Watch Your Language Blog

A very foreign language film

Linguists, the least likely Hollywood stars, are getting some major attention at the Sundance Festival this year. The Linguists details David Harrison’s and Gregory Anderson’s race to catalogue endangered languages such as Kallawaya and Chulym. I think an “Indiana Joneses of language hunters” kind of film definitely deserves a top spot in my Netflix queue. (ELHAM)

Tags: endangered languages
January 24, 2008

 

The Quotative Like

Discovery News looks at a study of the construction “to be + like” in instant messaging to indicate quoted speech, as in “He was like, did you see what she was wearing?”... More

Tags: English
January 23, 2008

 

Arabic Lessons: “It gets easier.”

Robert F. Worth looks at the complexities of learning Arabic for the New York Times.... More

Tags: Arabic
January 22, 2008

 

Take my shower… please!

Studying languages is often an exercise in embarrassing yourself. You have to make mistakes in order to learn. I lived with a family in Latvia for a year between high school and college as an exchange student. While I prided myself in being a quick study, I would sometimes find myself latching on to phrases before I knew their true meaning. Other times, it seems I got ahead of myself trying to put phrases together on my own. There was one bathroom in the apartment where I lived, with the shower, sink, and toilet all in one room. When I wanted to take a shower, I would warn the rest of my family in case they needed to use the facilities. ... More

Tags: language, Latvian, newsletter, study abroad
January 22, 2008

 

Speaking “Indian”

“Do you speak Indian?” is an inevitable question for many people of South Asian descent. Even though ‘Indian’ isn’t really a language, it’s understandable why people prefer that term. With 22 national languages in India, and many more non-national ones, not even those who ask “Do you speak Hindi, Malayalam, or Telugu?” cover all the bases.... More

Tags: Hindi, Hinglish, India, language, newsletter
January 22, 2008

 

Finally, an excuse to watch more movies!

Foreign films are a great way to practice a new language. You can learn by watching them with or without subtitles, and pausing and rewinding to hear a sentence or two over again if you need to. Not to mention the very helpful fact of having audio with clear visual aides, language set in real life situations, and plenty of cultural information. The ease at which you can rent foreign films online or in stores these days makes them an ideal and, importantly, fun way to learn more about a language and the culture of places where it is spoken. For example, here are some great French staples that you can watch as a student of French. ... More

Tags: French, language, movies, newsletter
January 22, 2008

 

Texting in Amharic

Texting in Ge’ez is now possible in Ethiopia, thanks to a new brand of cellphones by Nokia. It must have been quite a task; Ge’ez characters with all their variants number up to nearly 300. ... More

Tags: Amharic, texting
January 14, 2008

 

Mapping Language: Europe, 1730

The folks at Strange Maps today feature an ethnolinguistic map of Europe from 1730. The alphabets circling the map are of particular interest, as is the apparent color-coding of different linguistic regions. The map also uses the beginning of the Lord’s Prayer (a common starting point for documenting and comparing European languages at the time) to denote each region. (SUZANNE)

Tags: ethnolinguistics, European languages
January 8, 2008

 

Yo : a gender-neutral pronoun?

According to recent research, yo has emerged as the new gender-neutral pronoun in Baltimore. Linguists and teachers have found that their students are using yo in place of he or she, along with its common usage as a substitute for ‘you’ or ‘your’. Apparently this usage is almost entirely local to Baltimore. (ELHAM)

Tags: dialect, English, language
January 7, 2008

 

New Year’s Eve around the world

As the clocks turned to midnight in each time zone across the globe, “Happy New Year!” was shouted out in many different languages. Whether it was Saehae bok mani baduseyo! (Korean) or Gelukkig nieuwjaar! (Dutch), here’s just some of what you might have heard. Take the rest of the week to wish your friend a próspero año nuevo (Spanish). And in case you missed it on television: from Amsterdam to Zermatt, New Year’s Eve panoramas from around the world. (via Wired) (SUZANNE)


January 2, 2008