Language Death

Not too much time ago, on February 21, 2010, UNESCO acknowledged the 10th anniversary of International Mother Language Day. It sounds very strange at first. Why should we be celebrating our mother language - the language that most of us have been learning since we were little kids? As strange as it seems, I believe that this is a caution to all of us.

National Geographic recently published a study about language death and disappearance. Every 14 days a language dies, and by 2100, more than 3,500 languages will disappear from the face of the earth. Most of these languages will remain undiscovered, taking with them a great source of knowledge about different cultures, traditions, ways of thinking and history. Among all other global crises such as climate change or economical depression, language death is also alarming. With the death of each language, we become more unable to bridge the gap between different languages and ways of thinking associated with them. We are losing our diversity.

Included in the research, there is also a map of language hotspots, areas with many languages under the threat of extinction. It is interesting to see that nearly every region in the world is a language hotspot - only except Europe. Why is Europe not plagued by language death? Is it the European invasion and imperial politics of old European powers?

Another article that I have read, although it is not about language death, made me pose more questions about this topic. "Present imperfect: Is the human brain ill adapted for language?" by Katherine Harmon mentions an argument by Gary Marcus, a psychologist in New York University, that human brain still needs to evolve in order to be able to use languages effectively. The human brain is a context-driven memory, and some psychologists argue that in order for the brain to use a language as efficiently as possible, there should be a "logical language," one based on mathematical and logic models. Such a language was created in the 1960s, but it failed since people had a difficult time with learning it.

I can see why this artificial language failed to succeed. Languages are human creations, and they are created out of need - in order to describe emotions, to communicate thoughts, to talk. The creation process is not perfectly systematic, but that is how human brain chose to communicate its ideas with others. Is it really possible to create an artificial language without taking the way of human thinking, expression and psychology? Is a language a set of grammatical rules or a product of human thinking? I believe that since language is an innately natural creation, an artificial language that is systematized may not be the best one to match the natural need of humans. Language is more than a set of grammatical rules and list of conjugations. At a time when we are losing our naturally created languages so rapidly, it is not surprising to lose an artificial one.



Links: http://www.scientificamerican.com/blog/post.cfm?id=present-imperfect-is-the-human-brai-2010-04-07
http://www.nationalgeographic.com/mission/enduringvoices/
(Both are very interesting articles - I highly recommend reading them.)

Link to map: http://resources.lsaweb.com/wp-content/uploads/2009/06/language-hotspots-map.jpg

Animals and Language - An Interesting Thought

I have recently read an article called "Songbirds Offer Clues to How We Learn Language." The article reports a recent research on the Australian zebra finches: When the bird hears its father singing, certain genes in the bird’s brain get activated. It is a very interesting thought that hearing a song can actually alter the state of a gene in the brain. The relationship between language and speech, and a set of genes getting activated by a specific use of language serves as a further proof of the complexity of language learning and processing in the brain.

Up until now, many researchers attempted to teach language-like systems to different species of animals. Most of these attempts did not help much with explaining the idea of language in living creatures other than humans as their linguistic abilities seem to be rather limited. However, I believe that this research about the Australian zebra finches can bring a new insight to the linguistic abilities of animals.

One question to think about may be whether animals learn and process languages in a very different way than people do. If the process is similar both in humans and animals, can this really tell us something about disorders that inhibit speech, like autism?

It almost seems like a reversed process to trace the roots of autism by language. The genes in the songbird's brain that get activated by a song may be similar to those in the human brain which are also responsible for language processing and speech. Then, with autistic people, these genes would be deactivated, so that they would inhibit speech.

At this point, what I wonder is that if scientists manage to find a similarity between the genes regarding language processing and speech of the songbird and human, would it be possible to find a "song" to activate the genes in the human brain? Can this actually offer a way to improve the language development in autistic people which the disease greatly impedes?

(Link to the article: http://www.usnews.com/science/articles/2010/04/01/songbirds-offer-clues-to-how-we-learn-language.html).

"Hi, I'm Begüm!" - how to help people pronounce a Turkish name through French

Hi!

I am Begüm. I am from Istanbul, Turkey. Both of my parents are Turkish. I speak Turkish (native language), English and French fluently. I have started learning Spanish here at Stanford.

When I came to Stanford back in September, I realized "the tricky relationship" between myself and the languages I speak. Back in Turkey, I used to speak to my mum in French for practice purposes from time to time, and I would speak to my teachers in English. However, Turkish was still the language that I used extensively in my daily life. This changed when I came to the United States. Now, all aspects of my daily life are constructed around a foreign language, and I have this ongoing translation process in my brain. Learning a foreign language in another foreign language and translating things back and forth in my mind without even realizing it are all interesting notions. Even though I have no difficulty with understanding and speaking in English, at certain moments, especially when I am tired or stressed out, I feel the urge to stop speaking in English and explain myself in Turkish to people. I feel that it is the language in which I can communicate my emotions and thoughts precisely. I believe that this dilemma made me realize how different languages I speak have a significant impact on the way I live, and I want to learn about the scientific findings on how and why this is happening.

There is an interesting story about how I realized a change in the way that I think in a different language. While I was telling a past event which I heard from someone else to one of my roommates, I did not make it clear to her that I actually did not witness it myself. This actually caused a lot of confusion. When she asked me whether I have witnessed the event myself, I thought that it was a rather weird question since she is supposed to understand that from the way I conjugate the verbs. Suddenly, I realized that I was talking in English and not in Turkish. Turkish has two different past tenses. One of them is to describe the events we witnessed, and the other one is to describe the events we overheard or inferred. It is a very interesting notion which implicitly requires the speaker to specify his source of knowledge at any time he refers to a past event.

I realized another interesting point after I moved to the States. Here, pronouncing my name is quite difficult for people. Some of them try at least 10-15 times to pronounce my name. There are some people who cannot pronounce it no matter how hard they try. When I was traveling to France a couple of years ago, I came up with something that made it easier for French people to pronounce my name. In French, "legume", the word for vegetable, is pronounced in the same way as my name, except my name starts with a "b" instead of an "l." That actually made it very easy for French speakers to pronounce my name. In the beginning, I thought that the same analogy would not be that helpful in the States as not many people speak French here. However, what I realized over time is that, when I explain the analogy between the French word "legume" and "Begüm", non-French speakers have an easier time pronouncing my name. Most of them said that they have heard of neither "legume" or "Begüm." I believe that introducing them with a more familiar language makes it easier to pronounce my name. Because, most people here are acquainted with the French language more than they are with Turkish. They all know that French people speak French, but there are lots of people who ask me whether my native language is Arabic and whether there is a language called Turkish. Interestingly, to present them with an analogy in a language which they at least know that it exists, like French, makes it easier for them to pronounce a Turkish name, even though they may not be aware of the existence of a distinct language called Turkish.




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