Is It Worthwhile To Study Languages At University?

Just over a month ago, I discussed the dilemma of encouraging language learning while protecting my own livelihood as a translator. In the post, I mentioned that the average translator in the UK earns what I consider to be a disappointing amount considering that they master at least two languages, have a technical or business specialisation, and possess in-depth knowledge of the cultures of at least two countries.

This is the kind of statement that should hold a lot of weight for someone getting ready to go to university in a couple of months. Today, I'd like to revisit that particular point, extend it to all language-related jobs, and finally see whether studying languages is worthwhile. To do so, I'd like to draw on my own experiences as well as some information and statistics. Of course, this is a language blog and I'm a language fanatic so there will be some bias. In an attempt to provide a fair and balanced argument, I'm going to start with the negatives.

On a personal and negative note, I do genuinely believe that there are jobs out there that require language skills and do not adequately remunerate those with said skills. I can provide one such example from my own life experience.

A few years ago I spent a summer working in a data-entry centre that required knowledge of Spanish and several other languages at which I was paid the UK minimum wage for my troubles. By paying me minimum wage, my employer was effectively saying that my language skills were valueless or should be expected from any employee, which I hope you will agree is nonsense.

This is even more ridiculous given that the UK is famously the worst country in Europe terms of speaking foreign languages. Surely this should make my foreign language skills even more desirable in a country lacking the workforce to meet the demand for multilingualism.

Despite my personal anecdote, the demand for language jobs is definitely still there. You'll see facts floating around stating that the translation is one of the only recession-proof industries across the world. However, I've also definitely heard a fair few horror stories of translators being expected to work to impeccable standards, at incredible speeds, and for below a living wage. It wouldn't surprise me if this kind of behaviour was partly responsible for the decreasing numbers of students taking language degrees at universities in the UK.

On the one hand, UK language graduates had the third lowest employment rate of any discipline, according to a study published in 2013. However, the employment rate for all subjects only ranged from 84% to 95%, meaning there isn't a huge difference between the best and worst. On the other hand, UK language graduates were ranked sixth in terms of average salary earned. We live in a world where money talks, and this is the kind statement that's difficult to ignore.

Language learning can take you to plenty of places on this
beautiful blue marble we call home.

So far I've only been talking about studying languages from a financial viewpoint and in terms of employability and expected salary. However, languages have a value well beyond money. Learning languages opens doors and takes you places where you'll meet wonderful people that you wouldn't have otherwise met if you'd remained in a monolingual bubble. For me, you can't put a price on that!

The experiences I've enjoyed because of studying languages have been priceless and I have no doubt that there are plenty ahead of me. I'm so incredibly glad that I did study languages throughout school and at university.

In fact, even though I was terrible at languages at school, I still decided to study them at university because I loved them. When I started studying languages at university (Northumbria University, to be precise) I wasn't a model student and I wasn't particularly gifted at languages. It was only thanks to the wonderful lecturers whose love for languages far surpassed my own that I was given the opportunity to improve and develop my own language skills.

Finally, I feel the need to mention that the language department at Northumbria University (my alma mater) is under threat of closure. I feel anybody who had the support of lecturers anywhere near as wonderful as those at Northumbria would appreciate that this cannot be allowed to happen. I would be eternally grateful to each and every one of you if you could take the time to sign the following petition on change.org to ensure that the UK doesn't lose a wonderful language department. You can also show your support on this Facebook page.

Do you think it's worthwhile to study languages at university? Have your studies brought you financial success or something even better? Tell us all about them in the comments below.

Annoying Internet Terms That Shouldn't Be in Spoken Language

I love internet culture and arguably spend most of my time on the internet. It is a truly wonderful thing: at times it's a vibrant, beautiful ecosystem of ideas being exchanged, while at others it's like a dank puddle of murky water. Either way, I love it.

What I don't love about the internet is how some of its language encroaches into spoken language. I'm happy for the language to exist online and consider it almost as its own register. However, when the internet's weird lingo starts entering my ears and not my eyes, that's when I get annoyed. Here are a few of my biggest bugbears (or pet peeves to Americans) when it comes to online language that make me come close to losing my cool.

NASA astronaut Michael Gernhardt embodying "YOLO" in 1995
when dot-coms were just becoming household names.

Because

The term "because" is a bit of a funny one since I have no objection to the common usage of "because". However, the internet has given rise to the construction of "because" plus a noun. For example, "I can talk this way because language". I reckon it's a quick way to make most language purists' blood boil!

.com

Saying something is something.com is just downright stupid. My fury over this stems fully from the fact that saying "dot com" at the end of a word is not only already horrendously dated by about 20 years, it's also the kind of thing that uncool dads say when trying to be cool.

Fail

I wish people would stop using the verb "fail" when they are actually referring to a "failure", which is a noun. I also get fairly annoyed at the overuse of "epic" to describe said "fails". It's now used so often it's been demoted to the status of "moderate". This term is also often combined with the next one.

Hashtag

I like Twitter and understand why we have hashtags. In fact, I'm very happy to use them. Placing the "number sign" (#) before a word can help other users find content related to the word they've marked or to indicate the content is part of a particular conversation.

Using the term as a prefix irritates me beyond belief. Unless you're explaining a particular hashtag, saying hashtag is completely redundant.

LOL

LOL (an acronym for "laugh out loud") has been making the rounds online since people became too lazy to type out the onomatopaeia for laughter or explain that they found something humorous. As funny as it is when parents think "LOL" stands for "lots of love", there's nothing I find funny about using LOL in speech.

I find it annoying enough when people say "that's so funny" without actually laughing. Imagine how enraged I get when someone says "lol" in speech despite it being abundantly clear that they're not laughing out loud!

YOLO

I definitely agree that people should live life to the fullest. However, as a lover of Romance languages and Latin, I wish carpe diem was used instead of this acronym for "you only live once".

You can live your life with "YOLO" as a motto. Just please don't say it to me. Leave it on the internet, where it belongs. Thanks!

What internet terms do you wish people wouldn't vocalise? Tell us in the comments below.

"Do the Dew" and Yod-Coalescence

Dew, one of the most common subjects for macro lenses.

I was watching television the other day when I spotted an advert for Mountain Dew, a beverage that I tend to avoid like the plague as I have no interest in carbonated beverages except when using them as mixers with strong spirits. However, this post isn't about my intense dislike for adding gases to liquids, it's about the advertising slogan that Mountain Dew was using.

American readers will undoubtedly be familiar with Mountain Dew and their "Do the Dew" slogan. However, the one thing they seemingly overlooked was how British people pronounce "dew". The words "do" and "dew" are both pronounced /duː/ across the United States, while many accents across the British Isles differentiate between the two words, pronouncing "do" as /duː/ and "dew" as /dʒuː/.

This pronunciation of "dew" in various accents of British English makes it a homophone with the words "due" and "Jew", which rendered their "do the dew" slogan as a homophone for Semitic fornication when I first heard it. While I don't find this suggestion offensive, I certainly wasn't thinking of Mountain Dew when reading the tagline.

Lawn over dew.

While this is just an unfortunate coincidence of the differences between British and American English, linguists have obviously looked into this phenomenon, which goes by the name yod-coalescence.

Yod-coalescence is the term given when a particular set of sounds undergoes a process of sound change known as palatalisation, whereby a palatal or palatalised consonant occurs. This can happen when the pronunciation of two words together sounds different to when they are pronounced in isolation, while yod-coalescence refers to when the sounds [dj], [tj], [sj] and [zj] end up becoming [dʒ], [tʃ], [ʃ], and [ʒ]. This makes the British pronunciation of "Tuesday" sound like "chews day" to Americans, while it sounds like Americans say "twos day" to British ears.

How We Describe Languages

The proverbial ouroboros, the cyclical snake eating its own tail.

Languages are fascinating. If they weren't, I wouldn't have spent years learning about them and then writing about them. However, an odd thought popped into my head the other day. Without languages, I wouldn't be able to talk about languages, nor would I have anything to talk about. While we could sit and debate the ouroboros nature of language and thought for years (which people have already done and it's fascinating!), I would rather look at which words in English are commonly used when talking about language to see how we like to refer to this wonderful phenomenon.

I reckoned the best place to start would be with the words that commonly collocate with the word "language" in English in order to see if there were any patterns related to which words we use to talk about the fact that we talk.

Time and Place

When we describe languages, we are seemingly very interested in the time and place occupied by a language. We have to describe when the language was being spoken and whether it is still being spoken today. When discuss whether a language is still commonly used today, we either speak of a dead or a living language.

In the case of dead languages, we like to describe them according to the historical period in which they were used, calling them either ancient or classical languages, for example. Of course, languages that are living are often called modern languages.

Where a language is spoken is also key. Languages, like peoples, can be indigenous to an area since people like to bring their languages with them when they migrate. Sadly, the term "indigenous" is often used to describe languages that are endangered due to replacement by more prestigious languages in their areas.

Use

How much a language is used seems to be another common trend when referring to languages. We can talk about international and national languages, or on the other end of the scale, minority languages.

Use in terms of speakers isn't the only way we talk about languages and their speakers. We also like to know how information is being communicated. We can talk about spoken language, written language, and, in the event of corporeal communications, body language.

Situation and Context

In addition where and when languages are used, we're clearly interested in the situation and context in which languages are used. Some of the most common collocations include formal and informal language. The discussion of domain is also very common, such as referring to flowery, literary, and poetic language. Unfortunately, other commonly mentioned contexts include racist and sexist language, unless we're often condemning them.

Bad Language

Bad, crude, offensive, obscene, offensive, and strong language are all used regularly in English and make up some of the most common collocations. It seems that as much as we hate bad language, we can't stop talking about it.

The Uselessness of Back-Translations

A back-translation (BT) is when a translation or target text (TT) is translated back into its original source language (SL). When the back-translation is completed, it is then compared to the original source text (ST) in an attempt to gauge the quality of the translation, which I believe is incredibly stupid. While it's true that gauging the quality of translations is very difficult, I don't believe for one second that BTs are a viable way to do it.

The idea of BTs is based on a premise similar to that of mathematics, but is foolishly founded on the concept of a number of assumed exact equivalents between languages, be they lexical, syntactic, semantic, etc.

In maths, the equals sign indicates that the equations on either side of the symbol are the same. However, even this logic seems to be flawed, since if you imagine that numbers are words, you could easily say 7 = 7, but also that 7 = 6 + 1 or 7 = 5 + 2, etc.

If you can express sums in multiple ways, you can certainly express almost any sentiment in plenty of different ways. This is the problem I have with back-translations, as they assume that there is only ever one "correct" way to translate any given phrase and translating it back should yield exactly the same results.

Another issue I have with BTs is the assumption that discrepancies between the BT and the ST are due to mistakes by the first translator and issues in the TT. Comparing the ST and BT to one another completely ignores the TT and therefore the entire work of the first translator, as the BT is simply a derivative work of the BT.

Valet parking wasn't really necessary 100 years ago.

Imagine you give your car to a valet to park it while you have a meal. Later, when you collect your car, a different valet is driving your car and the car has a huge scratch down the side of it. Who scratched your car?

If you use the logic of BTs, the first valet definitely damaged your car as it has changed since you left it. However, without seeing the car's journey to and from the parking space, there's no way of telling who caused the damage.

What do you think of BTs? Is there a better way to gauge translations? Tell us your opinion in the comments below!

Putting Up With Phrasal Verbs

Many native English speakers have probably never considered or even heard of the term phrasal verb, much like the many other nuances of languages that native speakers don't give a second thought. However, it's these nuances that learners of a language can struggle with, and in my experience, phrasal verbs are a pain in the proverbial arse of many people trying to learn English. So what exactly are they?

As you should know, verbs make things happen. However, they're quite awkward for language learners since you often need to learn a whole host of things just to use them correctly. In order to use a verb in English, you first need to learn the grammatical person, which usually dictates who is the active participant of the verb.

Once you know who the verb's about, you need to know when it took place and its grammatical tense. Sometimes the tense doesn't indicate time exactly, but we won't get bogged down in that just now.

This nebula is only slightly more complex than phrasal verbs.

So you think you've got verbs all mastered? Not quite! In English, phrasal verbs can change the entire meaning of a verb just by adding a word or two. For example, looking is not the same as looking for or looking after. The first indicates viewing or watching, while the second indicates searching, and the third indicates being responsible for something.

It's sort of crazy that sitting down and sitting up are different things in English (with the first referring to taking a seat and the second to adjusting your posture). How can putting be completely different if you put up with rather than put out (and take care with the latter!).

The thing about phrasal verbs is that the words they're composed of cannot work in isolation: you need the verb and either a preposition (words that usually indicate a place or time) or a particle (a word that requires the other word to have any meaning).

Despite phrasal verbs being useless in isolation, they also are incredibly versatile when used. The order of the words that make up phrasal verbs is not entirely fixed, meaning that they might not always appear in the order that you learned them. In fact, the phrasal verb "to put up with" is famous for being used awkwardly in order to avoid ending a sentence with a preposition. While the quote isn't really from Winston Churchill, I still enjoy this syntactic monstrosity:

"This is the sort of English up with which I will not put."

- Not Winston Churchill

This flexibility is the kind of awkwardness that non-native speakers find horrendously difficult to wrap their heads around, and who could blame them? It's absolutely ridiculous!

Are you learning English as a foreign language? What do you think of phrasal verbs? What is your favourite phrasal verb? Tell us about your experiences in the comments below.

Prestige: The "Best" Way to Speak Languages

As a native English speaker, it always amuses me when I travel abroad and come across bars, clubs, and restaurants that use English names as a gimmick to appear fashionable. That said, I've also noticed French being paraded around the UK to make places sound cool.

When businesses use languages in this way, they're trying to make more money by having a cool image. But does a language have an image? We'll leave marketers give you their spiel about various demographics and how they relate to your brand image. We're far more interested in the linguistic side of things.

The root of this phenomenon in linguistics (sociolinguistics to be precise) is prestige. Just like certain restaurants, bars, and clubs, languages can also be prestigious. Depending on your culture, some languages can hold more prestige than others. It's also been found to be true that most cultures afford the highest prestige to the languages spoken by the most prestigious parts of their society. This means that if you're part of a prestigious group, odds are your language is also quite prestigious.

Money seems to bring prestige with it.

Interestingly, in addition to languages, dialects within languages (and dialect continuums, of course) are also subject to prestige. Much like with languages, the most prestigious dialects tend to be those spoken by the members of the society with the most prestige. It seems that prestige often goes hand in hand with wealth and political power.

It is thought that prestige dialects are related to, and the cause of standardized dialects. Standardized dialects are the dialects of a language that are considered to be the easiest to understand by most speakers of the language. For languages with a regulatory body, the standardized dialects are usually regulated by these academies.

That said, there's nothing that inherently makes prestige dialects or prestigious languages the "best" way to speak. In fact, it may even be beneficial to speak less prestigious dialects in certain situations. One example of this is the Geordie dialect of English which is spoken in my hometown. While it is likely considered to be one of the least prestigious dialects in England, it is often labelled as the "friendliest", which is why marketing of all kinds, from television adverts to telemarketing, features the voices of Geordies. There are undoubtedly countless other examples around the world that demonstrate how a non-prestige dialect may be more beneficial in certain situations, so if you don't speak the most prestigious dialect of your area, don't worry!