Languages in the News: February 2014

As we enter March we're looking back at some of the language news stories that were hitting the headlines in February, and the very end of January. While most headlines were dominated by news of the Sochi Winter Olympics, the month ended with the Washington Post covering an interesting story from the US claiming that a legislator in New Mexico wanted to count programming as a foreign language skill.

The Week ended the month with the story of how Netflix managed to alienate its deaf customers, through a variety of bad subtitling practice.

Is French important? The countries that make up this flag
would say so.

One of the most controversial series of language stories stemmed from a piece in The New York Times stating that the French government is a big advocate of French language programmes in New York. This led to an article in New Republic telling us to stop pretending that French is an important language, claiming that Spanish and Chinese are more important languages for New Yorkers to learn. While this may be true, it divided opinions due to its dismissive nature of French as an important language, rather than simply stating that the other two languages are more important.

Business Insider provided a rebuttal by giving us 7 reasons you should teach your children French, showing us that French isn't as unimportant as the New Republic article would have us believe.

The Guardian gave us an interesting article on untranslatable words, and though none of the words were technically untranslatable, the article was more focused on difficult to translate words. Elsewhere in The Guardian there were concerns at the drop in language students in UK universities, an ongoing problem that doesn't seem to show any signs of being rectified under the current government, but we'll leave politics for a politics blog.

The BBC asked the question whether English still borrows words at the start of the month and in mid-February was decoding the signs left my construction workers on pavements.

The Register explained an interesting issue surrounding Google Translate. It just so happens Google Translate is terrible because Google Translate is terrible. This is due to people using the machine translation for websites and other documents then publishing them online. This leads to Google using these translated documents as sources to train the programme, meaning that Google accepts these poor translations as real translations and effectively makes itself dumber.

A piece in The Week looked at common words in English that people can't agree on how to pronounce. 

The island of Ireland, the home of Irish.

Meanwhile The Irish Times reported on a march for language rights, though they did have some good news later on as South Dublin council launched a programme promoting and celebrating the Irish language.

The Economist explained the difference between a dialect and a language, after Hong Kong claimed Cantonese was not an official language but rather a dialect of Mandarin.

The Oxford Dictionaries Blog gave us the lexicon to understand freestyle skiing at the Sochi games and Buzzfeed, in a surprise turn, gave us a list, albeit a list of 21 Victorian slang words that we should be using.

The Smithsonian showed us that "huh?" is an almost universal utterance and a fascinating piece by Ben Faccini in Aeon explained why he wanted his children to be bilingual.

The Guardian was back at the end of the month and asked whether musicians are better language learners.

Aside from these news stories, we also discovered James Chapman's Tumblr, which includes many lovely drawing of onomatopoeia in various languages.

That's all the news we had for February, but if there are any we missed that you feel deserve a mention, tell us about them in the comments below.

Learning Languages with Social Media

One of the best ways to learn a language is to speak it. So what do you do when there's nobody around to talk to? If, like us, you spend most of your life in front of a computer, you should consider getting on Facebook, Twitter, Google+ or any of the other social media sites and start communicating.

Long before the aforementioned social media websites existed there was instant messaging. Services such as MSN Messenger and AIM enabled us to talk with our friends from anywhere in the world, as long as they had a modem and a good tolerance level for high-pitched squealing noises anything was possible. As its popularity and reach grew, the internet quickly became one of the great places to learn languages.

You can learn a language from the comfort
of your home, no pants required. 

Practising languages is tantamount to your success in learning a new language. You can study as much as you want but as we've found, if you don't use the language it becomes very easy to forget everything you've learnt. Instant messaging can help you practice your writing, but also requires quicker comprehension in order to formulate a response. You don't need to be as quick as if you were actually speaking to someone, but you need to be faster than if you were writing a letter or an email, which makes it a perfect middle ground for those wanting to exercise their language skills.

Now that the popularity of instant messaging is on the decline, its space has been taken up by social media, most of which come equipped with a chat function. If you have friends that speak a language you'd like to learn, communicate with them. Send them some messages in their language and get learning. If you're not sure how to say something then look it up, just not on Google Translate, and keep going.

As well as chatting or tweeting to your friends, look for groups, forums or other places where language learners want to get together to practice and learn languages. There are thousands of communities for language aficionados on-line so you have no excuse not to be doing it!

How Google Became a Verb

Many years ago, at least in terms of the internet, a couple of college students at Stanford (which is one of our top language universities in the U.S.) made something that helped change the way people both browse and speak. Their product, or perhaps service, was Google.

Without Google, finding things on the internet
is like finding a needle in a haystack.

As you surely know, Google is a search engine. Its primary function is to direct web users to the appropriate web page based on their search criteria. From its birth as a company all those years ago in 1998, Google has gone from strength to strength. From its humble origins as a white page with a text box, which hasn't changed much over the years, the corporation now includes cloud computing, email and even our much-loathed Google Translate.

The name for Google came from the word googol, which is the number 10¹⁰⁰, written as a one followed by one hundred zeros. Making it a pretty big number obviously is supposed to indicate the prowess of the search engine's capabilities.

The word Google as the name for the company has existed since its inception, but as a verb the first known occurrence came in an email from co-founder Larry Page on 8 July 1998 in which he said "have fun and keep Googling!". Despite the company trying desperately to stop people using the word in this manner, they have only themselves to blame.

It's unlikely "google" was
featured in this dictionary.

The American Dialect Society chose it as their most useful word of 2002, and it was even mentioned in an episode of Buffy the Vampire Slayer way back when.

In popular media it's used more and more frequently, and Google have taken steps to avoid its overuse since they fear it may become a generic trademark. They encourage people to use the verb to google (note the lowercase "g") only when referring specifically to Google's own search engine.

In many dictionaries, Google refers to the company or product, and google refers to the verb meaning "to search for on the internet", whether you use Google or not. So you can google on Google, but you can google using other search engines too!

With the world getting better-connected every day, we can only expect more words like this to find their way into the lexicon. We've heard people using Facebook as a verb too.

Have you heard any good internet neologisms? Tell us about them in the comments below!

Bad Practices For Language Learning

We love how many paintings there are of people writing!

Yesterday we looked at some good practices for language learning. Today we'll be warning you of the things to watch out for and avoid, thus naming and shaming some of the bad practices when learning a new language.

Accent

It's very unlikely that the language you're learning sounds like your native language. Even in your own language, we doubt that everyone has the same accent, so why would someone in France speak with an English accent? Make sure you realise that words are unique and even if they look exactly like one in your own language, don't pronounce it the same!

 

Not knowing whether this is miles or
kilometres could land you in a lot of trouble.

Convention

Even if you think you know the language inside-out there's always something you might miss. Many of the Romance languages use a full stop (period) in numbers where an English speaker would use a comma. 1,000 in French and Spanish is 1.000 since their usage is different. Make sure you know all the conventions that come with the language.

Though not necessarily a linguistic feature of a language, knowing which measurement systems they use in the country is very important as well. Telling someone in France you stayed in a town fifty miles outside of Paris will mean nothing to them. For Americans, don't tell Spaniards that it's 70 degrees in the summer in Miami else they'll be scared of going.

 

Diacritics

Diacritics, commonly known as accents, can be very important in other languages. Just because English uses them very rarely does not mean that they're useless. In many languages that have diacritics, ignoring them can change the entire meaning of a sentence. In French the diacritics can change pronunciation or just the meaning of the word. Parle is not the same as parlé nor is sur the same as sûr.

Google Translate

We just can't say this enough! Machine translation is bad! Stop using it as a shortcut to actually learning a language! We even did a whole post on why you shouldn't use Google Translate!

Would it be rude to ask for a fork? Probably...

Manners

Part of learning a language is communicating with other people. If they don't like you, don't expect them to help you practice their language. Make sure you know whether or not you should be addressing someone formally or informally.

Japanese, for example, has a complicated system of honorifics that you shouldn't avoid. Being culturally aware is a great way to avoid making an arse of yourself (or ass if you're in the U.S.).

Syntax

Just because you put words in a particular order in your language does not mean you can use that same order in another language. Word-for-word translations will often sound horrendous and may not even not make any sense. We remember someone saying "en mi padre's casa" in a Spanish class... we can assure you that everyone laughed derisively.

The Power Of Social Media On Languages

It wasn't too long ago that there was an article on the BBC (ah, the good ol' Beeb) that we found very interesting. It was about the tu form in French becoming very common in social media. Read the full article here.

For those not in the know, in French using the word tu (second person singular) rather than vous (second person plural) is considered very informal. However, it has become commonplace across social media.

Perhaps tu being shorter than vous contributes to this, especially in the case of social media sites such as Twitter that have character limits.

Of course, social media isn't usually considered the most formal setting. Even if you don't necessarily know a person, on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, etc it would be fine to use a colloquial register.

Colloquial language is fine. Manipulating their logo in any of the above ways is not.

You probably rarely write in full sentences. Would you start a text with "Dear..." and end with "yours sincerely"? We think not!

Text messages have also had a huge effect on the way people use language for some time now. If you've ever had a Pay-As-You-Go SIM card you know the importance of getting everything you need to say into that one text!

Those familiar with the internet before social media will remember that MSN Messenger, AIM and other IMCs (instant messaging clients) had people using BRB, OMG and the now world-famous LOL. Meaning "laugh out loud" and never "lots of love". We've all heard the horror stories of texts that read:

"Sorry to hear your father passed away. LOL"

Sorry for your loss. LOL

The point was made that French, German, Chinese and English users tend to use less formal language on social media sites. On the other hand, Japanese users show all sorts of formalities in their language use. Though if you're familiar with Japanese, you will know that it is rife with honorifics. If you used to watch the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (the brilliant original, not this CGI rubbish the kids have now) or any kung fu films, you will know the word Sensei. Other honorifics include -san -chan, -kun and many, many, many more!