Some myths about language

Osmania University celebrates its centenary this year (plus a few other anniversaries!). As part of its celebrations, it has brought out a freely downloadable volume called Insights on Global Challenges and Opportunities for the Century Ahead -- here's the link to the 27-MB PDF.

As the Preface notes, the 400-page volume "contains 81 articles with insights from eminent personalities including Nobel laureates, World Food Prize winners, Padma awardees, Heads of national and international organizations, distinguished scientists, social workers, and spiritual leaders."

Among the several interesting contributions to the volume is "Some myths about language" by Duggirala Vasanta, Aditi Mukherjee, and Dipti Mishra-Sharma (pp. 95-99). Addressing a general audience, they briefly discuss the following 10 myths:

Myth 1: Sanskrit is the ‘mother’ of all Indian languages.

Myth 2: Borrowing from other languages or language-mixing ‘spoils’ the purity of a language.

Myth 3: ‘Dialects’ are inferior to ‘languages’.

Myth 4: ‘Script’ is an essential part of language.

Myth 5: Exposing preschool children to multiple languages / scripts will hinder their cognitive growth.

Myth 6: The alphabetic writing system of English is inherently superior compared to Indian scripts.

Myth 7: Sign languages are not real languages / there is just one universal sign language.

Myth 8: Men and women differ in their linguistic / spatial abilities because their brains are wired differently.

Myth 9: Machine Translation (MT) will replace human translators.

Myth 10: Machine Translation output quality is so bad that it is useless.

Do take a look at these useful reminders.

How many languages are there in India?

This is a tricky question! Depending on how you define language and dialect, you get diverse answers. Here are three answers.

1. PLSI. "There are over 780 languages and 66 different scripts in India." Ganesh N Devy, Chairperson of the People's Linguistic Survey of India (PLSI), announced this in press conferences in Kolkata and Guwahati in July 2013. As the report in The Hindu said: "Arunachal Pradesh is the richest among the States with 90 languages.... Researchers found that Assam with 55 languages, Gujarat 48, Maharashtra 39, and West Bengal 38 are among the most linguistically diverse States.... The survey, Dr. Devy said, has revealed that the north-eastern parts of the country have one of the highest per capita language densities in the world." Another report quotes Devy as saying, "While it surely is a fact to celebrate the diversity of the country, the sad part is we have lost nearly 250 languages in the last 50 years or so." More elsewhere on this blog.

2. Ethnologue. "The number of individual languages listed for India is 461. Of these, 447 are living and 14 are extinct. Of the living languages, 75 are institutional, 127 are developing, 178 are vigorous, 55 are in trouble, and 12 are dying." This is how the internet's biggest language-database, Ethnologue, characterizes our languages. A-Pucikwar, Adi, Agariya... when I first saw this list many years ago, it was only the 25th language that I recognized -- Assamese.

3. Census of India. "122 languages" says the 2001 census. But wait -- how do they arrive at this number? Well, the enumerators "recorded faithfully" 6661 mother-tongue names from all over the country. These were then "subjected to thorough linguistic scrutiny, edit and rationalization." This resulted in 1635 "rationalized mother tongues" -- each of which is spoken by at least 10,000 speakers -- and 1957 names "which were treated as 'unclassified' and relegated to 'other' mother tongue category." These 1635 "rationalized mother tongues" were further classified following "the usual linguistic methods for rational grouping". The result was 122 languages.

One result of these reclassifications is that under the language-name Hindi, there are 49 "mother-tongues" (from Awadhi to Surjapuri). Besides, there are also 14.8 million "Others", speaking mother-tongues with 10,000 or fewer speakers. 14.8 million "Others": as Wikipedia tells us, there are about 174 countries and dependent territories with smaller populations than that!

Common Voices 7 & 8 - on Knowledge Commons

At the January 2011 conference of the International Association for the Study of Commons (IASC) held in Hyderabad, the "knowledge commons" were also discussed. The latest issues of the newsletter Common Voices bring together the deliberations.

Here are the contents of the two issues:

CV 7

Editorial: "Perspectives on Knowledge... Going Beyond Dichotomies"
A Giridhar Rao, "Linguistic Diversity in the Knowledge Commons"
Editorial: "The Loss of (Traditional) Ecological Knowledge among Communities"
Kabir Sanjay Bavikatte, "Stewarding the Commons: Rethinking Property and the Emergence of Biocultural Rights"
Editorial: "Traditional Knowledge and Intellectual Property Rights"
Editorial: "Traditional Ecological Knowledge: The Key to Effective Fisheries Management"
Shalini Bhutani and Kanchi Kohli, "Traditional Knowledge and 'Commons' Sense"
Venkatesh Hariharan, "Is IP Another Bubble about to Burst? A View from Another Civilisation"

CV 8

Editorial
Shiv Visvanathan, "The Logic of Knowledge Commons"
David Bollier, "Exclusive Control or Sharing: Which Creates Greater Value on the Internet?"
Editorial: "The Socialisation of Science: India's Knowledge Swaraj"
Harro Maat, "Knowledge, Technology and the Politics of Rice"
Wiebe E. Bijker, "Experimenting for a Knowledge Commons: Public Debate on Nanotechnologies in The Netherlands"
Pankaj Sekhsaria, "Jugaad as a Conceptual and Materials Commons"
Lawrence Liang, "A Handful of Concepts to Understand Openness and to Battle Simony"
Ravi Shukla, "Uncommon Identities: Approaching the Aadhar (UID) Scheme as a Digital Commons"

Hope you find the contents interesting.

Language & education - current reading

Quite a lot of language-related reading to report. Prof Saeed Farani (visit his online bookstore Sufiwisdom.org) alerted me to Speaking Like a State: Language and Nationalism in Pakistan by Alyssa Ayres. This is a good study of the divisive and exclusionary language policies of Pakistan, and what the country can learn from the language policies of India and Indonesia.

A reference there led me to "Language Policy and National Development in India" (2003) by Jyotirindra Dasgupta, an excellent account of language policy and politics. This essay (in a book called Fighting Words) was particularly interesting because it argues (among other things) that language conflict in India in fact has contributed to deepening democracy.

Meanwhile, IIIT's library acquired Probal Dasgupta's Inhabiting Human Languages: The Substantivist Visualization (2012) -- a stimulating essay on translation and Esperanto as key tools to democratize traffic between and within languages.

And then there are these studies (I reproduce the details from my email to the IIIT library):

1. S. Manoharan, V. Gnanasundaram, "Linguistic Identity of an Endangered Tribe Present Great Andamanese (Andaman and Nicobar Islands - India)" (2007), XVIII + 122, Rs 150

2. H. R. Dua, "Language Use, Attitudes and Identity Among Linguistic Minorities" (1986), V + 129,  Rs 34

3. Jennifer M. Bayer, "A Sociolinguistic Investigation of the English Spoken by the Anglo Indians in Mysore City" (1986), IX + 154, Rs 18

4. Jennifer M. Bayer, "Dynamics of Language Maintenance Among Linguistic Minorities (A Sociolinguistics Study of the Tamil Communities in Bangalore)" (1986), IX + 124, Rs 13

The address for ordering these is at the bottom of this page: http://www.ciil.org/PubBook.aspx

I'm currently reading the second in that list -- especially interesting since the linguistic minority Dua treats is "Dakkhani Urdu Speakers in Mysore". Much of what he says applies to just such speakers in Hyderabad (where I live).

More about these books in other posts.

Education in mother tongue essential - ASER

ASER, whom we've met several times in this blog, has a new report Inside Primary Schools: A study of teaching and learning in rural India (PDF). The study tracks about 30 000 children over a period of one year.

For about 10% of those children the school language was different from the home language. They consistently attend and learn less compared to the 90% for whom the school and home languages were the same (see Table 6.14 "Home/School language and children’s learning and attendance", p. 69).

As the authors - Suman Bhattacharjea, Wilima Wadhwa, and Rukmini Banerji - note:

"Children whose home language is different from the school medium of instruction face enormous additional problems at school. Given the lack of bridging mechanisms to enable a smooth transition from one language to the other, these children tend to attend school far less regularly. Whereas across both classes, about half of all children whose home language was the same as the school language were present in school on all three visits, this proportion is far lower among children whose home language was different from the school language (Table 6.14). Learning outcomes for these two groups of children are unequal to begin with and these differences accentuate over the course of one year, both in [class] 2 and in [class] 4." (pp. 68-69)

Here are the key findings of this report (p. 8):

• 20% of children surveyed are first generation school goers. Less than half of all households have any print material available, so children do not have materials to read at home.
• Children are learning in the course of a year, but even in states with the best learning outcomes, children’s learning levels are far behind what textbooks expect. At each grade level, children’s starting point is well below that of their textbooks.
• Children whose home language is different than the school language of instruction learn less.
• Attendance is the most important factor in children's learning.
• The average number of children present in each classroom is low, but in most classrooms children from more than one grade are sitting together.
• Child-friendly practices, such as students asking questions, using local examples to explain lessons, small group work, have a significant impact on children's learning.
• Teachers can spot mistakes commonly made by children, but have difficulty explaining content in simple language or easy steps. Teacher characteristics such as qualification/degree, length of training, and number of years of experience make little difference to children’s learning.

And the key policy recommendations (p. 8):

• Textbooks need urgent revisions. They need to start from what children can do and be more realistic and developmentally appropriate in what children are expected to learn, with clear learning goals and sequence.
• Systems must be put into place to track attendance, not just enrollment, and ensure regular reporting and monitoring of this attendance.
• Mother tongue instruction and programmes for language transition need to be introduced and expanded.
• Teacher recruitment policies need to assess teachers' knowledge, but more importantly their ability to explain content to children, make information relevant to their lives and to use teaching learning materials and activities other than the textbook.
• State teacher education plans should invest in the human resource capacity of academic support structures, like Block and Cluster Resource Centres (BRC/CRC) and District Institutes of Education and Training (DIET), to enable them to help improve teaching and learning quality via in-service training and classroom visits.
• As per RTE [Right to Education Act], indicators for child-friendly education need to be defined and measured regularly as a part of the markers of quality.
• Libraries, with take-home books for reading practice at the household level, should be monitored as part of RTE indicators. Family reading programmes could also be part of innovations to help support first generation school goers.

ASER studies and surveys have considerable impact. Let us hope some of these recommendations find their way into policy. As the study concludes:

"this study has provided a host of insights about influences on teaching and learning that can help align policy with what children need in order to learn well. As new provisions are put into place for teacher recruitment and training, student assessment and tracking, textbook content, and so on, we hope that these ideas will be debated vigorously and tested in practice."

PROBE revisited

Probe Revisited: A Report on Elementary Education in India (OUP 2011) is the book-length version of the study that was reported in The Hindu and Frontline in 2009 (I blogged about those reports here). As one of the partners of the study, CORD, says: "Despite a quantum leap in the number of children able to access schooling in the last 10 years, the situation continues to be dismal."

Just how dismal can be guaged from a 2010 Working Paper for Oxfam: Elementary Education in India: Progress, Setbacks, and Challenges. This document was co-authored by A. K. Shiva Kumar -- one of the authors of the PROBE report. As it says:

"Even today, despite progress, nearly all the problems admitted in 1950 are still waiting to be tackled. Physical infrastructure is inadequate, not all children are enrolled, retention is poor with girls lagging behind boys, drop-out rates remain high, children belonging to scheduled caste, scheduled tribe, and Muslim communities are largely excluded, inequalities persist, quality is poor, and learning achievements are low."

To the above list of old problems, the Working Paper adds the "de-professionalization" of teaching. "The last decade has witnessed large-scale appointment of local 'contract teachers' (shiksha karmis, shiksha mitras, para-teachers, etc.) at salaries far below those paid to permanent teachers in the same government schools. The survey found that contract teachers account for nearly 40 per cent of all teachers in government primary schools."


Disappointingly, nowhere does the Working Paper mention issues of medium of instruction as barriers to universal access and inclusion, especially for linguistic minorities. As we saw above, it notes the disproportionate exclusion of indigenous children (and other minorities), but does not even touch upon language policy in education. Let us hope that the book-length PROBE study notes the need for a mother-tongue based multilingual education.

Chotro 4 to showcase 800 languages

The following announcement was posted on the Iaclals Yahoogroup (which I moderate). I have not seen it yet elsewhere on the net, and am therefore posting the announcement in full. Three striking things about this Chotro:

• No time in the known human history representatives of 800 natural languages have come together on a single platform. The World Language Meet and CHOTRO FOUR will no doubt be a major media story globally.
• The time allotted for presentation of papers will be limited to 20 minutes; but there will be an audience of more than 500 for every presentation.
• Since the Conference is about Intangible Heritage and Languages and Literature in Oral Traditions, or about Oral Traditions, Power Point Presentations will be discouraged.

No PowerPoint, but they do want  the full text of the papers by 15 November 2011. And they plan to publish the proceedings.

Incidentally, I've blogged before about one of the organizers, Ganesh Devy, who is coordinating the People's Linguistic Survey of India.

Here's the announcement:

CHOTRO FOUR
January 6-8 2012
Vadodara, INDIA

IMAGINING THE INTANGIBLE
Languages, Literature and Visual Arts of the Indigenous

Bhasha Research and Publication Centre

In association with

European Association for Commonwealth
Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS)

Call for Papers

In the past, Bhasha Research and Publication (BRPC) and the European association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies (EACLALS) have held three unconventional conferences in a format that has by now come to be recognized among academics and activists as Chotro.

CHOTRO FOUR

is being convened at Vadodara, from the 6th to the 8th January 2012. It will be held side by side with the World Language Meet in which representatives of nearly 800 languages are expected to participate for presenting the survey of their own language(s)

BRPC and EACLALS now seek to initiate discussion on:

• Culture and Development/ Culture for Development
• Notions of the Intangible in Relation to Oral Traditions of Literature,
• Traditional Knowledge of the Indigenous,
• Threatened and Endangered Languages,
• Semantics of Intern-generational Oral Communication,
• Visual Anthropology of Indigenous Arts,
• Aesthetics of Representation of Inheritance,
• Oral Translations, Memory Based Performance Traditions,
• Colonialism and Cultural Amnesia,
• State Structures and Language Loss,

Towards this end, the organizers seek papers for presentations. All attempts will be made to have the presented papers published in theme based volumes through reputed publishing houses. Papers presented in previous Chotro conferences have been published by Orient Blackswan in two volumes, and are being published by Routledge in two further volumes. The length of papers should be not less than 4000 words and not more than 6000 words.

Registration:

For registration in CHOTRO FOUR, scholars/ cultural activists should send by email the following information latest by the 31st July 2011 to ganesh_devy@yahoo.com; Geoffrey.davis@web.de; shae_bhasha@hotmail.com:

Name
Gender ( necessary for proper allotment of accommodation)
Institutional Affiliation, if any
Title of the proposed paper
E-mail address and Telephone Number

Conference Fee:
There will be several categories of conference fee:

• Overseas participants from Australia, Western Europe and North America: GBP 80/ Euro 120/ USD 150
• Overseas participants from African Countries, South America and Eastern Europe: USD 80
• Participants from South Asia: USD 50, Indian Rs. 2000

There will be no additional charges for accommodation and meals during the days of the Chotro. The Organizers will provide hotel accommodation on room sharing basis and all meals during the days of the Chotro.

ABSTRACTS:

A 200 word abstract of the paper proposed for presentation must be sent together with the mail indicating interest in participating Chotro. Acceptance of papers will be communicated latest by the 15th August 2011.

SUBMISSION OF PAPERS:

Full text of the paper will be expected by the 15th November 2011. Participants whose papers are short listed for publication will be informed about the theme of the volume and the publication details by the 15th January 2012. The full and revised text of the papers selected for publication will be expected by the 31st March 2012.

TRAVEL, VISA AND LOGISTICS:

CHOTRO is not a formal association or organization. It is very much a voluntary effort to focus on the shared heritage and destiny of the indigenous of the world. Therefore, overseas participants are strongly advised to apply for Tourist Visa.

VADODARA (also spelt as BARODA) is situated approximately 400 kms north of Bombay (also spelt as MUMBAI) and 1000 kms south of New Delhi. The city is connected with Mumbai and Delhi by train and air. The nearest airport is 1km from the city and is named VADODARA. There is another airport at a sdistance of 140 kms at AHMEDABAD and inexpensive pick up taxies are easily available to ferry you to Vadodara.

THE UNIQUE FEATURE OF CHOTRO FOUR:

No time in the known human history representatives of 800 natural languages have come together on a single platform. The World Language Meet and CHOTRO FOUR will no doubt be a major media story globally.

The time allotted for presentation of papers will be limited to 20 minutes; but there will be an audience of more than 500 for every presentation.

Since the Conference is about Intangible Heritage and Languages and Literature in Oral Traditions, or about Oral Traditions, Power Point Presentations will be discouraged.

Every participant will have an opportunity of listening to several hundred languages.

CHOTRO FOUR is designed as A NEVER BEFORE event.

Join us in the exciting work of providing voice to the voiceless!

K. K. Chakravarty
Chair
Bhasha Research and Publication Centre


Geoffrey Davis
Chair
European Association for Commonwealth Literature and Language Studies

Ganesh Devy
Founder, Adivasi Academy
Head, People’s Linguistic Survey of India

Linguistic human rights in Turkey

While Turkey's President Abdullah Gul visited India, the Kurdistan National Congress sent an open letter to the Indian Prime Minister Manmohan Singh. The letter declared that "The systematic political, cultural, social and economic genocide against the Kurdish people is still continuing".

Among the various forms of discrimination is language discrimination. Here's how Skutnabb-Kangas and Fernandes describe the situation in "Kurds in Turkey and in (Iraqi) Kurdistan – a comparison of Kurdish educational language policy in two situations of occupation":

"In Turkey even speaking Kurdish in public places has been forbidden until recently. Kurdish-medium schools are not allowed; Kurdish children do not even have the right to study their mother tongue as a subject in schools. In theory, courses in the Kurdish language can be taught to teenagers and adults but in practice the obstacles and conditions have been so many and so bureaucratically and legally demanding that there are next to no courses."

Only the abstract of this article, published in Genocide Studies and Prevention (2008, 3:1, 43-73), is available in the public domain. But, if possible, do please read the full article because it documents "a rare positive example where the earlier oppressed (Kurds in Iraqi Kurdistan) do NOT turn into (linguistic) oppressors of others when they gain some power to control their own destinies."

Indeed, I'd welcome any account of a hitherto-oppressed group which, on gaining power, does NOT become another version of the erstwhile oppressor and reproduce the same pathologies of power.

Meanwhile, another activist Nurcan Kaya has authored the report Forgotten or Assimilated? Minorities in the Education System of Turkey (PDF) which calls upon Turkey to:

"play a historical role by bringing an end to the discrimination and the ignorance which has lasted almost a century. It is time to remember the forgotten ones, understand their needs, support their demands and fulfil Turkey’s obligations under international law."

Yet another report on the Kurds by the same organization, Minority Rights Group International, A Quest for Equality: Minorities in Turkey, (PDF) concludes wisely: "The state should not fear its own children. Not every one who asks for language and cultural rights demands territory."

Pakistan's Urdu Dictionary Project

Participating using Skype in an Esperanto language-festival recently in Maribor, Slovenia, I spoke on Urdu - the language and the culture. The longish report is on my Esperanto blog, and here's the link to the 15-or-so slides I had prepared for the 90-minute session (which included images of a kurtaa, salvaar kamiiz, some delicious birayaanii, and a couple of verses with Esperanto translations - and all the Urdu is in Nagari!).

While looking around on the Net, I came across a report by Rauf Parekh on Pakistan's Urdu Dictionary Project. Dr Parekh traces the interesting history of the project, its predecessors and sources of inspiration (the OED, of course, among others), the scholars associated with the project, and the project's ups and downs. But he also tells us that 21 volumes have already appeared and the last is under preparation! A truly magnificent project! And as he reminds us:

"Moreover, after the publication of the last volume, there still remains to be published an index and a bibliography enlisting the works cited. It would definitely take another volume. Then there is the project of shorter versions of the dictionary and many other spin-offs such as dictionaries of synonyms, antonyms, idioms, proverbs and technical terms."

Dr Parekh also informs us that:

"A similar scheme was launched in India and several scholars were hired by the Indian government to compile a greater Urdu dictionary. But the project in India could not take off and it was abandoned probably due to lack of political will and Urdu’s comparatively lesser status in India. By now the Indian scholars, too, had begun to look to the UDB [Urdu Dictionary Board] for an authentic dictionary...."

Let us hope that this project will further deepen the collaboration between the two countries on this shared cultural treasure - Urdu.

MTM education in RtE Bill

The Right to Education (RtE) Bill - about which I blogged the other day - says, "medium of instructions [sic!] shall, as far as practicable, be in child's mother tongue" (emphasis added).

As far as practicable; appropriate; wherever possible; adequate; substantial numbers; if there is sufficient demand; endeavour; within the framework of their education systems; pupils who so wish in a number considered sufficient.... Tove Skutnabb-Kangas gives many examples of these "opt-outs, modifications, alternatives, claw-backs" in her UEA-UNHCR talk in April 2008 in Geneva (slides 63-71) - I had blogged about this talk in October 2008.

From her recent keynote in Bamako, Mali, I copied her recommendations in a post on the Jharkhand forum. Here they are:

madhu prasad wrote:

> The pedagogically sound solution would be to retain the former as the medium of
> instruction but to introduce English as a subject, to be taught adequately
> and imaginatively, even from Class 1.

Yes, here are the main recommendations (slides 30-33) from a recent keynote by Tove Skutnabb-Kangas, a language-rights activist:

Recommendation 1: the mother tongue should be the main teaching language for the first eight years

1a. All Indigenous/tribal and other linguistic minority children (hereafter, IM children) should have their first or own language (or one of them, in case of multilingual children) as their main medium of education, during minimally the first eight years (but absolutely minimally the first six years), in non-fee state schools.

1b. Even if the mother tongue might no longer be used as a teaching language after grade 8, it should be used orally in the classroom, and it should be studied as a subject during the entire education process.

Recommendation 2: good teaching of a dominant local or national language as a subject

2. IM children should have good teaching of a dominant local or national language as a second language, given by competent bilingual teachers, from grade 1 or 2. It should be studied as a subject throughout the entire education process. It should be studied as a second (or foreign) language, using second/foreign language pedagogy/methods; it should not be studied as if it were the children's mother tongue.

Recommendation 3: transfer from mother tongue medium teaching to using a dominant local or national language as a teaching language

3a. Some subjects can be taught through the medium of a dominant local or national language and/or an international language in the upper grades, but not before grade 7 and only if there are competent teachers.

3b. If necessary one or two practical subjects (physical education, music, cooking, etc) can be taught earlier through the medium of a second language, but cognitively and/or linguistically demanding subjects (such as mathematics or history) should be taught in the child's first language minimally up to grade 7, preferably longer.

Recommendation 4: additional languages as subjects

4. IM children should have an opportunity to learn other languages as school subjects, including a language in international use such as English, Spanish, French, Russian, Hindi, etc, if it is not a dominant local or national language mentioned in Recommendation 2 above.

This keynote - at the Bamako International Forum on Multilingualism (19-21 Jan), organized by the African Academy of Languages (ACALAN, the African Union) - is archived on her website.

The next three slides (34-36) give a slew of references to back up these recommendations. Skutnabb-Kangas concludes:

Research conclusions about results of present-day indigenous and minority education show that the length of mother tongue medium education is more important than any other factor (including socio-economic status) in predicting the educational success of IM students, including their competence in the dominant language....

Education Bill - three critiques by Anil Sadgopal

Here are three excellent articles by Prof. Anil Sadgopal arguing that the education bill just tabled in the Upper House of the Indian Parliament is deeply discriminatory, and needs to be radically amended or replaced.

1. "C For Commerce", Tehelka Magazine, Vol 5, Issue 23, Dated June 14, 2008
http://tehelka.com/story_main39.asp?filename=cr140608cforcommerce.asp

A new Bill seeks to put the constitutional promise of free and quality education for all at the mercy of market forces, warns ANIL SADGOPAL

2. "Education Bill: dismantling rights", Anil Sadgopal, Financial Express, Posted: 2008-11-09
http://www.financialexpress.com/news/education-bill-dismantling-rights/383177/0

3. "The 'Trickle Down' Trick", Tehelka Magazine, September 2007
http://www.tehelka.com/story_main34.asp?filename=Ws290907The_Trickle.asp

The Prime Minister’s promise of "6000 high quality schools" is clearly designed to divert attention from the issue of long-pending structural transformation in the school system, says Prof. Anil Sadgopal

Arapaho revitalization

Its Native Tongue Facing Extinction, Arapaho Tribe Teaches the Young
By DAN FROSCH
The New York Times
October 16, 2008

"[O]nly about 200 Arapaho speakers are still alive, and tribal leaders at Wind River, Wyoming’s only Indian reservation, fear their language will not survive. As part of an intensifying effort to save that language, this tribe of 8,791, known as the Northern Arapaho, recently opened a new school where students will be taught in Arapaho. Elders and educators say they hope it will create a new generation of native speakers.

[...]

"Studies show that language fluency among young Indians is tied to overall academic achievement, and experts say such learning can have other positive effects."

Do read the full article.

Language, Education and (violations of) Human Rights

"Language, Education and (violations of) Human Rights" is the keynote that Tove Skutnabb-Kangas gave at a symposium on "Linguistic Rights in the World, the current situation", at the United Nations in Geneva, in April 2008. The symposium commemorated the 100th Anniversary of the Universal Esperanto Association (UEA) and the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR).

Skutnabb-Kangas argues forcefully that:

The most important Linguistic Human Right (LHR) in education for Indigenous peoples and minorities, if they want to reproduce themselves as peoples/minorities, is an unconditional right to mainly mother tongue medium education in non-fee state schools. This education (of course including teaching of a dominant language as a subject, by bilingual teachers) should continue minimally 8 years, preferably longer. Today, binding educational LHRs are more or less non-existent.

Meanwhile, as she points out, "According to pessimistic but realistic estimates, 90-95% of today’s spoken languages may be very seriously endangered or extinct by the year 2100."

She demonstrates that for children of indigenous and minority groups, dominant-language-medium education policies the world over are both widespread and destructive. She argues that these policies can be described legally (in international law) as "linguistic genocide" and "crimes against humanity".

Her "positive examples" of mother-tongue medium based multilingual education are from India, Nepal, Norway, Finland, and Ethiopia, and adds that there are encouraging reports also from Peru, Bolivia, and Bangladesh. But, as she says, "in today's situation there is a lot of nice talk and far too little action".

"Most countries are hypocritical", she concludes.

Her information-rich talk is best heard (or downloaded as an MP3 file) with the PDF of her presentation - both archived on Linguistic-rights.org (so far in English, Esperanto and French - more language-versions to be available soon).

Top 10 endangered languages

Peter Austin, a linguist at SOAS, presents a tantalizing list of strange and endangered wordbeasts. Excerpts:

"Jeru (or Great Andamanese) is spoken by fewer than 20 people on the Andaman Islands in the Indian Ocean.... The languages of the Andamans cannot be shown to be related to any other languages spoken on earth.

"... The Khoisan languages are remarkable for having click sounds – the | symbol is pronounced like the English interjection tsk! tsk! used to express pity or shame. The closest relative of N|u is !Xóõ (also called Ta'a and spoken by about 4,000 people) which has the most sounds of any language on earth: 74 consonants, 31 vowels, and four tones (voice pitches)....

"Yuchi nouns have 10 genders, indicated by word endings: six for Yuchi people (depending on kinship relations to the person speaking), one for non-Yuchis and animals, and three for inanimate objects (horizontal, vertical, and round)....

"Oro Win is one of only five languages known to make regular use of a sound that linguists call "a voiceless dental bilabially trilled affricate"... similar... to the brrr sound we make in English to signal that the weather is cold."

In the discussion at Language Hat, responding to the following query:

"How do you save a language? It's not like breeding a few more pandas and giving them extra bamboo shoots. You can't keep the last two speakers of !Xóõ at the London Zoo."

Austin remarks:

"Outsiders, including linguists, can't "save" a language -- only the community where it is spoken can decide to do so by continuing to speak the language and passing it on to their children. Linguists can assist with the process of revitalisation by supporting communities in their desires and helping to produce materials (books, dictionaries, language lessons) and new contexts for language use (eg. radio, pop music). There are numerous examples where language shift has been reversed and endangered languages have grown in size and become less endangered, eg. Welsh, Maori, Hawaiian, and many examples where communities are struggling right now to make this happen, eg. Ainu, Gamilaraay (an Australian Aboriginal language). In many cases, dealing with pressing social and economic issues in minority communities like health, environmental degradation, and land ownership goes along with linguistic and cultural revitalisation, so the zoo is exactly the wrong analogy to bring up."

Learnt Icelandic in 7 days?! The incredible Daniel Tammet

I've just read and seen interviews with the autist Daniel Tammet. According to the English Wikipedia, he not only has prodigious mathematical talents but also knows 11 languages: English (native-speaker), French, Finnish, German, Lithuanian, Rumanian, Estonian, Icelandic, Welsh, and Esperanto!

He changed his family name to Tammet, choosing, according to an interview, the Estonian word for the oak - 'I've always had a love of Estonian. Such a vowel rich language.'

He's even created a language. It's called Mänti - which comes from the Finnish word for the pine tree, according to a (frustratingly short) post on his (English) blog. A little more information about the language can be gleaned from his interview in The Guardian.

As if this is not enough, he's apparently learnt Icelandic in 2005 in one week! At any rate, he learnt enough of the language to be interviewed in it on national television in Reykjavik!

You can see a part of that interview in the BBC documentary, "The Boy with the Incredible Brain", which can be viewed on YouTube as five, excellent films. The interview with Tammet is in the last part.

Would be very interesting if a speaker of Icelandic could comment on the interview!

Esperanto version of this post: Lernis la islandan en 7 tagoj?! La nekredebla Daniel Tammet.