Languages in the News: July 2016

July has been quite a month for language news. Today we thought we'd look at some of the best language related stories from this month. Let's get straight to it!

Right at the start of the month, Forbes posted an interesting article on Facebook on how it shows posts in the user's language. A fascinating read, you can read the full article here.

The Conversation explored the massive benefits of learning another language, particularly in terms of happiness. You can check out their article on the secrets of happiness through language learning here.

Calgary, Canada, the area that originally was
and still is the home of the Tsuut'ína Nation.

Meanwhile, in the UK, The Guardian was looking at how cathedrals around the UK were teaching Latin and it was far more popular than expected. Feel free to look at the article here.

Canadian media was looking at the languages of the Tsuut'ina Nation, and how native speakers of the language were targeting youth in order to promote the language. Read the article here.

On FiveThirtyEight, there was an interesting article on emojis and how companies are looking at the best ways to merge language and emoji. Check out the article on making your messages more interesting here.

Towards the end of the month, we were back with The Guardian looking at the Stroop Test and how to try out your own psychological testing at home. If you feel like testing your friends and family with language-related psychological testing, check out the article here.

That's our news for this month! If you have any stories we missed, feel free to share them in the comments below!

Code Talkers: How Speaking a Minority Language Helped Win the Great War

On Wednesday, we were looking at the Navajo language and it got us thinking about the Navajo code talkers used during the Second World War. While the Navajo code talkers are probably the most famous, there were plenty of other code talkers who spoke other languages.

A code talker, for those who don't know, is someone who uses their language to transmit secret messages during wars. If you're trying to transmit information during a war, especially by radio, you do not want your enemy to know what you're saying. In order to ensure your message is only understood by those you want to understand it, you will probably use a code.

Encoded information is certainly one way to ensure that only the intended recipient understands your message, since a code is essentially a language that is only understood by a particular group of people. During the First and Second World Wars, the United States realised that there was a group of people who spoke languages that only they understood, the Native Americans.

Native American Code Talkers

Sequoyah may have invented the Cherokee
syllabary, but it was the spoken language that
was most useful.

The first code talkers spoke Cherokee, the Iroquoian language spoken by the Cherokee people. In fact, the Cherokee code talkers were present at the Second Battle of the Somme, helping to transmit encoded messages. 

The discovery of Native American languages as a means to transmit encoded messages was more of an accident than a genius military plan. It was noticed by the US Army during WWI that the enemy couldn't understand the Cherokee troops.

While the Cherokee code talkers were the first, they were certainly not the only Native American code talkers. The Choctaw Indians from Oklahoma used their language to transmit messages during the Great War.

Since code talkers were so successful during the First World War, Hitler sent a group of around thirty anthropologists to the United States in order to learn Native American languages before WWII had even started. However, not everything turned out as he planned. We'll be back on Monday with the full story. Join us then.

Read The Fascinating Story of the Navajo Code Talkers

Happy Birthday Edward Sapir!

Today, if you hadn't guessed by the title, is Edward Sapir's birthday. Unfortunately, he's dead. Fortunately, his legacy lives on the world of linguistics.

It's not a bad place to be educated.

Born to "German" parents, the place where he was born was actually in Prussia, which is now Poland. He moved to the U.S. where he studied Germanic linguistics at the University of Columbia, which is still one of the top language universities in the United States. It also allowed Jewish students in without any limitations, unlike other universities at the time.

His most important work included the classification of Native American languages. His work with Native American languages was even featured in the Encyclopædia Britannica. He took particular interest in the Athabaskan language family.

Sapir's other famous "work" included the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis. Despite the name, Sapir never co-authored any work with Whorf and, in fact, never made a hypothesis. It's just a useful label put on to some of the work he did in terms of linguistic relativity, just like Whorf.

The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis stipulated that the way people think, their cognitive processes, are affected by language. The idea that Inuits have several words for snow was an example used by Whorf to explain the hypothesis. It was, of course, found to be false.

Edward Sapir's work will be remembered for quite some time, not just amongst linguists, but also by everyone who wrongly quotes that "Inuits have hundreds of words for snow"!

Towards the end of his life Sapir was the head of Anthropology at Yale, where he continued to work on the relationship between anthropology and languages. Amazingly, few before him had thought that there'd be a link between the two!

He died in 1939 in New Haven, Connecticut.

The Best Way to Write Foreign Dialogue

They probably speak more Italian than Latin now.

Something that has frequently irritated us in media is the portrayal of foreign speakers. Sometimes a story calls for a foreign language. Other times the entire thing is set in a foreign land yet the actual language is ignored, which we imagine they call artistic license. We found the British TV show Rome very entertaining, but it was annoying that every single character in ancient Rome was speaking English. Of course this makes the show more accessible, but from a linguistic standpoint they should have really done the whole thing in Latin.

In the case of Rome, most of the characters have British accents. Don't let us go off on a tangent about the lack of American actors in the history and fantasy genres...

One of our pet peeves is when characters are given English dialogue with a stereotypical accent. War films are often guilty of this as German soldiers speak in English with one another, only with horrendous German accents. It's made even worse when the dialogue is sprinkled with words from the foreign language, which doesn't even come close to making it authentic. Throwing the occasional "Scheiße" into dialogue isn't fooling anybody.

Subtitles are great for karaoke too.

Our favourite method is having the dialogue in the foreign language, subtitled of course, as we outlined in our previous post on dubbing and subtitling. This method gives scenes more authenticity and enables us to enjoy foreign languages in their entirety. The computer game Assassin's Creed II was guilty of using English with bad accents to represent a foreign character. The protagonist, Ezio Auditore, is Italian but spent the entire game speaking like Super Mario. We were delighted to see that Assassin's Creed III, set in colonial America, features full scenes and sections of gameplay in the Native American language of the characters, complete with subtitles.

Our only complaint is that at it looked like the designers had confused Native American architecture with that of the Ewoks from the Star Wars franchise.