," the site states.

"Mr Hoddle wrote it in his notebook as 'Prahran,' and in that form it appeared on a plan of surveyed, but unsold, lands in 1840."

Professor Hajek says the two syllables - Prah-ran - quickly became shortened to one - Pran.

"Part of the reason is there are two Rs in there, so it confuses people and can be a little tricky to pronounce," he says. "You actually get that in other words like February and library where you get two Rs close together and you tend to get rid of one."

Reservoir

This one trips up even long-time residents, but those in the inner north know it's Reser-VORR, not Reser-VWAH, Professor Hajek says.

He says though the suburb was named for the water reservoir within it, people didn't know how to say the French word.

"We have a bit of problem saying 'wah', it's not something we usually have in English," he says. "People who didn't use the word, they might have called it a dam or a water tower, they see this word and they're not entirely sure how to pronounce it."

Hence, Reser-VORR.

Lalor

The suburb is named for Peter Lalor, the leader of the Eureka Stockade rebellion in 1854, so the pronunciation should be the same as his name - LAW-ler - right?

"Everyone who's from there, from the north, will tell you it's LAY-lor," Professor Hajek says.

Similarly with Prahran and Reservoir, it was easier to say - so eventually that's how everyone said it.

St Albans

If you head west and say "St Albans" and start the "Albans" part with an "Al" as in pal, you'll quickly be told it is actually "All" as in Paul.

And if you're a real local, the two words will merge to become "Sn'Albans", Professor Hajek says.

"You say these words a lot; the faster you say them, they get reduced and you end up with something much shorter," he says.

Malvern

Vicnames shows the suburb, formerly called Gardiner, was named after an estate in the area called Malvern, which was named for a town in Worcestershire in England.

There are actually three ways this one gets said - MOL-vern (that's the right way), MAUL-vern and MAL-vern - though the first two are more common, Professor Hajek says.

"People look at the spelling. Part of the problem is the A-L, there are three different ways of pronouncing it in English, so they've got to make a decision," he says. "The local pronunciation becomes commonplace, and then it's a question of whether people from outside know about it."

Melbourne

Most Aussies know how to say Mel-BEN and not over-pronouce the "bourne" part, but lately, locals are adding another twist to the name of our city, Professor Hajek says.

"We're increasingly pronouncing it as MAL-BEN," he says. "Not everybody does it, but it occurs often enough by Melbourne speakers that outsiders notice it, but it doesn't occur often enough that it's completely regular."

He says some Melburnians also have trouble with names such as "Ellen" and "Allan" mixing up the way they are pronounced, but Sydneysiders don't seem to have the same problem.

"It doesn't occur in NSW, but there's some evidence to suggest it's starting in Brisbane as well," he says. "It's got to do with the L after the vowel."

A local's guide to Melbourne suburb (and other Victorian place) names:

Beaumaris: Beau-MAURICE, not Beau-MARRIS

Berwick: Berrick, not BER-wick

Cranbourne: Cran-BURN, not Cran-BORN

Doncaster: Don-CASTER, not Don-CASS-TER

Jan Juc: Jan JUCK, not ZHAN ZHUKE

Kallista: Kal-LIS-ta, not KALL-is-TA

Lalor: LAY-lor, not LAW-ler

Maidstone: Maid-stone, not Maid-ston

Malvern: MOL-vern, not MAUL-vern or MAL-vern

Melbourne: Mel-BEN, not Mel-BORN

Moorabbin: Mor-ABB-in, not MOO-rab-in

Murrumbeena: Murum-BEE-na, not Moo-RUM-beena

Narre Warren: Narry (As in 'Harry') Warren, not Nara Warren or Nar-ray War-REN

Niddrie: Nid-djree, not Nid-rie

Northcote: North-CUT, not North-COAT

Ormond: OR-mond, not Or-MUND

Prahran: Pr-AAN, not Pra-RAN or Pra-RAHN

Reservoir: Reser-VORR, not Reser-VWAH

St Albans: St ALL-bans, not Saint AL-bans

Travancore: Travan-CORE, not Trav-VAN-core

Truganina: Trug-A-NINE-A, not Trug-A-NINA

Vermont: VER-mont, not Ver-MONT

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A definitive guide on how to pronounce Melbourne suburb names

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Move to Melbourne, and one of the first things you'll learn (maybe besides how to read a tram timetable) is how to say some of our tongue-twister suburb names. If you've come from the US, you'll learn it's Mel-BEN, not Mel-BORN - same goes with Gisborne.

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Descriptive vs Prescriptive views.

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As anyone who writes "Oxford comma enthusiast" in their Twitter bio will gladly tell you, English possesses quite a few rules.

One of these rules revolves around when it is correct to use less, and when it is correct to use fewer.

Here is the rule as it is often expressed:

Fewer refers to numbers of things. Less refers to quantities of things. So fewer jobs, but less employment.

For most style guides, this is about as far as the issue is usually pursued.

Which is fair enough, really: you don't have to be a UX designer to understand most people don't care about the vast and boring history of English usage - they just want to write a headline that won't get them pilloried.

But wait, there's more!

Have a look at the following real-life examples of news reporting, and see if you can spot any errors.

A teenage boy was shot less than two minutes after police arrived at his home, south-west of Brisbane.

The State Government sold the property ... for less than $500,000.

If you said "both those examples use less, but both modify numbers of things (minutes and dollars, respectively) so shouldn't it be fewer?", then congratulations: you have managed to be both extremely perceptive and a bit misguided.

Certain nouns that seem to refer to numbers (time, measurements, sums of money, statistics) can take less as a modifier without controversy - the reason here being that people generally conceive of such units as amounts, rather than numbers.

Let's amend our stated rule to reflect reality:

Fewer refers to numbers of things. Less refers to quantities of things. So fewer jobs, but less employment.

Less is also used to modify units of time, money, measurement, and other general statistics.

But wait, there's still more!

To get slightly technical: in English, according to our rule, fewer is used correctly when it modifies what most grammar manuals call count nouns.

These nouns are aptly named, because they refer to things you can count: editors, cabbages, books, and so on.

As one linguist dryly noted in an overview of the psychological literature on count nouns, their boundaries are fixed: "The sum of two chairs would not lead to one bigger chair."

Less, on the other hand, is conventionally held to be correct when it modifies mass nouns: concepts or quantities that don't have clear-cut boundaries. Butter, cream, and information are all examples of mass nouns.

But confusingly, mass nouns can become count nouns in specific circumstances.

As an example, let's stick with butter. As the Cambridge Guide to Australian English notes, a chef may uncontroversially refer to "all the butters in the fridge" to differentiate between different types of butter (salted, unsalted, brands, etc).

In such a construction, butter - ordinarily a mass noun - has taken on the characteristics of a count noun.

Would our hypothetical chef be right, then, in avoiding purchasing from supermarkets whose shelves stock "fewer butters"?

Let's amend that simple rule again.

Fewer refers numbers of things and is used with count nouns. Less refers to quantities of things, and is generally used with mass nouns. So fewer jobs, but less employment.

Less is also used to modify units of time, money, measurement, and other general statistics.

In some circumstances, mass nouns may become countable, and as such can take fewer.

You guessed it: there's more!

Time was, it was common promotional practice to ask people to enter competitions or other prize pools by responding to some primer - usually in "25 words or less".

At the supermarket, too, express lanes have long been marked by signs proclaiming "10 items or less".

While items and words are, on the face of it, easily quantifiable count nouns and as such should take fewer according to our rule, these specific uses of less are essentially standard in English. These uses have been established in Australia since at least 1980.

This usage is not free of detractors: in the early 2000s, apparently in response to customer pedantry, British retailer Marks & Spencer changed their express lane signage to say "six items or fewer".

Some years later, the not-to-be-outdone Tesco - then the UK's largest grocery chain - cut the Gordian knot by changing their signage to the (ambiguous) "up to 10 items".

At any rate, let's amend our rule again:

Fewer refers numbers of things and is used with count nouns. Less refers to quantities of things, and is generally used with mass nouns. So fewer jobs, but less employment.

Less is also used to modify units of time, money, measurement, and other general statistics.

In special circumstances, mass nouns may become countable, and as such can take fewer.

Less is also used for some specific constructions (five items or less, 25 words or less).

Call today and we'll throw in a set of steak knives!

Up until now, we've framed usage around less and fewer around correctness, using mostly binary terms.

Strunk and White's Elements of Style, for instance, exhorts its readers to avoid "misuse" of less in place of fewer. But correctness in English is hardly one size fits all.

Some style guides - the Commonwealth Style Manual is one - sidestep notions of correctness entirely, suggesting it's perfectly fine to use less with plural count nouns if your aim is to be less formal or come across as more relaxed.

Thus, fewer jobs is acceptable - and so is less jobs. Oh dear. Get the style guide, it's amendin' time:

Fewer refers numbers of things and is used with count nouns. Less refers to quantities of things, and is generally used with mass nouns. So fewer jobs, but less employment.

Less is also used to modify units of time, money, measurement, and other general statistics.

In special circumstances, mass nouns may become countable, and as such can take fewer.

Less is also used for some specific constructions (five items or less, 25 words or less).

In speech or informal writing, less can also be used before plural count nouns.

Where does the rule about 'less vs fewer' come from?

By this point, with all of the exceptions above listed, you have to wonder where this "rule" about not using less with numbers of things comes from.

As far as usage boffins have discerned, this condemnation of less-with-count-nouns seems only to spring from one 18th century text: Robert Baker's Remarks on the English Language.

Unlike many texts of its period, Baker's screed isn't even making a pretence of trying to force Latin or Greek grammatical structures onto nascent English language standards.

Instead, he bases this "rule" entirely on personal preference:

"This word [less] is often used in speaking of a number, where I should think fewer would do better," Baker wrote. Using fewer, he mused, was both "more elegant" and "more strictly proper".

Baker didn't even have the animus of a modern-day pedant, who sees less used where he thinks fewer should be and calls for the immediate defunding of the national broadcaster.

Baker devoted far more ink damning colloquial uses of mutual, or arguing that the indefinite pronoun one (as in, "Unless one is very cautious..") must only take one and oneself in the genitive and dative cases.

So should I use less, or fewer?

In No Country For Old Men, the mesmerising hitman Anton Chigurh is fond of mocking his opponents' moral codes.

"If the rule you followed brought you to this," Chigurh says before one particularly visceral execution, "of what use was the rule?"

The same advice generally applies to issues of English usage - though fortunately with less bloodletting.

On less and fewer: of what use is the rule? The adoption of Baker's personal preference by a century's worth of usage manuals means that now, anyone who writes less jobs must contend with a harsh response to their scheduled Tweet (or the pedantic shoppers at Tesco).

Such complainants, even being made aware that their "rule" has its origins in an 18th century thought bubble and not the English grammatical system, might well argue that it's ahistorical to ignore a century or so's worth of Strunk and White and others.

Everyone else just wants this dispute to go away. Personally speaking, I couldn't care fewer.
Tiger Webb is a researcher with ABC Language.

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As anyone who writes "Oxford comma enthusiast" in their Twitter bio will gladly tell you, English possesses quite a few rules. One of these rules revolves around when it is correct to use less, and when it is correct to use fewer. Here is the rule as it is often expressed: Fewer refers to numbers of things.

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It's difficult having a Birmingham accent.

It's hard speaking in a way that everyone in the UK detests and continually rips the piss out of. When you're told over and over again that your accent is ugly, it's difficult not to feel insecure. It'd be nice to feel pride in the way I speak, at least enough so it doesn't feel good when someone tells me, 'I don't think your accent is that strong'. I'm sick of seeing memes about how the Birmingham accent is the aural equivalent of a kick in the balls, or the world's shittest roast dinner. I'm sick of Jeremy Clarkson telling me I sound thick.

In our proudly egalitarian society, it's okay to discriminate against people based on the way they speak. Dr Alexander Baratta from the University of Manchester has called this 'accentism', and has likened it to racism. Baratta reports that people often feel as if they have to flatten out their accents to escape judgment and progress in their careers, but simultaneously feel ashamed at this betrayal of their self-identity. As a Brummie, I can relate to this - and painfully so. I want to be proud of my Brummie roots, but I feel like I have to tone down my twang to be taken seriously. It's got to the point where most of us native Brummies can't even stand the sound of our own voices anymore.

It doesn't help when even academic research seems determined to prove that the Birmingham accent is the ugliest, least intelligent-sounding, least attractive accent in the UK. How many more of these studies must we conduct before we're satisfied that Brummie is the most repulsive sound in the known universe? Recently I came across an article in The Telegraph, gleefully reporting a study demonstrating that speaking with a Birmingham accent is 'worse than staying silent'. What's next? How else can we shame Brummies? The ostensible purpose of such research is to find out about people's accent preferences, but the more studies that pile up proving the same point, the more they actually reinforce the preferences they report.

And while I don't doubt that many people genuinely hate how the Birmingham accent sounds, the extent to which our accent preferences are shaped by social norms should not be underemphasised. In my second year of university, I recall speaking to an international student who casually remarked that 'the Birmingham accent is horrible'. Clearly, she couldn't have been too familiar with the accent or she would have noticed that I spoke with it. I wasn't offended. Rather, I interpreted her faux pas as an attempt to align herself with a belief she assumed I also held. In the UK, Brummie is the accent we love to hate - it's how we're supposed to feel. In other parts of the world, people overwhelmingly love the Birmingham accent. This is a decidedly stark contrast, one that I doubt can be put down solely to aesthetic preference.

Things are looking up, though, I guess. Despite a few suspect accents (Helen McCrory, I'm looking at you), Peaky Blinders is doing its best to make the Birmingham accent seem cool. Cillian Murphy in particular does a commendable job with his understated Brummie inflection - and it's certainly an improvement on that horrendous Hotels4u advert a few years ago ('anything for yow, cupcake'), which featured a Birmingham-born actor hamming it up for comedic effect. But, it's unlikely that Peaky Blinders will be enough on its own to shift the public's perception of our accent: it'll take more than a single TV programme to change such a deeply embedded belief.

We self-hating Brummies, we're stuck between a rock and a hard place. We long to leave behind our Brummie roots, but we cringe at the thought of adopting a voice other than our own. All we can do is cross our fingers and hope the tell-tale rise and fall of our voices slowly dissipates over time, so the betrayal feels completely natural. We shouldn't have to feel like this, but it's difficult to foster any kind of pride in our accents when everyone - even academia - keeps telling us how disgusting we sound. As a society, we need to recognise the effects that accentism can have on people and the insecurities it creates. It's no joke.

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Accentism is a real thing - just ask us Brummies

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It's hard speaking in a way that everyone in the UK detests and continually rips the piss out of. When you're told over and over again that your accent is ugly, it's difficult not to feel insecure.

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n China last month, Theresa May attended the launch of the British Council's English is Great campaign, intended to boost interest and fluency in our national language. This might sound like Donald Trump's notorious "Make America great again", but comes in fact from a stronger position. Beyond doubt, the use of English is greater than ever, and far more widespread than any other language in the world. All non-English-speaking powers of our globalised world recognise it as the first foreign language to learn; it is also, uniquely, in practical use worldwide. The British Council reckons that English is spoken at a useful level by some 1.75 billion people, a quarter of the world's population. It is taught from primary level up in all China's schools; it is the working language of the whole European Union.

On the news service France 24, English is used more prominently than French. Its use is required of all airline pilots and control towers, 24/7. And it is seen as an essential cachet for progress in some amazing places: for example, 14 years ago, the prime minister of Mongolia - a country with no historic links to an English-speaking power - decreed it should replace Russian in all schools as part of his aspiration to make Ulaanbaatar a centre for telephone call services. One in six Russians claims to speak it. English is clearly the language of choice for those with global aspirations, whatever their political stance towards Anglo-Saxon powers.

This global acceptance of English, now far beyond the zones of influence of the British empire or the United States' backyard, has effectively grown up in just a century - neatly, and a little paradoxically, since the 1919 treaty of Versailles. In deference to the US, this was the first international treaty written in English; but it also turned out to mark the incipient decline of the world's greatest English-speaking institution, the British empire. From a language point of view, however, British power had the good fortune to be succeeded by its cousin in North America, so that the usual historic lag, as political command leads on to linguistic imitation, was disguised. Even as Britain began to decline economically, its established position was reflected by increased take-up of English as the language to learn.

But all this while, especially from the 1920s to the 1990s, the focus of US expansion was changing, moving from North America to the world, leading to influence on trade, engineering, telecommunications, mining, media, science and finance, as the dollar moved to replace sterling as the world's reserve currency. This was followed by the digital information revolution, creating new fortunes based in Silicon Valley at the turn of the 21st century. These were all positive for the world role of English (a role founded by Great Britain), but should have been expected to peak later, in the growth of soft power and the increased popularity of American culture.

When circumstances change, dominant languages fall. And the change is clearly coming

It is this lagged growth of English, reflecting US influence hitherto, that we are now experiencing. Yet it is happening in a 21st century when other nations, particularly in Asia but also in South America and Africa, are far outpacing the US (let alone Britain and the European Union) in economic growth rates. This is an amazing juncture in world history. And two questions arise. Is the position of English a real asset to the states that speak it natively? And is the language likely to hold this position in the pecking order indefinitely?

Considering the windfall benefits of English as one's own language, some immediate advantages are undeniable. It has given direct access to the world's principal medium of communication: good for having an inside track on "news we can use", as well as facilitated access for well-educated anglophones to influential jobs. It has also put us in a position to charge some kind of rent for allowing others admission to this linguistic elite: hence the massive earnings from teaching English as a foreign language (now well over £2bn in the UK alone, reaching £3bn by 2020), and global markets for English-language publishing (£1.4bn in exports in 2015). This is another spin-off from Britain's recent history of dominance, like the siting of the Greenwich meridian, giving daily opportunities for global trades between Asia and America, or the association of investment, and hence global finance, with the City of London.

But special knowledge of a language is an asset that wastes all too soon when it becomes global property. World English will have just a historic connection to Britain or the US, and knowing it well is no longer exclusive to native speakers. Even the short-term windfall advantages came with a moral hazard. Presumption of entitlement can breed complacency at home, as well as resentment abroad - all too evident in the current "negotiations" on Britain's divorce from Europe.

It is hard to credit the vulnerability of a language such as English - which has spread, unbidden and unplanned, far beyond its homeland, and is even claimed to be the "language of freedom". But this in itself is nothing new. Transnational lingua francas, once established, always give off an aura of permanence. Yet when circumstances change, they fall. And the change is clearly coming.

And so the natural expectation will be that after the new powers, such as China, India or Brazil, establish themselves economically, politically (and probably militarily), their linguistic and cultural influence too will come to be felt, among those who want to do business with them, and then with one another. But as with all newly dominant languages, there will be a lag.

If centred on China, say, the world may be less enthusiastic for "the hidden hand" of Adam Smith's free markets. If other centres emerge, the result may be more mixed, asserting local Islamic, Buddhist or Hindu traditions. Evolving translation technologies may make languages largely interchangeable, pushing national cultures into the background. Whatever, there will be no special deference to the current English-speaking tradition.

Something like this, after all, is what happened in the 17th century, when the newly global power France won a role for French as a common language for civilised Europe: French - with strong Enlightenment overtones - replaced Latin itself, which had held that role for 15 centuries. In a different way, it is what happened in the 19th century, when the imperial interlopers Russia and Britain abolished Farsi in their Asian domains. Before that, Farsi had been pre-eminent for 800 years as the language of Muslim culture, trade and politics.

For English, therefore, its current peak is likely to be as good as it will ever get, its glory as a world language lasting just a couple of centuries - almost a flash in the pan, not yet comparable with those forerunners Latin or Farsi. And on present form, its fall is likely to coincide with the latest rise of China, whose documented history has run for three millennia. Chinese, too, is great.

Nicholas Ostler is the author of Empires of the Word, and The Last Lingua Franca. He chairs the Foundation for Endangered Languages

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Have we reached peak English in the world? | Nicholas Ostler

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One of Britain's greatest strengths is set to diminish as China asserts itself on the world stage, says author Nicholas Ostler

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Unlike most languages, when Icelandic needs a new word it rarely imports one. Instead, enthusiasts coin a new term rooted in the tongue's ancient Norse past: a neologism that looks, sounds and behaves like Icelandic.

The Icelandic word for computer, for example, is tölva, a marriage of tala, which means number, and völva, prophetess. A web browser is vafri, derived from the verb to wander. Podcast is hlað varp, something you "charge" and "throw".

This makes Icelandic quite special, a language whose complex grammar remains much as it was a millennium ago and whose vocabulary is unadulterated, but which is perfectly comfortable coping with concepts as 21st-century as a touchscreen.

But as old, pure and inventive as it may be, as much as it is key to Icelanders' sense of national and cultural identity, Icelandic is spoken today by barely 340,000 people - and Siri and Alexa are not among them.

In an age of Facebook, YouTube and Netflix, smartphones, voice recognition and digital personal assistants, the language of the Icelandic sagas - written on calfskin between AD1200 and 1300 - is sinking in an ocean of English.

"It's called 'digital minoritisation'," said Eiríkur Rögnvaldsson, a professor of Icelandic language and linguistics at the University of Iceland. "When a majority language in the real world becomes a minority language in the digital world."

Secondary school teachers already report 15-year-olds holding whole playground conversations in English, and much younger children tell language specialists they "know what the word is" for something they are being shown on the flashcard, but not in Icelandic.

Because young Icelanders in particular now spend such a large part of their lives in an almost entirely English digital world, said Eiríkur, they are no longer getting the input they need to build a strong base in the grammar and vocabulary of their native tongue. "We may actually be seeing a generation growing up without a proper mother tongue," he said.

The language has survived major foreign inputs in the past, under Danish rule for example. The impact of English, however, "is unique in scale of impact, intensity of contact, speed of change", Eiríkur said. "Smartphones didn't exist 10 years ago. Today almost everyone is in almost full-time contact with English."

The range and volume of English readily accessible to Icelanders has expanded exponentially, most of it more relevant and more engrossing than ever before, said Iris Edda Nowenstein , a PhD student working with Eiríkur on an exhaustive three-year study of the impact of digital language contact on 5,000 people.

"Once, outside school you'd do sport, learn an instrument, read, watch the same TV, play the same computer games," she said. "Now on phones, tablets, computers, TVs, there are countless games, films, series, videos, songs. You converse with Google Home or Alexa. All in English."

English may not be the enemy - in principle, multilingualism is obviously a good thing - but its sheer weight and variety online are overwhelming, Nowenstein said. Nor is Icelandic alone. As many as 21 European languages are potentially at risk of "digital extinction", according to research.

Icelandic's relatively few speakers are also unusually proficient in English and enthusiastic early adopters of new technology. "The obvious worry is that young people will start to say: 'Okay, so we can't use this language abroad. If we're not using it much in Iceland either, then what's the point?" Eiríkur asked.

In what amounts to a perfect storm for such a small language, it is also under siege in the real world. The wild north Atlantic island welcomed almost two million foreign visitors last year, four times the 2008 figure, and immigrants now make up 10% of the population, a five-fold increase in two decades.

Mostly EU workers on short-term contracts in fish-processing or tourism, new residents rarely need to master Icelandic, with its three genders, four cases and six verb forms. In the bars, restaurants and shops of downtown Reykjavík, it can be a struggle for locals to get served in their native language.

Online, however, is the biggest concern. Apart from Google - which, mainly because it has an Icelandic engineer, has added Icelandic speech recognition to its Android mobile operating system - the internet giants have no interest in offering Icelandic options for a population the size of Cardiff's.

"For them, it costs the same to digitally support Icelandic as it does to digitally support French," Eiríkur said. "Apple, Amazon ... If they look at their spreadsheets, they'll never do it. You can't make a business case."

Where Icelandic versions do exist, said Nowenstein, they are not perfect. "You can switch Facebook to Icelandic, but it's not good at dealing with cases," she said. "So people get fed up with seeing their names in the wrong grammatical form, and switch back to English."

Max Naylor, a UK academic also involved in the study, said he had emailed and written to Apple several times but had never received a reply. "We're not expecting a fully-functioning operating system, but the hope is that they will at least open themselves up to collaboration," he said.

The Icelandic government is setting aside 450m krónur (£3.1m) a year over the next five years for a language technology fund it hopes will produce open-source materials developers could use, but the challenge - from apps and voice-activated fridges to social media and self-driving cars - is immense.

Icelandic has survived almost unscathed for well over 1,000 years, and few experts worry it will die in the very near future. "It remains the majority, official language of a nation state, of education and government," Nowenstein said.

"But the concern is that it becomes obsolete in more and more domains, its use restricted, so it's second best in whole areas of people's lives. Then you worry about Icelanders understanding much less, for example, of their cultural heritage."

In the meantime, Naylor said, literacy rates among Icelandic children are falling as their vocabulary shrinks. "You could soon have a situation where Icelanders will be native in neither Icelandic or English," he said. "When identity is so tied up with language ... it's hard to know what that will mean."

This article was amended on 27 February 2018 to reflect the fact that Icelandic people are typically referred to by their first name on second mention.
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Icelandic language battles threat of 'digital extinction'

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Unlike most languages, when Icelandic needs a new word it rarely imports one. Instead, enthusiasts coin a new term rooted in the tongue's ancient Norse past: a neologism that looks, sounds and behaves like Icelandic. The Icelandic word for computer, for example, is tölva, a marriage of tala, which means number, and völva, prophetess.

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The seven biggest Aboriginal organisations in New South Wales have demanded that the state parliament commit to a "new agenda" for Aboriginal rights, including a makarrata process.

In an unprecedented show of unity, the coalition of land councils, medical services, legal services, child and family services and education advocates - representing thousands of Aboriginal people across the state - will march on parliament on Thursday to demand "self-determination and a better deal" for Aboriginal people.

"We want to send a clear message to parliament," the chairman of the NSW Aboriginal Land Council and the newly appointed chair of the prime minister's Indigenous Advisory Council, Roy Ah See, told Guardian Australia.

"Walk with us. Talk with us. Sit with us. Cannot get any simpler than that."

"These seven major organisations representing Aboriginal people in NSW have between us more than 200 years of experience, and the solutions are within our communities," Ah See said. "But we're not being listened to. In fact, we're being used as political footballs."

Thursday's march is also an endorsement of the Uluru statement from the heart. It is still very much on the agenda, Ah See said, despite its rejection by Malcolm Turnbull.

"We are marching under banner of makaratta, which means coming together after a struggle," Ah See said. "We understand makarrata is a Yolngu word, and we respect that.

"Blackfellas are no different to any other people, we disagree all the time, but the collective wisdom of our people never gets it wrong.

"That's why the Uluru statement from the heart is so important. It was a process that had collective endorsement of everybody who attended."

Ah See said a treaty process in NSW was a possibility but it was not his call to make. Makarrata - sitting, talking, listening - would be a start.

"I can't speak for everybody," he said. "It's going to take people power to come up with a positive message for change."

Also part of the coalition is the Aboriginal Child, Family and Community Care State Secretariat, which represents more than 240 organisations working on behalf of Aboriginal children and families. AbSec's chief executive, Tim Ireland, said it was being excluded from crucial decision making.

"At AbSec we want to see an end to current policies harming our children, particularly the push to adopt children from out-of-home care," he said. "We've been clear and consistent in our opposition to this.

"The NSW government and FACS [Family and Community Services] need to sit down with us to develop child protection and family support policies that are proven to work for our kids and families.

"We want to redesign the system as it applies to Aboriginal communities, so that our families are empowered to access support and the services are tailored to their needs."

Thursday is the International Day of the World's Indigenous Peoples.

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March for makarrata: NSW Aboriginal groups unite to demand a 'new agenda'

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The seven biggest Aboriginal organisations in New South Wales have demanded that the state parliament commit to a "new agenda" for Aboriginal rights, including a makarrata process.

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From the first time we step into an English class, we're told that the rules matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it's appropriate to use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these things really matter? Outside of the classroom, what difference does it make if we write "who" instead of "whom" or say "good" instead of "well"?

It does make a difference, at least sometimes. In order to determine when those times are, the question must be asked: For whom are you writing? Take that last sentence, for example. As Joan Acocella wrote recently in The New Yorker, "Every statement is subjective, partial, full of biases and secret messages." The above sentence is no exception. Its ostentatious structure and secret message says, "I am one of you." It also says even sneakier things like "I'm educated, an authority," and "You can trust me about language usage." The average New Yorker reader recognizes the effort the sentence exerts to maintain grammatical correctness, and in recognizing this, the reader bonds with the writer. "I" becomes "we." We share a secret now. We're a team.

But how different would things be if I walked into the sports bar down the street on a Sunday afternoon and asked, "For whom are we rooting today?" The wording would not be likely to win me many pals at the pub. The most likely response from the collective would be banishment to a far corner, a shake of the head, and an astonished, "What'd ya mean, who're we rootin' for?"

Why did it go so wrong? In short, different audience, different dialect. The key to linguistic acceptance is recognition and adaptation. Know thy audience, know thy friends. It's not a matter of which sentence is "correct"-"for whom are we rooting" versus "who are we rooting for"-so much as which sentence is correct for the given situation.

All of the complex linguistic theories of language acquisition and whether grammar is universally hardwired or learned through practice don't matter one bit in practical everyday living. If "correct" is only a matter of situation, then what we should really be asking is why we need to be able to use both versions of the sentence. Why should we bother to learn prescriptive English-the grade-school rules-if it isn't our natural dialect?

Repugnant as it may be, the simple answer is that we need to learn prescriptive English because that's the way the people in power communicate. As far as daily survival is concerned, it doesn't matter whether the origins of this linguistic power structure are racist, classist, or élitist, or whether they're based on the whims of dead white males. This is how the system works right now, today, and in order to best get the attention of those in power, to begin to effect change, we must be able to use their dialect. We must know their rules.

People who say otherwise, who say that in all situations we should speak and write however we'd like, are ignoring the current reality. This group, known as descriptivists, may be fighting for noble ideas, for things like the levelling of élitism and the smoothing of social class, but they are neglecting the real-world costs of those ideas, neglecting the flesh-and-blood humans who are denied a job or education because, as wrong as it is, they are being harshly judged for how they speak and write today.

Furthermore, as David Foster Wallace points out in his essay "Authority and American Usage," it's not at all clear that "society's mode of expression is productive of its attitudes rather than a product of those attitudes." In other words, Wallace continues, it's bizarre to believe that "America ceases to be elitist or unfair simply because Americans stop using certain vocabulary that is historically associated with elitism and unfairness."

This is not even to mention the descriptivists' dirty little secret. When it comes time for them to write their books and articles and give their speeches about the evil, élitist, racist, wrongheadedness of forcing the "rules" on the masses, they always do so in flawless, prescriptive English. Ensconced behind a mask of noble ends, something obscenely disingenuous is happening here. How easy it is for a person who is already part of the linguistic élite to tell others who are not that they don't need to be. Or, as Joan Acocella puts it, the descriptivists will "take the Rolls. You can walk, though."

These do-as-you-please linguists imagine themselves to be fighting for the common man, but they don't practice what they preach. Playing the game and being able to deploy the rules has afforded them the luxury of a good education, a steady job, and decent income. It has allowed them to have their noble voices heard in the fight for linguistic equality. But they fight from a good, safe distance. They're not on the front lines, naked and exposed.

For the individual looking for a higher education or trying to secure a decent job, what seems more humane: Admitting that, ugly, élitist, and unfair as it is, prescriptivism is currently the dialect of power and being able to manipulate that dialect can help you get ahead, or pretending that utopia is at hand, that everyone is a revolutionary, that linguistic anarchy will set you free? The choice to use our natural dialects whenever and wherever we please, to live in a world free of language-based racism and classism, may indeed be a worthy end for which to strive, but it's also worth remembering that individuals don't live in the end. They live now.
Photograph by Carl Iwasaki//Time Life Pictures/Getty Images.

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Inescapably, You're Judged By Your Language

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From the first time we step into an English class, we're told that the rules matter, that they must be followed, that we must know when it's appropriate to use a comma and what it means to employ the subjunctive mood. But do these things really matter?

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Dear language learners: have you ever embarrassed yourself in Spanish... enough to cause a pregnant pause? Ever talked about preservatives in food, in French, only to receive weird looks? And why should you think twice about offering a gift to a German?

Hapless language learners around the world have fallen into this common linguistic trap countless times: while learning a language, you desperately reach out for the friendly familiarity of a similar sounding word in that language-only to be met with semantic treachery! Confusingly, the words may not always mean what you might assume from what they sound or look like. Hilarity ensues (for your listeners at least) as the dastardly "false friend" strikes again.

In Spanish for instance, "embarazada" sounds like English "embarrassed" but actually means "pregnant." The sneaky looking " préservatif"in French means "condom," as it does in most other languages that use a version of this Latin word ( preservativo in Spanish, Italian, and Portuguese, präservativ in German for instance)-except for the outlying English language. Definitely an odd thing to find in food. And as for the poor Germans sidling away nervously if you offer a gift, "gift" means "poison" in German. On the other hand, any Norwegians standing aimlessly nearby might suddenly be intrigued by the offer because "gift" in Norwegian means "married."

False friends are those confusing words that appear or sound identical or similar to words in their own language, yet have different meanings or senses.

False friends, as many may already know firsthand from their own unfortunate linguistic encounters, are those confusing words and phrases that appear or sound identical or similar to words in their own language, yet have different meanings or senses. The term comes from the longer phrase "false friends of the translator" coined in 1928 by French linguists Koessler and Derocquigny. Since then, they've also been called false cognates, deceptive words, treacherous twins, belles infidèles (unfaithful beautiful women), so as we can see, this inadvertent lexical trickery apparently gives people a lot of feelings.

Though often seen as a kind of amusing but inevitable rite of passage for the budding translator or language learner, an embarrassment of hilarity is not the only thing to come out of this. The existence of false friends can have a major impact on how information is received by people across different cultures, cause serious offense and misunderstandings, and can actually start to change languages, exerting pressure on how the semantics might shift, through influential contact from other word senses.

Many examples are benign, such as the etymologically unrelated Italian "burro" (butter) and Spanish "burro" (donkey), or Spanish "auge" (acme, culmination, apogee), French "auge" (basin, bowl) and German "auge" (eye). These all happened to converge into the same form at the same time, from different cognates. Making a mistake with these words might result in a laugh or two, but some other lexical traps have a more interesting effect on communication.

False friends do not always stem from false cognates. They can diverge markedly in word sense from the same etymological origins, through semantic changes such as pejoration or amelioration as speakers move away from certain meanings and towards others. The fact that they clearly appear to come from the same source can actually cause confusion when we least expect it. Consider a longer word like in Spanish, in Catalan, in French and in Italian. All these words were drawn from the same Latin word "fastidious," which has come to develop a slightly more positive nuance in English (attentive to detail) compared to its cognate counterparts in the Romance languages, "fastidioso" " fastidiós" " fastidieux" " fastidioso" "fastidium," meaning "loathing, dislike, disgust. " Once again, English is an outlier, as the Romance versions stay truer to the original negative sense, with meanings like "annoying, irritating, boring," etc. This apparently once caused a minor diplomatic incident at a conference, according to researcher Chamizo Domínguez, when an English speaker approved of a Spanish delegate's speech as "fastidious," which was misunderstood to mean that it was boring.

Most European languages follow each other in maintaining a certain word sense, while English seems to go another way.

So what's the cause of this? How do false friends arise and why does it seem like English is such an oddball compared to other European languages in the way its semantics have changed over its history? Research has recorded multiple examples where most European languages follow each other in maintaining a certain word sense, while English seems to go another way. "Eventually" (in the end, finally), for example, means "perhaps, possibly" in the "eventuell" and eventualmente." Other examples are "actually" ("really, in truth" in English vs "currently" in other languages), "fabric" ("a textile" vs "factory"), "etiquette" ("polite behavior" vs "label") and even "billion" ("a thousand million" in English vs "a trillion" in other languages). Make a mistake in your accounting with that last example and you'd have a bit of a problem.

False friends arise through the various actions of semantic change. This might appear to happen randomly but often it's the case that there are identifiable patterns of semantic shifts on groups of words. English seems to have had more major shifts and upheavals than other languages, from the merging of two language families into a single language, with a large part of its vocabulary borrowed from Latinate Norman French, to the Great Vowel Shift markedly changing how words are pronounced, which might account for its outlier status. As the unofficial global language spoken and shared through social media by so many from different cultural backgrounds, it would be understandable if the push and pull of semantic changes happen rapidly and false friends arise.

Even within a language or dialect, confusion can reign if speakers don't consider the pragmatic contrasts in different discourses.

As languages share words and meanings, the influence of certain words might slowly and surreptitiously add shifting nuances that may take over a word's primary sense completely. Carol Rifelj discusses how French has struggled with itself over the many English flavored borrowings that have entered the language, creating false friends -some more obvious than others. Clear borrowings such as "les baskets" (sneakers, from "basketball") or "le look" (style in a fashion sense) acquire their own senses in the language and might mystify an English speaker, developing into false friends. But what if English speakers all started calling their sneakers "their baskets" and this changed the primary sense of the word "basket" in English? Rifelj observes that this is happening in the reverse direction, to French. Loan words from native English words is one thing, but Rifelj points out how a more furtive semantic change passes by unnoticed by most French speakers, simply because all the words are actually originally French. Les faux amis might suddenly develop into " très bons amis" when French borrows back French origin words, complete with their brand new English meanings. For example "contrôler" (to verify), started taking on a new meaning thanks to English, in terms like " c ontrôle des naissances" (birth control), yet because the words are French the change passes by unnoticed. " Futur" has taken over many of word senses once carried by " avenir" (future). An English inspired phrase such as " conference de presse" (press conference) has overtaken the old " réunion de journalistes, " and so on.

Well, with all this embarrassing confusion it's enough to make a person stop learning languages-false friends can also be found lurking in the dialects of the same language, as many researchers have pointed out. George Bernard Shaw is famously reputed to have said "The United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language," and that's putting it mildly when it comes to false friends. Misunderstandings of words like " rubber" (eraser vs condom), " pants" (trousers vs underpants), " suspenders" (straps to hold up trousers vs stockings), " biscuit" (hard cookie vs a soft scone), " fag" (cigarette vs a pejorative term for a gay man), " fanny " (vulgar slang for vagina vs backside) can cause some serious blocks in communication, if not outright offense in some cases. From personal experience, as a nervous student anxious to make a good impression on a strict and straight-laced potential landlord, I remember innocently asking if it would be okay to have pot plants in the apartment. "She means potted plants! POTTED PLANTS!" interrupted my face-palming American roommate. It can certainly be easy to make errors because we're so sure we know what the words in our own native dialect mean that we might not consider or question the new cultural context that they're said in.

Even within a language or dialect, confusion can reign if speakers don't consider the pragmatic contrasts in different discourses. Speaking of preservatives, take an example like " conservative," someone who is aligned to the right of the political spectrum. The word stems from the same cognate as " conservation," meaning to "keep, safeguard, aiming to preserve" so it might confuse some why conservative political views seem to be ideologically opposed to conservation of the environment. Especially considering Ronald Reagan once said: "You're worried about what man has done and is doing to this magical planet that God gave us, and I share your concern. What is a conservative after all, but one who conserves?"

Some have pointed out that historically, American conservatives, led by Republican presidents, have been staunch friends of conserving the environment around us, with the National Park System, the EPA and the Clean Air Act all enacted under conservative administrations. A major cultural and semantic shift since then has meant that the conservative outlook today has all but abandoned a strong environmental legacy and become very much a false friend in this regard, with conservative Republican leaders consistently voting against conservation and for big industry polluters instead.

Because meaning can be fluid and languages eventually change, it can be often confusing for speakers, for language learners, and translators to find that finely preserved words and phrases no longer mean what they once meant. While we might have to do more work to overcome the treacherous pitfalls of the false friend, they also preserve a lexical legacy between and within languages that reveals much about the movement of meaning over time.

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Friend or Faux? The Linguistic Trickery of False Friends | JSTOR Daily

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Dear language learners: have you ever embarrassed yourself in Spanish... enough to cause a pregnant pause? Ever talked about preservatives in food, in French, only to receive weird looks? And why should you think twice about offering a gift to a German?

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Max Smitheram, 54, has attempted to learn te reo Māori (the Māori language) on numerous occasions, but he has never stuck with it - until now. A pakeha [European New Zealander], Smitheram attends free weekly classes and practises at home with his Uruguayan partner, who is also learning the language.

"I had a longstanding wish to learn Māori. It is really interesting to have the opportunity to understand different ways of thinking and understand more about my home," said Smitheram, an environmental planner. "It is an important part of the heritage and identity of New Zealand."

Smitherham is not alone. Te reo is undergoing a revival in New Zealand, with jam-packed classes and waiting lists now common. Māori language teachers from Auckland in the North Island to Dunedin and Invercargill in the South say they are unable to meet demand for their services and free classes routinely draw hundreds of students.

John McCaffery, a language expert at the University of Auckland school of education, says the language is thriving, with other indigenous peoples travelling to New Zealand to learn how Māori has made such a striking comeback. "It has been really dramatic, the past three years in particular, Māori has gone mainstream," he said. "What we're seeing is a clear indication that the language's status and prestige has risen dramatically and research shows that is one of the key indicators of whether children and young people will be interested and committed to learning it."

According to Statistics New Zealand, the proportion of Māori people able to hold an everyday conversation in te reo decreased 3.7% between 1996 and 2013. But anecdotal evidence suggests numbers of non-Māori speakers of the language are rising, as are young Māori adults and professionals, who would not have been captured in the last census.

Big business is on board, too. Google has launched a Māori version of its website, Vodafone has helped Google Maps record more accurate Māori pronunciations, Disney has released a Māori version of the hit Polynesian film Moana, and Fletcher Building has rolled out bilingual signs on all its construction sites.

"There's an increasing sense that te reo is good for identifying your business as committed to New Zealand," said Ngahiwi Apanui, chief executive of the Māori Language Commission. McCaffery echoed his point, saying more than a third of Māori teaching graduates were snapped up by big business keen to build stronger relationships with Māori and tribal groups with significant financial portfolios.

The status of te reo as an increasingly admired language - with its speakers garnering respect - is a long way from the period following the second world war when Māori speakers were chastised for using their language. Young Māori recall being beaten or whipped for speaking te reo in schools and government institutions such as orphanages, and at home more Māori gave up on the language and learned English to get jobs as a vast migration from rural to urban began. By the 1980s, fewer than 20% of Māori spoke te reo.

Now it is very different. According to surveys by Te Puni Kōkiri, a Māori public policy group, "attitudes towards the Māori language among Māori and non-Māori are improving", and "the Māori language currently enjoys a high status in Māori society and also positive acceptance by the majority of non-Māori New Zealanders."

Maori words such as kia ora (hello), Aotearoa (New Zealand), kia kaha (be strong) and kai (food) have long been part of New Zealand English. But the use of others is spreading. The prime minister, Jacinda Ardern, recently gave her child a Māori middle name: Te Aroha, Aroha meaning "love". The gesture was welcomed by tribal groups, who said Ardern was improving relations between the government and Māori people and also sharpening her own language skills.

On New Zealand's national day, Waitangi, this year, the first 49 seconds of Ardern's speech on the sacred treaty grounds were delivered in te reo, while former prime minister Bill English spoke te reo for five minutes. Current Labour ministers Nanaia Mahuta and Peeni Henare are fluent speakers while the Green party co-leader, Marama Davidson, learnt as an adult.

At Buckingham Palace in April, the prime minister began her Commonwealth toast with a Māori proverb, in a video that has been watched tens of thousands of times.

In June, the Māori heavy-metal band Alien Weaponry's album Tū went right to number one in New Zealand and has had more than a million streams on Spotify, while last year Wairua by the Māori group Maimoa Music was the most-watched YouTube clip in New Zealand, seen more than 5.5m times. In 2016 the Māori pop song Maimoatia shot straight to the top of the iTunes chart in New Zealand, knocking Justin Timberlake off the number one position. Producer Marama Gardiner, a fluent te reo speaker, said the song was designed to build confidence in young speakers of te reo, who could sometimes feel shy practising their language skills. "I want people to be singing a great te reo song all over the world. That would be such a boost of confidence for speakers in New Zealand, that their indigenous language is not dying but adapting."

A larger range of Māori programming has also played a significant role in normalising the language, including publicly funded Māori TV, whose presenters and journalists speak only in Māori, with captions provided.

All signage is now bilingual in government offices, hospitals and most public spaces and the first bilingual children's playground was opened in Rotorua this year.

Mainstream broadcasters on commercial channels such as TVNZ and TV3 have shown a commitment to using Māori live on air and ignore critics who complain of feeling excluded.

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TV presenter Kanoa Lloyd uses te reo words on her prime-time show.

Television news presenter Kanoa Lloyd, of Māori descent, began introducing te reo words to her weather reports in 2015 and received a torrent of complaints and online abuse. She has continued to use te reo on her prime-time show The Project. The governor-general, Dame Patsy Reddy, revealed this year that she had started learning te reo, but said she was concerned about the shortage of Māori teachers nationwide.

Last week the Labour minister Kelvin Davis held a hui [meeting] with Māori language experts, seeking their advice on how to get more New Zealand teachers speaking the language, so they could teach eager students. Davis is himself a conversational Māori speaker. "We want them to have the confidence and competence to be able to weave te reo into their lessons, [and] to normalise te reo in the classroom," he said.

"We want all New Zealanders to feel that te reo is just a normal part of our lives and that we can switch in and out of languages as we see fit."

Māori language experts say the language has never been more widely used, normalised or respected. The dark days, they say, of Māori speakers being beaten and punished are long gone.

"I think there is increasing awareness that there is intrinsic value in learning te reo, that it is the language of this country," said Dr Arapera Bella Ngaha, who is studying the revitalisation of te reo at Auckland university. She relearned te reo as an adult after she was banned from using it at boarding school. "It has become cool and I am very happy about that. For a long time we thought it was over."
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'Māori has gone mainstream': the resurgence of New Zealand's te reo language

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Max Smitheram, 54, has attempted to learn te reo Māori (the Māori language) on numerous occasions, but he has never stuck with it - until now. A pakeha [European New Zealander], Smitheram attends free weekly classes and practises at home with his Uruguayan partner, who is also learning the language.

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On 16 May, a lawyer named Aaron Schlossberg was in a New York cafe when he heard several members of staff speaking Spanish. He reacted with immediate fury, threatening to call US Immigration and Customs Enforcement and telling one employee: "Your staff is speaking Spanish to customers when they should be speaking English ... This is America." A video of the incident quickly went viral, drawing widespread scorn. The Yelp page for his law firm was flooded with one-star reviews, and Schlossberg was soon confronted with a "fiesta" protest in front of his Manhattan apartment building, which included a crowd-funded taco truck and mariachi band to serenade him on the way to work.

As the Trump administration intensifies its crackdown on migrants, speaking any language besides English has taken on a certain charge. In some cases, it can even be dangerous. But if something has changed around the politics of English since Donald Trump took office, the anger Schlossberg voiced taps into deeper nativist roots. Elevating English while denigrating all other languages has been a pillar of English and American nationalism for well over a hundred years. It's a strain of linguistic exclusionism heard in Theodore Roosevelt's 1919 address to the American Defense Society, in which he proclaimed that "we have room for but one language here, and that is the English language, for we intend to see that the crucible turns our people out as Americans, of American nationality, and not as dwellers in a polyglot boardinghouse".

As it turned out, Roosevelt had things almost perfectly backwards. A century of immigration has done little to dislodge the status of English in North America. If anything, its position is stronger than it was a hundred years ago. Yet from a global perspective,it is not America that is threatened by foreign languages. It is the world that is threatened by English.

Behemoth, bully, loudmouth, thief: English is everywhere, and everywhere, English dominates. From inauspicious beginnings on the edge of a minor European archipelago, it has grown to vast size and astonishing influence. Almost 400m people speak it as their first language; a billion more know it as a secondary tongue. It is an official language in at least 59 countries, the unofficial lingua franca of dozens more. No language in history has been used by so many people or spanned a greater portion of the globe. It is aspirational: the golden ticket to the worlds of education and international commerce, a parent's dream and a student's misery, winnower of the haves from the have-nots. It is inescapable: the language of global business, the internet, science, diplomacy, stellar navigation, avian pathology. And everywhere it goes, it leaves behind a trail of dead: dialects crushed, languages forgotten, literatures mangled.

One straightforward way to trace the growing influence of English is in the way its vocabulary has infiltrated so many other languages. For a millennium or more, English was a great importer of words, absorbing vocabulary from Latin, Greek, French, Hindi, Nahuatl and many others. During the 20th century, though, as the US became the dominant superpower and the world grew more connected, English became a net exporter of words. In 2001, Manfred Görlach, a German scholar who studies the dizzying number of regional variants of English - he is the author of the collections Englishes, More Englishes, Still More Englishes, and Even More Englishes - published the Dictionary of European Anglicisms, which gathers together English terms found in 16 European languages. A few of the most prevalent include "last-minute", "fitness", "group sex", and a number of terms related to seagoing and train travel.

In some countries, such as France and Israel, special linguistic commissions have been working for decades to stem the English tide by creating new coinages of their own - to little avail, for the most part. (As the journalist Lauren Collins has wryly noted: "Does anyone really think that French teenagers, per the academy's diktat, are going to trade out 'sexting' for texto pornographique?") Thanks to the internet, the spread of English has almost certainly sped up.

The gravitational pull that English now exerts on other languages can also be seen in the world of fiction. The writer and translator Tim Parks has argued that European novels are increasingly being written in a kind of denatured, international vernacular, shorn of country-specific references and difficult-to-translate wordplay or grammar. Novels in this mode - whether written in Dutch, Italian or Swiss German - have not only assimilated the style of English, but perhaps more insidiously limit themselves to describing subjects in a way that would be easily digestible in an anglophone context.

Yet the influence of English now goes beyond simple lexical borrowing or literary influence. Researchers at the IULM University in Milan have noticed that, in the past 50 years, Italian syntax has shifted towards patterns that mimic English models, for instance in the use of possessives instead of reflexives to indicate body parts and the frequency with which adjectives are placed before nouns. German is also increasingly adopting English grammatical forms, while in Swedish its influence has been changing the rules governing word formation and phonology.

Within the anglophone world, that English should be the key to all the world's knowledge and all the world's places is rarely questioned. The hegemony of English is so natural as to be invisible. Protesting it feels like yelling at the moon. Outside the anglophone world, living with English is like drifting into the proximity of a supermassive black hole, whose gravity warps everything in its reach. Every day English spreads, the world becomes a little more homogenous and a little more bland.

Until recently, the story of English was broadly similar to that of other global languages: it spread through a combination of conquest, trade and colonisation. (Some languages, such as Arabic and Sanskrit, also caught on through their status as sacred tongues.) But then, at some point between the end of the second world war and the start of the new millenium, English made a jump in primacy that no amount of talk about it as a "lingua franca" or "global language" truly captures. It transformed from a dominant language to what the Dutch sociologist Abram de Swaan calls a "hypercentral" one.

De Swaan divides languages into four categories. Lowest on the pyramid are the "peripheral languages", which make up 98% of all languages, but are spoken by less than 10% of mankind. These are largely oral, and rarely have any kind of official status. Next are the "central languages", though a more apt term might be "national languages". These are written, are taught in schools, and each has a territory to call its own: Lithuania for Lithuanian, North and South Korea for Korean, Paraguay for Guarani, and so on.

Following these are the 12 "supercentral languages": Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish and Swahili - each of which (except for Swahili) boast 100 million speakers or more. These are languages you can travel with. They connect people across nations. They are commonly spoken as second languages, often (but not exclusively) as a result of their parent nation's colonial past.

Then, finally, we come to the top of the pyramid, to the languages that connect the supercentral ones. There is only one: English, which De Swaan calls "the hypercentral language that holds the entire world language system together". The Japanese novelist Minae Mizumura similarly describes English as a "universal language" . For Mizumura, what makes it universal is not that it has many native speakers - Mandarin and Spanish have more - but that it is "used by the greatest number of non-native speakers in the world". She compares it to a currency used by more and more people until its utility hits a critical mass and it becomes a world currency. The literary critic Jonathan Arac is even more blunt, noting, in a critique of what he calls "Anglo-Globalism", that "English in culture, like the dollar in economics, serves as the medium through which knowledge may be translated from the local to the global."

In the last few decades, as globalisation has accelerated and the US has remained the world's most powerful country, the advance of English has taken on a new momentum. In 2008, Rwanda switched its education system from French to English, having already made English an official language in 14 years earlier. Officially, this was part of the government's effort to make Rwanda the tech hub of Africa. Unofficially, it's widely believed to be an expression of disgust at France's role in propping-up the pre-1994 Hutu-dominant government, as well as a reflection that the country's ruling elite mostly speaks English, having grown up as exiles in anglophone east Africa. When South Sudan became independent in 2011, it made English its official language despite having very few resources or qualified personnel with which to teach it in schools. The Minister of higher education at the time justified the move as being aimed at making the country "different and modern", while the news director of South Sudan Radio added that with English, South Sudan could "become one nation" and "communicate with the rest of the world" - understandable goals in a country home to more than 50 local languages.

An English class at a government school in Bentiu, South Sudan. Photograph: Roberto Schmidt/AFP/Getty Images

The situation in east Asia is no less dramatic. China currently has more speakers of English as a second language than any other country. Some prominent English teachers have become celebrities, conducting mass lessons in stadiums seating thousands. In South Korea, meanwhile, according to the sociolinguist Joseph Sung-Yul Park, English is a "national religion". Korean employers expect proficiency in English, even in positions where it offers no obvious advantage.

The quest to master English in Korea is often called the yeongeo yeolpung or "English frenzy". Although mostly confined to a mania for instruction and immersion, occasionally this "frenzy" spills over into medical intervention. As Sung-Yul Park relates: "An increasing number of parents in South Korea have their children undergo a form of surgery that snips off a thin band of tissue under the tongue ... Most parents pay for this surgery because they believe it will make their children speak English better; the surgery supposedly enables the child to pronounce the English retroflex consonant with ease, a sound that is considered to be particularly difficult for Koreans."

There is no evidence to suggest that this surgery in any way improves English pronunciation. The willingness to engage in this useless surgical procedure strikes me, though, as a potent metaphor for English's peculiar status in the modern world. It is no longer simply a tool suited to a particular task or set of tasks, as it was in the days of the Royal Navy or the International Commission for Air Navigation. It is now seen as the access code to the global elite. If you want your children to get ahead, then they better have English in their toolkit.

Is the conquest of English really so bad? In the not-too-distant future, thanks to English, the curse of Babel will be undone and the children of men may come together once again, united with the aid of a common tongue. Certainly, that's what English's boosters would have you believe. After all, what a work is English, how copious in its vocabulary, how noble in expression, how sinuous in its constructions, and yet how plain in its basic principles. A language, in short, with a word for almost everything, capable of an infinite gradation of meanings, equally suited to describing the essential rights of mankind as to ornamenting a packet of crisps, whose only defect, as far as I know, is that it makes everyone who speaks it sound like a duck.

Well, not really. (OK, maybe a little - English, while not an ugly language, isn't exactly pretty either). Mostly, I'm speaking out of bitterness - one that is old, and until recently, lay dormant. My first language was Polish. I learned it from my parents at home. English followed shortly, at school in Pennsylvania. I learned to speak it fluently, but with an accent, which took years of teasing - and some speech therapy, kindly provided by the state - to wear away. That, combined with the experience of watching the widespread condescension towards those who take their time learning English, left me a lifelong English-sceptic. (I admit, also, that a strain of linguistic megalomania runs through many Polish speakers, one best summed up by the novelist Joseph Conrad, who, when asked why he didn't write in his native language, replied: "I value too much our beautiful Polish literature to introduce into it my worthless twaddle. But for Englishmen my capacities are just sufficient.")

It's not that English is bad. It's fine! A perfectly nice language, capable of expressing a great many things - and with scores of fascinating regional variants, from Scots to Singapore English. But it is so prevalent. And so hard to escape. And so freighted with buffoonish puffery written on its behalf: "our magnificent bastard tongue"; "the language that connects the world". Please. There is no reason for any particular language to be worshipped around the world like a golden idol. There is a pervasive mismatch between the grand claims made on English's behalf, and its limitations as means of communication (limitations, to be fair, that it shares with all other languages).

Is English oppressive? When its pervasive influence silences other languages, or discourages parents from passing on their native languages to their children, I think it can be. When you do know another language, it's merely constricting, like wearing trousers that are too tight. That's because while English is good for a great many things, it is not good for everything. To me, family intimacies long to be expressed in Polish. So does anything concerning the seasons, forest products and catastrophic sorrows. Poetry naturally sounds better in Polish. I've always spoken it to cats and dogs on the assumption that they understand, being simultaneously convinced that raccoons and lesser animals only respond to shouts.

This isn't quite as idiosyncratic as it sounds. Aneta Pavlenko, an applied linguist at Temple University in Pennsylvania, who has spent her career studying the psychology of bilingual and multilingual speakers, has found that speakers of multiple languages frequently believe that each language conveys a "different self". Languages, according to her respondents, come in a kaleidoscopic range of emotional tones. "I would inevitably talk to babies and animals in Welsh," reports a Welsh-speaker. An informant from Finland counters: "Finnish emotions are rarely stated explicitly. Therefore it is easier to tell my children that I love them in English." Several Japanese speakers say that it's easier to express anger in English, especially by swearing.

Intuitive though it might be to some, the idea that different languages capture and construct different realities has been a subject of academic controversy for at least 200 years. The German explorer Alexander von Humboldt was among the first to articulate it in a complex form. After studying Amerindian languages in the New World, he came to the conclusion that every language "draws a circle" around its speakers, creating a distinct worldview through its grammar as well as in its vocabulary. In the 20th century, the American linguists Edward Sapir and Benjamin Lee Whorf elaborated this idea into a broader vision of how language structures thought. Both drew inspiration for their work from their study of North American languages such as Nootka, Shawnee and Hopi.

This idea - now usually known as the linguistic relativity hypothesis, or Sapir-Whorf hypothesis - has had a checkered history in academia. At different times, it has been hailed by it proponents as foundational insight for modern anthropology and literary theory, and blamed by its detractors as the source of the worst excesses of postmodern philosophy. In recent decades, sociolinguists have arrived at a few startlingly suggestive findings concerning the influence of language on colour perception, orientation and verbs of motion - but in general, the more expansive notion that different languages inculcate fundamentally different ways of thinking has not been proven.

Nonetheless, some version of this idea continues to find supporters, not least among writers familiar with shifting between languages. Here is the memoirist Eva Hoffman on the experience of learning English in Vancouver while simultaneously feeling cut off from the Polish she had grown up speaking as a teenager in Kraków: "This radical disjointing between word and thing is a desiccating alchemy, draining the world not only of significance but of its colours, striations, nuances - its very existence. It is the loss of a living connection." The Chinese writer Xiaolu Guo described something similar in her recent memoir, writing about how uncomfortable she felt, at first, with the way the English language encouraged speakers to use the first-person singular, rather than plural. "After all, how could someone who had grown up in a collective society get used to using the first-person singular all the time? ... But here, in this foreign country, I had to build a world as a first-person singular - urgently."

Li Yang teaches students his 'Crazy English' accelerated learning method in Nanjing, China. Photograph: China Photos/Getty Images

In the 1970s, Anna Wierzbicka, a linguist who found herself marooned in Australia after a long career in Polish academia, stood the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis on its head. Instead of trying to describe the worldviews of distant hunter-gatherers, she turned her sociolinguistic lens on the surrounding anglophones. For Wierzbicka, English shapes its speakers as powerfully as any other language. It's just that in an anglophone world, that invisible baggage is harder to discern. In a series of books culminating in 2013's evocatively named Imprisoned in English, she has attempted to analyse various assumptions - social, spatial, emotional and otherwise - latent in English spoken by the middle and upper classes in the US and UK.

Reading Wierzbicka's work is like peeking through a magic mirror that inverts the old "how natives think" school of anthropology and turns it back on ourselves. Her English-speakers are a pragmatic people, cautious in their pronouncements and prone to downplaying their emotions. They endlessly qualify their remarks according to their stance towards what is being said. Hence their endless use of expressions such as "I think", "I believe", "I suppose", "I understand", "I suspect". They prefer fact over theories, savour "control" and "space", and cherish autonomy over intimacy. Their moral lives are governed by a tightly interwoven knot of culture-specific concepts called "right" and "wrong", which they mysteriously believe to be universal.

Wierzbicka's description of English's subconscious system of values hardly holds true for the billion or more speakers of this most global of tongues. But it is also a reminder that, despite its influence, English is not truly universal. Its horizons are just as limited as those of any other language, whether Chinese or Hopi or Dalabon.

For if language connects people socially, it also connects them to a place. The linguist Nicholas Evans has described how Kayardild, a language spoken in northern Australia, requires a speaker to continually orient themselves according to the cardinal directions. Where an English speaker would orient things according to their own perception - my left, my right, my front, my back - a speaker of Kayardild thinks in terms of north, south, east and west. As a consequence, speakers of Kayardild (and those of several other languages that share this feature) possess "absolute reckoning", or a kind of "perfect pitch" for direction. It also means removing one's self as the main reference point for thinking about space. As Evans writes of his own experiences learning the language, "one aspect of speaking Kayardild, then, is learning that the landscape is more important and objective than you are. Kayardild grammar literally puts everyone in their place."

Kayardild and its kin are truly local languages, with few speakers, and modes of expression that are hard to separate from the places in which they are spoken. But that should not lead us to think that they are lesser. The world is made up of places, not universals. To speak only English, in spite of its vast vocabulary and countless varieties, is still to dwell in a rather small pool. It draws the same circle Humboldt described around its speakers as each of the other 6,000 human languages. The difference is that we have mistaken that circle for the world.

Because English is increasingly the currency of the universal, it is difficult to express any opposition to its hegemony that doesn't appear to be tainted by either nationalism or snobbery. When Minae Mizumura published the Fall of Language in the Age of English, in 2008, it was a surprise commercial success in Japan. But it provoked a storm of criticism, as Mizumura was accused of elitism, nationalism and being a "hopeless reactionary". One representative online comment read: "Who does she think she is, a privileged bilingual preaching to the rest of us Japanese!" (Perhaps unsurprisingly, Mizumura's broader argument, about the gradual erosion of Japanese literature - and especially, the legacy of the Japanese modernist novel - got lost in the scuffle.)

Those of us troubled by the hyperdominance of English should also remember the role it has played in some societies - especially multi-ethnic ones - as a bridge to the wider world and counterweight to other nationalisms. This was especially keenly felt in South Africa, where Afrikaans was widely associated with the policy of apartheid. When the government announced that Afrikaans would be used as a language of instruction in schools on par with English in 1974, the decision led in 1976 to a mass demonstration by black students known as the Soweto uprising. Its brutal suppression resulted in hundreds of deaths, and is considered a turning point in the anti-apartheid struggle. Similar protests have periodically racked southern India since the 1940s over attempts to enforce official use of Hindi in place of English.

A sign for English lessons in Nawalgarh, Rajasthan, India. Photograph: Alamy Stock Photo

In other parts of the world though, English still carries the full weight of its colonialist past. Since the 1960s, the celebrated Kenyan novelist Ngũgĩ wa Thiong'o has advocated on behalf of African languages and against the prevalence of English-language education in postcolonial countries. In his landmark 1986 book Decolonising the Mind: the Politics of Language in African Literature, he describes the corrosive effect of English language instruction, comparing it to a form of "spiritual subjugation". Colonial education, in which pupils were physically punished for speaking their native languages while at school (something also done to the Welsh into the early 20th century) was necessarily, and deliberately, alienating, "like separating the mind from the body".

Since publishing Decolonising the Mind, Ngũgĩ has worked to put its dictates into practice. He renounced his baptismal name, James, and with it Christianity, and ceased to write fiction in English. Since the 1980s, he has written all his novels and plays in his native Gikuyu, only using English (and occasionally Kiswahili) for essays and polemics. This last decision is one that many people still question. As he said in a recent interview: "If I meet an English person, and he says, 'I write in English,' I don't ask him, 'Why are you writing in English?' If I meet a French writer, I don't ask him, 'Why don't you write in Vietnamese?' But I am asked over and over again, 'Why do you write in Gikuyu?' For Africans, the view is there is something wrong about writing in an African language."

Part of the paradox of Ngũgĩ's situation is that while he may be the world's foremost advocate for writing literature in African languages, his novels have won acclaim and gained international recognition through the medium of English. The hegemony of English is now such that, in order to be recognised, any opposition to English has to formulated in English in order to be heard.

Today it is estimated that the world loses a language every two weeks. Linguists have predicted that between 50 and 90% of the world's 6,000 or so languages will go extinct in the coming century. For even a fraction of these to survive, we're going to have to start thinking of smaller languages not as endangered species worth saving, but as equals worth learning.

In most of the world, it's already too late. In California, where I live, most of the languages that were spoken before the arrival of Europeans are already extinct. On America's eastern seaboard, thanks to long proximity to Anglo settlers, the situation is even worse. Most of what we know about many of these vanished languages comes in the form of brief word lists compiled by European settlers and traders before the 19th century. Stadaconan (or Laurentian) survives only from a glossary of 220 words jotted down by Jacques Cartier when he sailed up the St Lawrence River in Canada in 1535. Eastern Atakapa, from Louisiana's Gulf Coast, is known from a list of only 287, gathered in 1802. The last fragments of Nansemond, once spoken in eastern Virginia, were collected from the last living speaker just before his death in 1902, by which time he could only recall six words: one, two, three, four, five and dog.

The great Malian historian and novelist Amadou Hampâté Bâ once said that in Africa, when an elder dies, a library burns. Today, across the world, the libraries are still burning. In his marvellous book, Searching for Aboriginal Languages: Memoirs of a Field Worker, the linguist Robert MW Dixon describes travelling across Northern Queensland in the 1960s and 70s to record indigenous languages, many of which had already dwindled to a handful of speakers. It's hard to remain an oral language in an increasingly text-dependent world. All the forces of modernity, globalisation, industrialisation, urbanisation and the rise of the nation-state are arrayed against the small and local as opposed to the big and shareable.

In this past century, the Earth has been steadily losing diversity at every level of biology and culture. Few deny this is a bad thing. Too often though, we forget that these crises of diversity depend, to a great extent, on our own decisions. Much of what has been done can also be undone, provided there is the will for it. Hebrew is the most famous case of a language brought back from the dead, but linguistic revitalisation has been proven to be possible elsewhere as well. Czech became a viable national language thanks to the work of literary activists in the 19th century. On a much smaller scale, endangered languages such as Manx in the Isle of Man and Wampanoag in the US have been successfully pulled back from the brink.

Coming face-to-face with the current onslaught of linguicide, I find myself wanting to venture a modest proposal. What if anglo-globalism wasn't a one-way street? What if the pre-contact languages of the Americas were taught in American high schools? What if British schoolchildren learned some of the languages spoken by the actual residents of the former empire? (This is a utopian project obviously. But how much would it actually cost to add a linguistic elective to larger high schools? One jet fighter? A few cruise missiles?)

Current educational discourse is full of talk about the need to bolster children's cognition. In the culture at large, experts have been trumpeting the cognitive benefits of everything from online brain games to magic mushrooms. Why not try Hopi instead? The point of this education wouldn't necessarily be to acquire fluency in an extinct or smaller language - it would be to open a door.

And think of the vistas it might open up. For generations, a huge percentage of philosophy and social science has been conducted in and about English speakers. Humankind, as imagined by the academy, is mostly anglophone. This has even been true in linguistics. Noam Chomsky's idea of a universal grammar underpinning all languages was based on a rather narrow empirical base. More recent research into dozens of smaller languages, like Kayardild and Pirahã, has been steadily whittling away at his list of supposed universals. We now know there are languages without adverbs, adjectives, prepositions and articles. There seems to be hardly anything that a language "needs" to be - just thousands of natural experiments in how they might be assembled. And most of them are about to be lost.

In some ways, the worst threat may come not from the global onrush of modernity, but from an idea: that a single language should suit every purpose, and that being monolingual is therefore somehow "normal". This is something that's often assumed reflexively by those of us who live most of our lives in English, but historically speaking, monolingualism is something of an aberration.

Before the era of the nation-state, polyglot empires were the rule, rather than the exception. Polyglot individuals abounded, too. For most of history, people lived in small communities. But that did not mean that they were isolated from one another. Multilingualism must have been common. Today, we see traces of this polyglot past in linguistic hotspots such as the Mandara mountains of Cameroon, where children as young as 10 routinely juggle four or five languages in daily life, and learn several others in school.

Residents of Arnhem Land in northern Australia routinely speak half a dozen or more languages by the time they are adults. Multilingualism, writes Nicholas Evans, "is helped by the fact that you have to marry outside your clan, which likely means your wife or husband speaks a different language from you. It also means that you parents each speak a different language, and your grandparents three or four languages between them."

A resident of another linguistic hotspot, the Sepik region of Papua New Guinea, once told Evans: "It wouldn't be any good if we talked the same; we like to know where people come from." It's a vision of Babel in reverse. Instead of representing a fall from human perfection, as in the biblical story, having many languages is a gift. It's something to remember before we let English swallow the globe.
Main illustration by Miguel Montaner

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Behemoth, bully, thief: how the English language is taking over the planet

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The long read : No language in history has dominated the world quite like English does today. Is there any point in resisting?

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Devastasha Beaver
EN333-Case Study
Report

The Lord's Prayer through the Centuries

This case study explores the morphological, syntactical, lexical, and spelling changes in words and phrases in The Lord's Prayer, through translations in Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English. The Old English translation is from circa year 1000, the Middle English translation is from 1389, the Early Modern translation is from 1526, and the Modern English translation is from1952. There are two tables preceding this report; the first displays the words and phrases throughout the different translations, while the second is a compilation of the data in the categories of morphology, spelling, and syntax. This case study will present the differences and similarities throughout the translations in morphology, syntax, and spelling/lexicon, and propose what may have brought about such changes.
Spelling
The most significant changes through the translations are the different spellings employed. Some of the changes in spelling are the result of phonology, or the pronunciations of words; others are the result of changes in lexicon because of historic changes. There are three specific spelling changes because of phonology in the selected data. First, the letter "f" in Old English is in the place the letter "v" occupies in Modern English. This is so in the Old English words for "heaven," which is "heofonum," "forgive," which is "forgyf," "evil," which is "yfele," "forgive (men)," which is "forgyfab," and "forgive (us)," which is "forgyfþ" in Old English. This shows that, at that time, the letter "f" was pronounced in a similar way to how "v" is pronounced in

Modern English. This is perhaps because the phonological features of /f/ and /v/ are all the same, except that /v/ is voiced and /f/ is not (Fromkin 285). During the time that Old English was spoken, /f/ may have been pronounced in a voiced manner as /v/ is today.

Secondly, the "th" in the middle of words in Modern English is different in Old and Middle English. The Old and Middle English words for "father" both contain a "d" rather than a "th" ("Fæder" and "fadir," respectively). However, the "th" in Modern English "neither" is a "w" in Old English. The "th" in "father" and "neither" is pronounced /ð/ in Modern English (Fromkin 256). The /ð/ has many common phonological features with /d/ and /w/. They are all syllabic, nasal, voiced, palatal, and sibilant, which can explain the different spellings in Old English. Additionally, /d/ is much closer phonetically to /ð/ than /w/ is, as they are both consonantal, sonorant, labial, anterior, velar, and coronal. The only features that /w/ has in common with /ð/ that /d/ does not are that they are both continuant and alveolar. These commonalities account for the phonologic spellings in Old English.

Finally, in Old, Middle, and Early Modern English, "y" often takes the place that "i" or "e" would occupy in Modern English. For example: in Old English, "forgyf," "yfele," "forgyfab," "forgyfþ," and "synna;" in Middle English, "yuel," and "synnes;" and in Early Modern English, "wyll," "ys," and "yvell." This suggests that "y" was pronounced as the phoneme /i/ is in Modern English, which implies that "i," "e," and "y" were all pronounced the same in some words all the way up until Modern English.

In the data set, there is one specific example of words changing as a result of lexical changes through the translations. The word that is "debts" in Modern English changes significantly

through each translation. In Old English it is "gyltas," which means "crime, sin, fault, or fine," according to www.etymonline.com. It then becomes "dettis" in Middle English, which appears to be from the Old French word "dete," that comes from the Latin for "thing owed," according to www.etymonline.com. This is most likely a result of the Norman Invasion of England in 1066. It then changes to "treaspases" in Early Modern English, which is also from Old French, but first used in Scottish laws meaning "to enter unlawfully" in 1455, according to www.etymonline.com. The final translation is "debts" in Modern English, which is again from the Old French; however, according to www.etymonline.com, the "b" was restored in the English spelling around 1560-1660. The translations changed as the lexicon in England changed through the Norman invasion, which introduced French words and other influences.
Morphology
Morphologically, the word "forgive" in Old and Middle English appear to be the most changed through different tenses. In Old English, the phrase "And forgive (us)" is "And fogyf," while "forgive (us)" is "forgyfþ" and "forgive (men)" is "forgyfab." Though the differences are interesting, there is not enough evidence in the data to hypothesize about what the morphological change is. In Middle English, "forgive" is the same in "And forgive (us)" and "forgive (us)" (for eue) and is only different for "forgive (men)" ( for euve), which would imply that the insertion of "v" between the "u" and second "e" signifies that "men" are the object to be forgiven.

In regards to morphemes, in all translations, the suffix "s" marks a plural noun, with one exception in Old English. For example, the word for "debts" in each translation ends with the

suffix "s," i.e.: "gyltas," dettis," "treaspases," and finally, "debts." The exception of the pluralizing suffix "s" in Old English comes in the word for "trespasses." In Old English, it is "synna," while in every subsequent translation it is pluralized by the suffix "s," ("synnes," "trespases," and "trespasses"). This may suggest that in the Old English translation, "trespass" or "sin" may have been singular in the prayer, or perhaps "synna" is an irregular plural noun.

The phrase "thy will be done on earth as it is in heaven," through the different translations appears to show that the overall syntax of English has stayed relatively the same. The translations from Old English to Modern English, respectively, are as follows: "pin willa on eorþan swā swā on heofonum," "thi wille don as in heuen and in erthe," "they wyll be fulfilled as well in erth as hit ys in heven," and finally, "Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in heaven." Though the words for "earth" and "heaven" are sometimes switched, as in Middle English, the meaning remains the same, as they are syntactically the same. However, the phrase, "our father" in Old English implies differently, as it is "Fæder ūre," placing the possessor after the noun. In other circumstances, though (i.e. "your trespasses" being "ēowre synna" in Old English) normal English syntax is followed. This may suggest that in certain circumstances, perhaps only when speaking about God directly, the syntax of sentences is different in order to show reverence to the divine.
Conclusion
Though there are many changes from Old English to Modern English, upon close examination, not much has changed. The largest amount of change is in spelling, however,

accepted spellings of words change frequently and are often different between regions that speak the same language. For example, British English recognizes "colour" as correct, while American English only recognizes "color" as the correct spelling, although they are both words in Modern English. Overall, English syntax has remained largely the same throughout all translations, and many words follow the modern morphological rule that, in English, the suffix "s" makes regular nouns plural. The main difference between translations is the dependence of Old English on phonologically spelling words, as opposed to the more complicated spellings and pronunciations in Modern English. Through the introduction of French, Latin, Scottish, and other influences, the English language has evolved from being highly Germanic, to a language with roots in several places.

Works Cited/Consulted

Fromkin, Victoria, et al., eds. An Introduction to Language. 9th ed. Boston: Wadsworth, 2011.
Print.

(Translations are from "Projects for 'Historical Linguistics and Language Change'" handout.)

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The Lord's Prayer through the Centuries: A Case Study

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Devastasha BeaverEN333-Case StudyReport The Lord's Prayer through the Centuries This case study explores the morphological, syntactical, lexical, and spelling changes in words and phrases in The Lord's Prayer, through translations in Old English, Middle English, Early Modern English, and Modern English.

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How many words do you need to know before you know a language?

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How many words do you need to know before you know a language?

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U2 AoS2

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Beth Sagar-Fenton & Lizzy McNeillMore or Less, BBC Radio 4

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How many words do you need to speak a language?

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The vocabulary required to be understood in another tongue may not need to be vast.

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U2 AoS2

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I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns. And I didn't speak to him in Russian in the first few weeks of his life; it felt ridiculous to do so. All he could do was sleep and scream and breast-feed, and really the person I was talking to when I talked to him was his mother, Emily, who was sleep-deprived and on edge and needed company. She does not know Russian.

But then, at some point, when things stabilized a little, I started. I liked the feeling, when I carried him through the neighborhood or pushed him in his stroller, of having our own private language. And I liked the number of endearments that Russian gave me access to. Mushkin, mazkin, glazkin, moy horoshy, moy lyubimy, moy malen'ky mal'chik. It is a language surprisingly rich in endearments, given its history.

When we started reading books to Raffi, I included some Russian ones. A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children; they were not nonsense verse, but they were pretty close, and Raffi enjoyed them. One was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a bag, and never returned. Kharms himself was arrested in Leningrad, in 1941, for expressing "seditious" sentiments, and died, of starvation, in a psychiatric hospital the following year; the great Soviet bard Alexander Galich would eventually call the song about the man in the forest "prophetic" and write his own song, embedding the forest lyrics into a story of the Gulag. Raffi really liked the Kharms song; when he got a little older, he would request it and then dance.

Before I knew it, I was speaking to Raffi in Russian all the time, even in front of his mother. And while at first it seemed silly, because he didn't understand anything we said, in any language, there came a point when I saw that he did. We started with animal sounds. "What does a cow"- korova-"say?" I would ask. "Moo!" Raffi would answer. "What does a cat"- koshka-"say?" "Meow." "And what does an owl"- sova-"say?" Raffi would make his eyes big and raise his arms and pronounce, "Hoo, hoo." He didn't understand much else, though, at a certain point, around the age of one and a half, he seemed to learn that nyet meant "no"-I said it a lot. He didn't understand me as well as he understood his mother, and he didn't understand either of us all that much, but still it felt like a minor miracle. I had given my son some Russian! After that, I felt I should extend the experiment. It helped that people were so supportive and impressed. "It's wonderful that you're teaching him Russian," they said.

But I had doubts, and still do.

Bilingualism used to have an undeservedly bad reputation; then it got an undeservedly exalted one. The first came from early twentieth-century American psychologists, who, countering nativists, proposed that something other than heredity was causing Eastern and Southern European immigrants to score lower than Northern Europeans on newly invented I.Q. tests. They proposed that the attempt to learn two languages might be at fault. As Kenji Hakuta points out, in his 1986 book, " The Mirror of Language," neither the psychologists nor the nativists considered that I.Q. tests might themselves be useless.

In the early nineteen-sixties, this pseudo-science was debunked by Canadian researchers in the midst of debates over Quebecois nationalism. A study by two McGill University researchers, which used French-English bilingual schoolchildren in Montreal, found that they actually outperformed monolingual children on tests that required mental manipulation and reorganization of visual patterns. Thus was born the "bilingual advantage." It remains the conventional wisdom, as I have recently learned from people telling me about it over and over.

In fact, in recent years, the bilingual advantage has been brought into doubt. The early studies have been criticized for selection bias and a lack of clear, testable hypotheses. It's possible there is no bilingual advantage, aside from the indisputable advantage of knowing another language. And while it is not the case, as some parents still think, that learning another language alongside English will impede English learning significantly, it may be the case that it impedes it a little bit. As the psycholinguist François Grosjean stresses, language is the product of necessity. If a child discusses, say, hockey only with his Russian-speaking father, he may not learn until later how to say "puck" in English. But he'll learn when he has to.

In any case, in the absence of a "bilingual advantage" that will automatically test your kid into the preschool of his choice, you have to decide, as a parent, whether you actually want him to know the language. And here, for me, the trouble begins.

My parents took me out of the Soviet Union in 1981, when I was six. They did it because they didn't like the Soviet Union-it was, as my grandmother kept telling us, "a terrible country," violent, tragic, poor, and prone to outbursts of anti-Semitism-and they did it because there was an opportunity: Congress, under pressure from American Jewish groups, had passed legislation that tied U.S.-Soviet trade to Jewish emigration. Leaving wasn't easy, but if you were aggressive and entrepreneurial-my father at one point paid a significant bribe-you could get out. We moved to Boston. Probably no other decision has had a greater effect on my life.

My parents were attached to Russian culture by a thousand ineradicable ties. But they did not cut me off from American society, nor could they have. I assimilated wholeheartedly, found my parents in many ways embarrassing, and allowed my Russian to decline through neglect. Six is an in-between age in terms of assimilation. If you're much younger-two or three-the chances of keeping your Russian are slim, and you basically just become an American. If you're older by a few years-for Russians, nine or ten seems to be the cutoff-you probably won't ever lose your accent, and you will be marked as Russian for the rest of your life. At six, you can still remember the language, but you won't have an accent. It's up to you what to do. I know many people who came over at that age and still speak Russian to their parents, but don't do anything with Russian professionally and never go back to Russia. I also know people who came over at that age and go back all the time and even married Russians. I am in the latter group; I started going over while in college and have been writing and thinking about Russia ever since.

Knowing Russian has meant a great deal to me. It's allowed me to travel with relative ease throughout the former Soviet Union. Culturally, I have enjoyed the things my parents enjoyed-the Soviet bards, some of the charming Soviet rom-coms of the nineteen-seventies, the poetry of Joseph Brodsky and the plays of Ludmilla Petrushevskaya. As I got older, I added some things of my own. But I am aware that my connection to Russia is an attenuated connection. I do not know Russian or Russia as well as my parents did. I am an American who inherited certain linguistic and cultural skills and saw in the wake of the Soviet collapse an opportunity to deploy them as a writer and translator, as my parents once saw a different opportunity-to get out. But most of my life has been lived in English. Does a talented computer programmer teach her children C++? Maybe. If they show an interest in it. But a talented computer programmer doesn't teach her children languages for which they have no use, or languages that will get them into trouble. Right?

Russia and Russian aren't useless, exactly, but the country is for the foreseeable future a place of darkness. How old will Raffi be when Putin finally departs from the scene? In the most optimistic scenario, with Putin retiring in 2024, Raffi will be nine. But if Putin holds on longer, maybe Raffi will be fifteen. Maybe twenty-one. Is it impossible for Raffi to go to Russia in the meantime? Not impossible. But not exactly, from his parents' perspective, desirable. I still remember the look on my father's face when he dropped me off at Logan Airport so I could go to Russia on my own for the first time. It was the spring of 1995, the end of my sophomore year of college. My father had recently lost my mother to cancer; my older sister, a journalist, had moved back to Russia to pursue her career there. And was he now also losing me? It was the closest I've ever seen my father to crying. I wonder if he regretted at that moment that he had kept up my Russian. In my case, I came back. Nothing too bad happened to me. But that doesn't mean I want Raffi going over there. He's so small!

I wish I could teach him Spanish, a language that would dramatically expand his access to people in New York City as well as much of the rest of the world. I wish I could teach him Italian or Greek or French, so that he could visit those beautiful countries and speak their languages. It wouldn't be too bad, in terms of his future job prospects, to teach Raffi Mandarin or Cantonese, the way ambitious hedge funders do for their kids in New York. Hell, even Israel has beaches. If I taught him Hebrew he could read the Torah. But I don't have access to any of those languages. All I have is Russian. And I don't even speak it that well.

It is a disadvantage for Raffi that his father's Russian is as imperfect as it is, that I often can't remember or don't know the names for common things-the other day I was trying to summon the name for scooter and called it samogon (moonshine) instead of samokat. I frequently have trouble remembering how to say sheep and goat ( ovtsa and kozel, for the record). It doesn't help that Russian words are so much longer than English ones-milk is moloko, apple is yabloko, hello is zdravstvuyte, and ant is muravey! On top of that, my grammar is full of errors.

I see friends who came over at the same time as I did but didn't keep up their Russian, raising their kids entirely in English. Sometimes I feel sorry for them and all they're missing; at other times, envious. They have finally liberated themselves from Russia's yoke, just as their parents wanted them to. They are free to be themselves around their children, to express themselves with ease. They always know the words for scooter and goat and sheep.

There are intense White Émigré communities on Long Island that keep their kids learning Russian into the fourth generation. The journalist Paul Klebnikov came from such a community. After the Soviet Union fell apart he went to Moscow, where he published a book about the corruption of the Russian state by big business. In 2004, he was shot nine times and died on a Moscow street. A poorly conducted trial ended in a not-guilty verdict for the two defendants. No one has been punished for his murder.

Kiev is a place where a lot of Russian is spoken. Parts of Estonia and Latvia, also. Entire neighborhoods in Tel Aviv. Brighton Beach! These are all places I would like Raffi to visit before he visits Moscow, where his father was born.

During the first two and a half years of Raffi's life, the development of his Russian was by any measure pretty halting. His first word was "kika," by which he meant "chicken" (there are chickens in the community garden next door to us). For a while, because he used k rather than ch to start the word, I thought it might be a combination of "chicken" and the Russian word, kuritza. But none of his subsequent approximations of words- ba for bottle, kakoo for cracker, magum for mango, mulk for milk-had any Russian components. A glossary we compiled for his grandparents when he was almost eighteen months identified fifty-three words or attempted words, only one of which was an attempt at Russian: mech, i.e., myach, i.e., "ball." In retrospect, I had to admit that he said kika not because he was trying to say kuritza but because he couldn't pronounce the "ch" sound in chicken.

Despite all my qualms about Russian, I was speaking a lot of it to him, and his failure to learn it was hard not to take personally. Did Raffi prefer the language of his mother (and everyone else around him) to that of his father? Was I-this is probably closer to the truth-not spending enough time with him? Did he sense my ambivalence about the whole project? Did he hate me?

The psycholinguist Grosjean, in his summary of contemporary research in the 2010 popular textbook " Bilingual: Life and Reality," says that the major factor that determines whether a child will become bilingual is need: Does the child have any actual cause to figure out the language, whether it's to speak to a relative or playmates, or to understand what's on TV? Another factor is the volume of "input": Does he hear enough of it to begin to understand? A third factor, more subjective than the others, is the parents' attitude toward the second language. Grosjean uses the example of Belgian parents whose children are supposed to learn both French and Flemish; many parents have a less than enthusiastic attitude toward Flemish, not exactly a world language, and their children end up not learning it very well.

In our case, there was absolutely zero necessity for Raffi to learn Russian-I didn't feel like pretending I couldn't understand his fledgling attempts to speak English, and neither was there anyone else in his life, including the Russian speakers in my family, who didn't know English. I did my best to create a reasonable volume of Russian in his life, but it was dwarfed by the volume of English. Finally, I had, as I've said, a bad attitude.

And yet I kept it up. When Raffi was really small, the only Russian books he enjoyed were the nonsense poems by Kharms and the cute nineteen-eighties Swedish books about Max by Barbro Lindgren, which my sister had brought me from Moscow in a Russian translation. But around the age of two he started to enjoy the poems of Korney Chukovsky. I had found these too violent and scary (and long) to read to him when he was very little, but as he became somewhat violent himself, and also able to listen to longer stories, we read about Barmaley, the cannibal who eats small children and is eventually eaten by a crocodile, and then moved on to the kinder-hearted Dr. Aybolit ("Dr. Ouch"), who takes care of animals and makes a heroic journey to Africa at the invitation of a hippopotamus-Chukovsky was a big fan of hippopotamuses-to cure some sick tigers and sharks. I also put a few Russian cartoons into his "screentime" rotation-most of them were too old and too slow for him to like, but there was one about a melancholy crocodile, Crocodile Gena, who sings a sad birthday song for himself, that he enjoyed.

As the months went on I could see that he understood more and more of what I was saying. Not that he did what I told him. But sometimes I would mention, for example, my tapochki, my slippers, and he would know what I was talking about. One time he hid one of my slippers. Gde moy vtoroy tapochek? I asked him. Where is my other slipper? He went under the couch and produced it very proudly. And I was also proud. Was our child a genius? Just from my repeating the same words enough times, and pointing to objects, he had learned the Russian words for those objects. It was incredible what the human mind was capable of. I couldn't stop now.

I recently read one of the foundational texts in the study of bilingualism, Werner F. Leopold's " Speech Development of a Bilingual Child," in four volumes. It's an amazing book. Leopold, a German-born linguist, came to the U.S. in the nineteen-twenties and eventually got a job teaching German at Northwestern. He married an American woman from Wisconsin; she was of German extraction but did not know the language, and when, in 1930, they had a daughter, Hildegard, Leopold decided to teach her German on his own. He kept a painstaking record of the results. The first three volumes are quite technical, but the fourth volume is less so. It is Leopold's diary from the time Hildegard turned two until the age of six.

The book is full of Hildegard's cute grammatical mistakes, and also a fair number of technical transcriptions of her German speech. After developing an impressive German vocabulary in her first two years, Hildegard begins to submit to the predominantly English-language environment. Leopold repeatedly laments the decline of her German. "Her German continues to recede," he writes, when Hildegard is a little past two. "The progress in German is small." "The displacement of German words by English ones progresses slowly but steadily." He gets no support from the German émigré community: "It is very difficult to have the influence of the German language reinforced by our many friends who speak German. All of them lapse involuntarily into English when Hildegard answers in English."

At the same time, one senses in Leopold a beautiful serenity about Hildegard's progress, because she is so cute. "It is surprising that she says to shave in English," he writes, "although I am the only one whom she sees shaving. She asks me every time what I am doing and receives the answer in German, 'raiseren.' One evening, she touched my beard stubbles and said, You must shave? " A few months later he notes that Hildegard has begun to be curious about the two languages she is learning. She asks her mother if all fathers speak German. "Apparently," Leopold writes, "she has up to now tacitly assumed that German is the language of fathers, because it is that of her father. The question reveals the first doubt concerning the correctness of the generalization."

The decline in Hildegard's German is finally and impressively reversed when she is five and the family is able to go to Germany for six months. She hears some "Heil Hitlers" in her kindergarten, but otherwise has a great time. I thought, reading this, that if Leopold can take Hildegard to Hitler's Germany to improve her German, surely I can go to Putin's Russia. But I haven't yet.

About six weeks ago, a month before his third birthday, Raffi's Russian development suddenly accelerated. He began to notice that I was speaking a different language from everyone else-that he was "facing two languages," as Leopold said of Hildegard. Raffi's first reaction was annoyance. "Dada," he said one evening, "we need to put English in you." He clearly conceived of language-correctly, according to Grosjean-as a substance that fills a vessel. I asked him why he couldn't speak Russian to me. "I can't," he said simply. "Mama put English in me."

Then, one night, when Emily and I were talking while putting him to bed, he noticed something strange: "Dada, you speak English to Mama!" He had not observed this before.

Then his mother went away for a long weekend. For the first time in a long while he was hearing more Russian than English. He began to get the hang of it. "Dada," he exclaimed one evening as he was riding my shoulders home from day care, "this is what it sound like when I speak Russian." He proceeded to make a series of guttural noises that did not at all sound like Russian. But he was beginning to see that it was a different language, and one that he could, theoretically, speak.

He started having more fun with it. "Fee-fi-fo-fum," he chanted one evening, before getting into the bath, "I smell the blood of a Englishman!" He made as if he were going to eat me. "Me?" I said, in Russian. "I'm an Englishman? " Raffi the giant took the point and adjusted: "I smell the blood of a Russian man!" He laughed riotously-he loves replacing one word or sound with another, often nonsensically. But in this case he made sense. A few days later, at dinner, he said something even more striking. I had been speaking to him, but then changed the subject and addressed Emily. Raffi didn't like it. "No, Mama!" he said. "Don't take Dada's Russian from him!" Russian in this instance was a symbol of my attention.

We were really in it now. Not only did he understand Russian, he understood it as a distinct form of communication between us. If I withdrew it at this point, we would lose that. There was no going back.

At the same time, Raffi was going through one of his periodic bouts of bad behavior. They tend to come in cycles. A month of good behavior followed by two months of willful disobedience and tantrums. The most recent one started a couple of months ago. It involves running away from me or Emily when we're out for a walk-sometimes entire blocks away. It involves a certain amount of hitting. And it definitely involves bad behavior with his playmates-taking their toys, pushing them, pulling their hair.

I have found that I am shorter-tempered in Russian than I am in English. I have fewer words and therefore run out of them faster. I have a register in Russian that I don't seem to have in English, in which I make my voice deep and threatening and tell Raffi that if he doesn't choose right away which shirt he's going to wear this morning, I'm going to choose it for him. When he runs down the street, I find myself without any embarrassment yelling in a very scary manner that if he doesn't come back, he'll get a timeout. (We don't have a Russian word for "timeout," so it sounds like this: " RAFIK, YESLI TY NEMEDLENNO NE VERNESHSYA, U TEBYA BUDET OCHEN' DLINNY TIMEOUT.") I am more of a yeller in Russian than I am in English. Raffi is afraid of me. I don't want him to be afraid of me. At the same time, I don't want him to run into the street and get hit by a car.

Sometimes I worry about this. Instead of an articulate, ironic, chill American father, Raffi is getting an emotional, sometimes yelly Russian father with a limited vocabulary. It's a tradeoff. Then again, I had a permissive mother and a strict father. And I was very happy.

One of my downfalls as Raffi's Russian teacher is that I am bad at scheduling. There are constant Russian parent meetups in Brooklyn that I can't attend or just don't care to drag myself to. Nonetheless, a few weekend mornings ago I took Raffi to a kids' sing-along in a bar in Williamsburg. A Russian parent had booked the space and gotten a singer, Zhenya Lopatnik, to perform some children's songs. There we were-a bunch of Russian-speaking parents with our two-and-three-year-old kids. Most of us were more comfortable in English than in Russian, and none of us had any wish to repatriate. Why, then, were we doing this? What did we want to pass on to our children, exactly? Certainly nothing about Russia as it is currently constituted. Perhaps it was fitting that we were listening to children's songs. There was something magical about our childhoods, we were sure of that; what we couldn't know was whether any of it was due to the music we listened to or the books we read in Russian or to the very sound of the language. Probably none of these things; probably it was just magical to be a child. But as we couldn't rule out that Russian had something to do with it, we had to give it to our kids as well. Maybe.

Raffi didn't know most of the songs. But then Lopatnik sang Crocodile Gena's birthday song, and Raffi grew excited and did a little dance.

At the end of the kids' program, Lopatnik announced that she wanted to do some songs for the parents. "What do you think of Tsoi?" she asked. Tsoi was a songwriter and the lead singer of Kino, one of the greatest Russian rock bands. The adults cheered. She did a song from Kino. Then she did a famous though less cool Nautilus Pompilus song-"I Want to Be with You." It's a banal title, but the song has real conviction-the conceit is that the singer's lover has died in a fire and he longs for her, though in later years the author would insist that he believed the song had religious connotations and that the addressee was God.

I broke glass like chocolate in my hand
I cut these fingers because they could not touch you
I looked at those faces and could not forgive
That they didn't see you and yet they could live.

We had never listened to this song together and yet Raffi was transfixed. All of us were transfixed. The original version was accompanied by much late-Soviet-rock nonsense, like synthesizers and a sax solo. Yuck. Stripped of these, in Loptanik's rendition, it was a haunting song. "But I still want to be with you," went the refrain. "I want to be with you. I so want to be with you."

In that room, at that moment, it seemed not about religion but, as Nabokov said of " Lolita," about culture, about language-about our longing to remain somehow connected to Russia, to Russian, despite everything. And the impossibility in so many ways of doing so.

Raffi hummed the Nautilus Pompilus song on the way home. A few days later I heard him singing it to himself as he played with some Legos.

Ya hochu byt' s toboy
Ya hochu byt' s toboy
Ya hochu byt' s toboy

And a few days after that, he said his first Russian sentence. " Ya gippopotam," he said. I am a hippopotamus.

I was deeply, stupidly, indescribably moved. What had I done? How could I not have done it? What a brilliant, stubborn, adorable child. My son. I love him so much. I hope he never goes to Russia. I know that eventually he will.

Keith Gessen is the author of the novel " A Terrible Country," to be published in July.
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Why Did I Teach My Son to Speak Russian?

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I no longer remember when I started speaking to Raffi in Russian. I didn't speak to him in Russian when he was in his mother's womb, though I've since learned that this is when babies first start recognizing sound patterns.

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History of The English Language (The Language of Science)

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The theory started with amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s, who claimed that the Hopi language has no ways to indicate past or future, and that this is connected to the Hopi's cyclical sense of time. He meant this as praise, under which the Hopi occupy a "higher plane of thinking" in contrast to the "bludgeon" of a language we English speakers are stuck with.

Since then, much Whorfian work has been dedicated to showing that the languages of groups often thought of as "primitive" give their speakers more sensitivity to life than European languages. Navajo has different words for "to handle" depending on the shape of the object handled, and one experiment suggested that Navajo children are more attuned to shape than white Americans.

It is certainly a mark of enlightenment to understand that all humans are equal and that being a First World Westerner is hardly the only way of being human. However, the "language as thought" idea can seem a tad grisly when we pull the camera back.

The problem is that some languages happen to be more anal about nuance than others. Let's take a simple sentence: In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth. In English, the sentence marks the past tense, has articles, and marks the plural. The Russian version does even more: no articles, but past tense, plural, plus a special form of created that shows that it only happened once and marking earth as an object.

But in Mandarin Chinese, the sentence is just "Start start God achieve make sky earth." No endings or articles. No marking of the past or anything else. If language creates thought, the Chinese aren't exactly quick on the uptake-nor are speakers of countless languages in Southeast Asia and Africa. In Japanese, to say I like Bob you just say, roughly, "Bob likeability," with no I or anything else. It's hard to fashion a compliment to the culture from such a thing-upon which realization it becomes attractive to consider that the language you speak does not shape your processing abilities.

This is not to say that Whorfianism has no scientific value: Much current work in the subject does show tiny differences in perception. In English we say "a long time"; Indonesian has "a lot of time." Shown a lengthening line and a gradually filling jar, English speakers are a little better at indicating how long they watched the line while Indonesian speakers are a little better at indicating how long they watched the jar.

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The theory started with amateur linguist Benjamin Lee Whorf in the 1930s, who claimed that the Hopi language has no ways to indicate past or future, and that this is connected to the Hopi's cyclical sense of time.

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WARNING!! some of it is not credible, but an interesting deterministic perspective

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Lera Boroditsky: How language shapes the way we think

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There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world -- and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language -- from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian -- that suggest the answer is a resounding yes.

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Updated April 17, 2018 12:06:34

When people learn the ABC has a pronunciation database - and that part of my job is to attend to its upkeep - the emails they send in are not always complimentary.

"You should be concentrating on the diversions being made in the name of modernism," begins one.

For this correspondent, and many others, an unforgiveable solecism is eroding the good name of this once great nation. To be specific, it is a perceived inability to pronounce the name of this once great nation.

"The uneducated pronunciation of the name of this great country, Australia, is insulted by the use of a Y," the correspondent writes. "As in Austraya, which immediately comes to mind."

Perhaps without realising it, this person has hit upon an issue with quite a long history - just not quite in the way they think.

A proud tradition of pronouncing Australia incorrectly

Towards the tail end of 1933, Londoners realised something strange: BBC announcers seemed to take multiple approaches to pronouncing the word Australia.

In one, the first syllable rhymed with the title of Patrick White's then-unpublished Voss. In the other, the first syllable resembled the vowel sound in ore.

This state of chaos terrified the British public so much that newspapers lobbied the BBC to go with (their orthography) Osstralia.

Actual Australians, hearing of this debate, argued for a third way.

"I agree that Australia should not be pronounced Orestralia," said the Reverend GE Hale, a lecturer in public speaking at the Workers' Educational Association of Adelaide.

"But neither should it be pronounced Osstralia."

For Hale, there was a third way - closer to Orestralia, but without stress on the first syllable. Orstralia.

That this great country had not settled on a single pronunciation of its own name, even 30 years after Federation, didn't seem to faze its residents.

On the contrary: there is some evidence to suggest that speakers of Australian English used these variant pronunciations as a handy form of social marker.

In his autobiography, the writer Hal Porter observed that he was "an unmistakable Australian, albeit of the Awstralian rather than the Osstralian variety".

Porter's remarks on the Australian accent, written in 1963, neatly mirror today's anxieties around pronunciation.

Where contemporaries bemoan the "uneducated pronunciation" of Austraya, Porter reckoned those who said Awstralia possessed "an ineradicable and perverse" accent.

(After all, nothing is more indicative of the Australian quality of mateship than hanging your compatriots out to dry for their speech patterns.)

"Wealth cannot taint [their accent] nor education undo it," Porter wrote, adding that such an accent telegraphed the "certified weaknesses" of the Australian character.

This ex nihilo linking of feature-of-speech to national moral failure is first-rate demonising. You get the sense Porter, who died in 1984, would have really hated Crocodile Dundee.

Straya, mate

But stuffing up this first vowel sound isn't the only sin Australians are allegedly guilty of. Worse, to some minds, is when we lop the first syllable entirely off.

In 1988 - the Bicentennial year, no less - Fairfax language columnist Alan Peterson angsted publicly on what he termed "the slurred uhStralia", as well as its stablemates 'Stralia and 'Straya.

"Pronunciation of our nation mourned" ran the headline that, admittedly, kept its tongue firmly cheek-adjacent.

Returning the missing initial vowel to the word, Peterson said, would make a fitting Bicentenary gift to the language.

Prescriptivists and their pedants-in-arms tend toward a form of temporal arrogance: English is always assumed to have been mutilated but recently, their bastion against ignorance is always thought always to be tongue's last.

Peterson, writing in 1988, could not have known that the Australian National Dictionary's (AND) second edition would find citations for 'Stralian back to 1902, and for 'Stralia that predate Federation.

The elision he held to be poisonous was, in fact, patriotic.

(In fairness to Peterson, the earliest citation the AND has for Straya is his - though even that abbreviation must have been made in the 1930s. As GE Hale wrote at the time: "On no account should the 'i' [in Australia] be spoken as 'y'.")

I am, you are, we are... what, exactly?

At the heart of complaints about how to pronounce Australia - and at the heart of many such complaints about pronunciation - is how you feel about change.

One of the earliest historical sources describing a distinct Australian accent comes from Scottish-born educator and musicologist Samuel McBurney.

In 1887, travelling throughout the colonies on a lecture tour with his wife, McBurney made a study of peculiarities in the Australian dialect.

This surviving article forms one of the earliest detailed accounts of the Australian tongue.

The striking thing is, McBurney was confronted with broadly similar acoustic phenomena to those of today's complainants: shortening of words, elision of some vowel sounds, broadening of others.

(In one anecdote, McBurney describes 19th century colonials enunciating I die as Oi doi, which - to my ears - just sounds like Kath and Kim.)

Rather than spurn this newfound tongue, McBurney largely approved. Australian English could "compare favourably" with any dialect of Britain, he said.

Verbal contractions such as 'Straya, which some now deplore as evidence of lazy character or educational decline, McBurney saw as part of the grand Victorian teleology of progress.

"Labour-saving devices are not confined to tilling the ground," he wrote. "Where the young colonial finds himself understood by half the oral exertion necessary, he abbreviates."

The truth is probably somewhere in the middle: variant pronunciations, of the national word or otherwise, are no more the result of concerted attempts to streamline language than they are of any grand modernist project.

It's just variation, which - on the historical evidence - has been a part of Australian speech for longer than the country has existed.

Dictionaries, when confronted with Australia, either list multiple pronunciations (Macquarie) or don't offer one, assuming it to be self-evident (Australian Concise Oxford).

(Though even then: there's often a difference in how words are pronounced in isolation, compared to how they are produced in continuous speech.)

But the assumption (by some) that a person might might be uneducated, all because of how they pronounce one word - or that, through the use of neutral vowels in connected speech, the national character is somehow degraded?

That, to my ears, sounds positively un-Australian.
Tiger Webb is a researcher with ABC Language.
First posted April 14, 2018 06:30:00

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Australians struggle to pronounce the word 'Australia' correctly

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Updated April 17, 2018 12:06:34 When people learn the ABC has a pronunciation database - and that part of my job is to attend to its upkeep - the emails they send in are not always complimentary. "You should be concentrating on the diversions being made in the name of modernism," begins one.

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Adult immersion program is linking culture and country.

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Indigenous Languages come from one root language family

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Indigenous Languages come from one root language family

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Updated March 28, 2018 09:45:44

After decades of debate, Australian researchers say they have finally proven a theory that all Indigenous languages descend from one common language.

Experts from Western Sydney University and the University of Newcastle have spent three years investigating the origins of Indigenous languages in Australia.

Their findings have been published in the historical linguistics journal, Diachronica.

Western Sydney University Associate Professor of linguistics Robert Mailhammer said there were about 250 Australian Indigenous languages spoken at the time of European settlement.

"The question that we asked was did all of those languages come from a common source," he said.

"Our team have been the first to be able to demonstrate this through the evidence gathered."

Australia's mother language

Linguists have long theorised that Indigenous languages all stem from one ancestor language, dubbed Proto-Australian.

The researchers studied Indigenous languages across the country, discovering the sounds of words showed recurrent systematic differences and similarities.

The team said its findings suggest Proto-Australian would have been spoken about 12,000 years ago, suggesting the languages recorded today were not spoken by the first inhabitants of Australia.

"We think the language would have spread from areas in the north [of Australia] and then all across Australia, either in one big wave or in two smaller waves all around the continent," Dr Mailhammer said.

"The interesting question for us is why did this one language spread and why did it supersede all of the other languages that were there?"

'Can we do it again?'

The research has been welcomed by other experts in the field, including the University of Newcastle's Dr Ray Kelly.

Dr Kelly is a speaker of the Dunghutti language from the Macleay Valley region of northern NSW, and said Indigenous languages had long been viewed in isolation.

"It throws up this perception that our languages are distinct, they don't communicate to each other and they have no relationship," he said.

"This other idea suggests something quite different."

Dr Kelly said the research might be able to help Indigenous languages survive in the modern world, as new generations could theoretically borrow missing pieces of their ancestral tongues from neighbouring regions' dialects.

"It says to Indigenous people, if we do actually come from a single family language, then we're in a good position because we've got neighbouring languages that are doing better," he said.

"Can we learn from each other and borrow from each other which we would have done naturally over the last many thousands of years. Can we do it again?

"As Indigenous people we have to be involved in that deep analysis."

The Australian Research Council project is wrapping up, with researchers using their findings to compile a book detailing the sounds and structure of the Proto-Australian language.

Topics: aboriginal-language, indigenous-culture, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, community-and-society, languages, history, australia, sydney-2000

First posted March 28, 2018 06:29:08

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Indigenous languages all come from same 12,000-year-old root, researchers say

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Updated March 28, 2018 09:45:44 After decades of debate, Australian researchers say they have finally proven a theory that all Indigenous languages descend from one common language. Experts from Western Sydney University and the University of Newcastle have spent three years investigating the origins of Indigenous languages in Australia.

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How the Irish gave Australia its favourite slang words

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How the Irish gave Australia its favourite slang words

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Updated March 16, 2018 07:45:32

Australian English decidedly finds its origins in British English. But when it comes to chasing down Irish influence, there are - to paraphrase Donald Rumsfield - some knowun knowuns, some unknowun knowuns, and a bucket load of furphies.

The origin of the Aussie 'larrikin'

The first Irish settlers, most of whom were Irish language speakers, were viewed with suspicion and derision. This is reflected in the early Australian English words used to describe those who came from (a blend of Paddy and Land).

The Irish were guided by paddy's lantern (the moon); their homes adorned with Irish curtains (cobwebs); and their hotheadedness saw them have a paddy or paddy out. These Irish were said to follow Rafferty's Rules - an eponym from the surname Rafferty - which meant "no rules at all".

More than a few Irish were larrikins.

In his book Austral English, EE Morris reports that in 1869, an Irish sergeant Dalton charged a young prisoner with "a-larrr-akin about the streets" (an Irish pronunciation of larking, or "getting up to mischief").

When asked to repeat the charge by the magistrate, Dalton said: "a larrikin, your Worchup".

This Irish origin of larrikin had legs for many years, and perhaps still does. Unfortunately, here we have our first furphy, with more compelling evidence linking larrikin to a British dialect word meaning "mischievous or frolicsome youth".

But if larrikin language is anything to go by, these youths went way beyond mischievous frolicking - jump someone's liver out, put the boot in, stonker, rip into, go the knuckle on and weigh into are just some items from the larrikin's lexicon of fighting words.

With the Dalton furphy, though, we see evidence of something called "epenthesis", the insertion of extra sounds.

Just as Dalton adds a vowel after his trilled "r" in a-larrr-akin, many Aussies add a vowel to words like "known" and "film" ( knowun and filum) - and here we see a potential influence of the Irish accent on Australian English.

Calling all 'sheilas'

In contrast to larrikin, the word sheila is incontrovertibly Irish. Popular belief derives it from the proper name, Sheila, used as the female counterpart to Paddy, a general reference to Irish males.

Author Dymphna Lonergan, in her book Sounds Irish, prefers to derive it from Irish Gaelic síle, meaning "homosexual", noting Sheila wasn't a particularly popular Irish name as it began to appear Down Under.

Significantly though, St Patrick had a wife (or mother) named Sheila, and the day after St Paddy's Day was once celebrated as Sheelah's Day. So, Sheila was something of a celebrity.

Irish infiltrates Aboriginal languages

Barrack is another likely Irish-inspired expression. A range of competing origins have been posited for this one, including the Aboriginal Wathawarung word borak, meaning "no, not", and links to the Victorian military barracks in Melbourne.

But the most likely origin is the Northern Irish English barrack, "to brag, be boastful of one's fighting powers". The word has since sprouted opposite uses - Australian barrackers shout noisy support for somebody, while British barrackers shout in criticism or protest.

Perhaps surprisingly to many, the Irish were the first Europeans some Australian Aboriginal tribes encountered.

This contact is evident in the presence of Irish words in some Aboriginal languages. For instance, in the Ngiyampaa language of New South Wales, the word for shoe is pampuu, likely linked to a kind of shoe associated with the Aran Islands in Ireland, pampúta.

Is 'Didgeridoo' Gaelic?

Lonergan argues that more attention should be directed to this sort of Irish Gaelic influence.

Lonergan points, for example, to archival evidence linking the origin of didgeridoo to an outsider's perception of how the instrument sounds, questioning the degree to which the sound corresponds to the word.

As a counter-argument, she notes an Irish word dúdaire,meaning "trumpeter or horn-blower", as well as Irish and Scots-Gaelic dubh, "black" and dúth, "native".

She observes that Irish and Scots-Gaelic speakers first encountering the instrument might well have called it dúdaire dubh or dúdaire dúth (pronounced respectively "doodereh doo" or "doojerreh doo").

Counting your chooks

Similar arguments are made for a number of other words traditionally viewed as having British English origins.

The Australian National Dictionary sees chook (also spelled chuck) as linked to a Northern English/Scottish variation of "chick". However, Lonergan notes this is phonetically the same word (spelled tioc) the Irish would have used when calling chickens to feed ( tioc, tioc, tioc).

Your 'shout'

Another potential influence also comes from the transference of Irish meaning to English words. For example, the Australian National Dictionary is unclear as to the exact origin of shout, "to buy a round of drinks", but Lonergan links it to Irish working in the goldfields and an Irish phrase glaoch ar dheoch, "to call or shout for a drink".

Lonergan posits that Irish miners translating to English might have selected "shout" rather than "call" - "shouting" could easily have spread to English speakers as a useful way to get a drink in a noisy Goldfields bar.

Good dollops of Irish in the melting pot

Irish influence on Australian English is much like the influence of the Irish on Australians themselves - less than you'd expect on the surface, but everywhere once you start looking.

And those with a soft spot for Irish English might feel better knowing that some of their bête noires are in fact Irish ( haitch, youse, but, filum and knowun).

As Irish settlers entered the Australian melting pot, so too did a hearty dose of their language.

Howard Manns is a lecturer in linguistics at Monash University. Kate Burridge is a senior fellow at the Freiburg Institute for Advanced Studies and a professor of linguistics at Monash University. This article was originally published on The Conversation.
Topics: community-and-society, languages, australia, ireland

First posted March 15, 2018 06:12:52

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Where did we get the words 'sheila', larrikin' and 'furphy'?

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Updated March 16, 2018 07:45:32 Australian English decidedly finds its origins in British English. But when it comes to chasing down Irish influence, there are - to paraphrase Donald Rumsfield - some knowun knowuns, some unknowun knowuns, and a bucket load of furphies.

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Terminology, connotations and changing language norms regarding Aboriginal Australians

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Playing with children helps them learn language

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Playing with children helps them learn language

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The Brain-Changing Power of Conversation

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Interplay between parents and children ignites the brain and boosts its response to language, spurring lasting literacy skills

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IPA chart with little red links to see how the mouth operates when speaking these phonemes