infundibulum

Māori Queen Te Atairangikaahu passed away yesterday in Ngaruawahia, New Zealand. She helped to promote the Te Reo Māori (the Māori language) during her forty year reign.

Maori Queen worked for youth

Maori used to be dying language, but as patron of the Kohanga Reo movement, Dame Te Ata made Maori proud to speak their mother tongue.

The message from children at the marae: “It’s cool to korero!”

The Kōhanga reo (”language nest”) program which the Queen helped to promote has been quite a successful in helping to create a new generation of Māori speakers (and as a result it’s been emulated in Hawaiian punana leo).

The word “kōrero,” which our young interviewee used, means “to speak” or “to talk.” (There’s a very nice language learning website called Kōrero Māori.)

Here’s another obituary at the L.A. Times, and a lovely photo of her coronation in 1966.

Here in Montgomery County, Maryland, there’s a paper called “El Tiempo Latino.” Which I read because it’s *cough* free. The paper is published by the Washington Post. (Not sure, actually, if it started off that way or was bought…)

A couple days ago, this article caught my attention:

Enseñanza multilingüe: Frente a un pedido oficial, escuelas del área inician clases de español, y otros idiomas, desde la guardería (Multilingual education: In accord with an official requirement, area schools initiate classes in Spanish and other languages, beginning in preschool)

Well anyway, that’s my own translation of the headline and blurb. Since it’s an interesting article in its own right, I figured I’d look it up on the web and translate the key bits. So I googled the author, and lo and behold, the original was in English, at the Washington Post:

Schools Try Elementary Approach To Teaching Foreign Languages

Interestingly, as far as I can tell, there’s no formal indication at all that translation was involved. The English version is probably the original, since it’s much longer (1400 words vs. 400 in Spanish), but no translator’s name is mentioned.

One often comes across newspaper pieces that carry taglines at the end, along the lines of “So-and-so contributed to this article…” Why shouldn’t the translator get any such credit?

August is Philippine Languages Month in the Philippines.

Speaking in tongues–Pilipino-style

This overview has some interesting Tagalog Pilipino Filipino words thrown in. (I think that’s the current term for the national language… you know what? It’s complicated. )

For instance:

IT is not Linggo ng Wika; it’s Buwan ng Wika. It’s not Abakada and Tagalog; it’s ABCD and Pilipino. It’s no longer Taglish as a language borrowed and corrupted; it’s now translation and code switching as proof of comprehension and multilingual mastery. It’s more than just stodgy textbooks and formal oratorical balagtasan; it’s also a celebration of comic-book lore and street corner kwentuhan. It’s no longer Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa; it’s now Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa ay Buwan ng mga Wika sa Pilipinas.

Ricardo Nolasco of the Philippine Languages Commission (whaddya know, they have a wiki) has some more background on that last pair of phrases:

Nolasco explains, “Buwan ng Wikang Pambansa ay Buwan ng mga Wika sa Pilipinas is a pitch for linguistic diversity. Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa was the slogan during the martial-law regime and that promoted dangerous ideas such as that having many languages was disadvantageous to the country—and that’s not correct.”

With a bit of digging I discovered that Isang Bansa, Isang Diwa means “One nation, One spirit.” It was the motto from the bad old days of the Marcos government. (And more amusingly, perhaps, it recently resurfaced in the name of the wacky Eddie Gil’s Partido Isang Bansa Isang Diwa. He promised to “make every Filipino a millionaire within one hundred days” of being elected. That didn’t work out! (Unfortunately!).)

Haven’t managed to decipher the first, more agreeable phrase that Nolasco mentions, but buwan is “month,” wikang pambansa is “national language,” and wika sa Pilipinas is (I think) “languages of the Philippines.” So I’m guessing the whole thing means something like “The Month of the National Language and (All?) the Languages of the Philippines”?

It would also be fun to know what the languages on that poster are, specifically.

While wandering around the Technorati “Language” tag, I ran across a blog called café salemba, which gives us some insight into the politics of language in Indonesia.

I don’t know much about that neck of the woods myself, linguistically, except that Malay (Bahasa Melayu) and Indonesian (Bahasa Indonesia) are very similar languages indeed.

According to an article that Café Salemba points to, there is a movement afoot in Indonesia, Malaysia, and Brunei to promote the use of Malay in the face of increasing use of English, Chinese, and Arabic. (The article seems to have been moved, but also it’s also available here, and there’s a followup article here ).

I think Café Salemba is right to disregard, and even mock, the idea that government can effectively legislate how language is used:

People communicate, regardless of what language they are using. As long as you understand what I mean and I understand what you mean, we’re fine. Misunderstandings might arise, but that’s how language develop in the first place.

That is to say, language is like market. It is supposed to be free. Non-imposed, non-enforced. It grows as people need it. Let people choose how they communicate. There were times when people thought they could impose some new words. And they failed. Umberto Eco told us a story about it. The Italian fascists tried to force people to say “mescita” instead of “bar”. They failed.

It’s just not possible to prevent people from using a particular language. One needn’t look further than the Indonesian Ministry of Education website to detect the influence of borrowings from English: struktur, statistik, kalender, program, publikasi, web mail, profil, nonformal, nasional, e-government, award, workshop…. Heck, the ministry itself is called the Departemen Pendidikan Nasional Republik Indonesia. Call me crazy, but that looks like a four out of five borrowing ratio…

But even so, it’s not quite true to say that governments can have no linguistic influence in the long run — they can and they do. If you compare, for instance, the history of the African countries of Kenya and Tanzania, it’s quite clear that the heavy hand of the Tanzanian government effectively positioned Swahili as the language of the country, whereas in Kenya, English is still widely understood and used.

So there’s at least one key place where imposing a language can play a critical role in shaping the linguistic future of a country: schools.

N.Va. Prisoner Lost in Translation

Every morning, dozens of Latinos come by Kaiser’s desk. Many appear confused, frustrated. Starved for familiarity, they devour her every word, even if her Spanish is a bit broken.

Kaiser, 59, speaks English with a strong Tennessee accent and Spanish with the inconsistency of someone who taught herself more through desire than formal training. But she tries, and she sympathizes, and on a February afternoon when the halls were mostly hushed except for a man wandering around with a worried look, she listened.

You can hear the sound of me groaning as you read the next bit:

“It seems like there was a breakdown on a couple of levels,” said Tawny G. Hays, clerk of the General District Court.

From the beginning, his last name was entered as “Antonio Cruz” in court documents and as “Cruz” in jail records — a problem that both jail and court officials say often arises with Hispanic names that tend to be long and include an also-known-as.

Col. Charles “Skip” Land, who heads the jail, said the name might explain why officials failed to take Cruz to court Dec. 12. “Some people also come in with a hyphen between their name and then don’t come up unless that hyphen is typed in,” he said.

An interesting look at the situation of Spanish from the Alabama Press-Register: Lack of Spanish speakers problem for Mobile, Baldwin police

The problem is exacerbated by a recent influx of Spanish speakers in the wake of Hurricane Katrina:

Top local law enforcement officials said the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, which destroyed much of the Gulf Coast last year, and the availability of employment, particularly construction jobs, has brought a huge wave of Spanish-speaking immigrants to the Mobile Bay region.

Hernn Prado of the Alabama Latin American Association argues that increasing the number of Spanish-speaking officers would alleviate difficulties: “Police would be able to develop a better community policing… The Hispanic community would build more trust in law enforcement, and investigation of crime will be simpler.”

The scale of the problem is pretty impressive if you look at a map. I put this together from some maps at Wikipedia commons, see for yourself:

The Alabama Department of Safety’s State Trooper division has no Spanish speakers at its Mobile post, which covers Mobile, Baldwin, Washington, Clarke and Choctaw counties, a trooper spokesman said.

That’s an awful big chunk of land not to not be represented by a single Spanish-speaking officer in the department.

Ahmadinejad tells government not to use Western terms in Persian

Uh, right, good luck with that.

TheStar.com - Keeping a native language alive

Word of the program has sparked great interest in native communities across North America.

“We have received calls from the Six Nations, the Sak and Fox Nations of Oklahoma, the Navaho of Arizona, the Squamish of British Columbia, the Seminoles of Florida, the Inuit and the Ojibwa in Ontario,” Goodleaf says. “They all want to know how it is working out.”

The program is based on the Rosetta Stone language learning software. It seems they have a program aimed at Endangered Languages.

The article also mentions some legislative plans in the works:

Not only is the program being used in schools and private homes, but by Sept. 1, the council will require Kahnawake’s 900 public servants to enrol in Mohawk language lessons. This includes social workers, teachers, medical workers, firefighters, peacekeepers and infrastructure employees.

“There’s a fine line on our public employees in learning Mohawk. We’re not going to throw people out,” Delisle says. “We’re not trying to force businesses to conform immediately. We’re not saying your job is being threatened if you don’t learn our language, but people with language skills will definitely be an asset when it comes to hiring. There is no real timeline (for language enforcement) but this is transitional. If we don’t see the necessary results, we will have to be stricter.”

Grand Chief Michael Delisle says that they’re targetting something like 80% fluency for all public employees within 15 years, an ambitious number.

Another winner of the “yet another article titled ‘Lost in Translation’” award:

Lost In Translation - www.phayul.com

“There is such a dearth of competent translators today,” laments Geshe Lhakdor, the director of the Library, with holdings of “more than 80,000 manuscripts, books and documents; hundreds of thankas, statues and other artifacts; 6000 photographs and other materials.”

And a comment I found reassuring in the wake of the article’s implication that ancient religious texts are the most important source for translation:

“If at all any, only few books have been published or translated into Tibetan, like for instance, Seven Years in Tibet. While it is important to sustain and promote one’s traditional knowledge, it is equally important that we tap into the wealth of information and knowledge in foreign literature, by translating them into Tibetan,” Geshe la said.

Read more about the Tibetan language