Watch Your Language Blog

The Language Advantage

It’s that time of year. We’re all glued to the television, waiting to see who will make the first big mistake. Who will commit a cultural gaff so unforgivable it will lose them the entire competition. Who will come out unscathed on the other end as victors, having jumped through hoops, traveled far and wide trying to win favor from the locals and avoid cruel tricks played by their rivals along the way. Politics? Who said anything about politics? I’m talking about The Amazing Race. While I admit it’s a guilty pleasure, I also watch the show religiously with a linguistic interest. It seems to be a given that the teams with a bit of Spanish or French under their belts have a slight advantage. It’s also obvious when teams have mastered a few key phrases in each language: “faster” and “we’re in a race” seem to be popular expressions. (Incidentally, all those women saying obrigado — “thank you” — to their cab drivers across Brazil? Good try, but ladies, change the “o” for an “a” — obrigada is what women say.) Even having a capacity for quick language study has its benefits to the show’s contestants, sometimes in a very direct sense. Last season, contestants were asked to learn 10 words in the Mòoré language as part of the Burkina Faso leg of the race. And on last night’s episode, language played a bigger role than even some viewers might have realized. The contestants found themselves in northern Brazil. They had encountered a challenge which left one team member searching a wall covered in writing to find the name of their next destination. Contestants ran back and forth, writing down names and numbers, asking the judge if they were correct. One contestant walked back to the judge and recited one of the graffiti he’d written down in Portuguese. I nudged my husband, who was sitting on the couch next to me. “It’s an inside joke. He just said ‘the last team to arrive may be eliminated’ in Portuguese.” (This phrase appears on clues in every episode of the show.) I like to think that it was a joke shared by just a few of us, the contestant obviously not included. English is supposed to serve well for most travelers who spend little time outside of hotels, airports, and taxicabs, but the number of shots the Amazing Race editors stick in of team members running around foreign streets screaming “English?! ENGLISH?!” tells me otherwise. Which brings me to my favorite Amazing Race moment, when Season 7 contestants found themselves in Jodhpur, India, and had recruited a local to help them get train tickets. They told them where they needed to go and that they needed to find out from the ticket vendor when the next train departs. “Can you ask her that for us?” the contestants pleaded. The local nodded and turned to the ticket vendor. “They want to to know when the next train departs,” he said. In English. (SUZANNE)

Tags: language, television, travel
October 6, 2008

 

Demonyms: Naming Nationalities

While in the midst of editing the culture notes for an upcoming Croatian language course, I started to notice the oddity of the word “Croats.” I thought about it: why do we say “Croats,” and not “Croatians?” Surely this goes against all the rules of naming nationalities. We have “Russians” (not “Russes”), “Romanians” (not “Romans”), “Albanians” (not “Albans”), “Austrians” (not “Austers”)… so why “Croats,” and not “Croatians?” And why “Poles,” not “Polandese?” “Irish,” not “Irelanders?”... More

Tags: Croatian, demonyms, English language
July 25, 2008

 

You might want to consider looking into…

“You might want to consider looking into using this type of evidence in your paper,” said my professor. Really?! With so many verbs (exactly four: “might,” “want,” “to consider,” “looking into”) between me and what I needed to do (“use a certain type of evidence to make my paper better”), I did not feel particularly compelled to do anything about it at all. In my mind, my professor was making a rather vague suggestion and naturally, my reaction was to take little notice of it.... More

Tags: English, making requests, politeness, sarcasm, speech acts
June 3, 2008

 

Starting Out By Listening Up

Every once in a while, when the work day is slow (a seemingly rare occurrence these days), my colleagues and I enjoy talking about different aspects of language. One topic that has come up before is how it sometimes feels as if our personalities alter a bit when we switch to a different language. I swear that whenever I start speaking Latvian or Russian I become a feisty teenager, instead of a lackadaisical thirty-something. But it’s also fascinating to experience not just how we change, but how the world around us changes when we hear it through the ears of a different language.... More

Tags: Chinese, Italian, language learning
April 18, 2008

 

Marion Cotillard Breaks the Language Boundary

Okay, so I know I’m a week late on this, but there’s been much ado made over the fact that the top four acting prizes went to non-Americans. That’s not what I want to talk about. What I want to talk about — what’s amazing to me, rather — was Marion Cotillard’s win for her portrayal of Edith Piaf in La Môme, or, as it was titled here, La Vie En Rose.... More

Tags: American Sign Language, French
March 3, 2008

 

We the front-runner

Little words such as pronouns—I, you or we—carry more important meaning than we usually give them credit for. If you listen more closely to the political speeches that are everywhere around us in this exciting election year, you’ll notice that the candidates use the pronouns in rather picturesque ways. I’m particularly thinking of the pronoun we. ... More


February 6, 2008

 

English as a global language, diversified

The Financial Times recently published an interesting article about English as a global language.... More


November 9, 2007

 

Don’t “throw mama from the tambien.”

It’s that time of the year; final submissions for the Best Foreign Language Film have poured in from a record number of sixty three countries, after much controversy in some cases. Of course, I’m interested in films in languages I’m familiar with, but this is also an opportunity to explore other languages I’ve always wanted to learn. (Too bad South Africa didn’t submit a film this year; I’ve been fascinated with Xhosa lately.)... More


October 23, 2007

 

Steven Pinker and the Parasitic Gaps

All of us here at Living Language are fascinated by languages, but not all of us are linguists. Most of us came here with a genuine love for the study of languages, and for teaching them to others. We do have two linguists in our midst, though, so the words “universal grammar” or “parasitic gaps” sometimes seep into our office conversation, and whenever that happens, I feel like a fish out of water. I decided long ago that I’d need to become at least an armchair linguist if I wanted to keep up.... More


October 19, 2007

 

Finally kids get the blame for things they do to their parents—and languages

Ideas sprout like mushrooms after the rain; one of these good ideas, that has finally generated quite a few mushrooms in the last several years, is the awareness that at least 50% (some say 90%) of the world’s 7,000 or so languages are about to die in the course of our century and the realization that we should do something to save them. Check out this recent article in the rainmaker New York Times and this much more entertaining Colbert report to get a perspective on what’s going on. Centuries are getting shorter as we speak (we keep talking about it in this office—weeks just fly by and it’s the Monday-morning editorial meeting again), so linguists have been quite busy in the last fifteen or so years getting the word out about this imminent loss to our humanity. They are also grouping together to “save” as many of those dying languages as they can, which mostly means painstaking documentation, digital archiving and description, and much more rarely, actual revitalization, which of course takes more than a digital recorder and a notebook. ... More


October 1, 2007

 

The sound of snow on the Mediterranean

English wasn’t the language I chose to learn, rather, even when I was ten, many more years ago than I’d like to admit here, it was clear to my parents that English and its speakers are gaining ground in the world and that you needed to learn the language to get anywhere. French was the language I loved and aspired to master as a teenager and then, continued to study in college. I simply absorbed Italian, the way I did my native Croatian, while imperfectly, by listening to my mother speak it to neighbors, and to acquaintances we ran into at the Korzo, and by spending way too many Saturday evenings watching Canzonissima. (You kind of like this? Here’s your chance to learn more about La Carrà “Sensazionale,” while practicing your Italian at the same time.) …And German was a mistake.* ... More


September 27, 2007

 

Potterese

Like many others (is “many others” an understatement, or what?), I spent the weekend devouring the latest Harry Potter book in two sittings. You wouldn’t think I could get a language post out of this, but you’d be very wrong. The Harry Potter series has always been filled with an amazing scope of linguistic enjoyments, some obvious, some deeper beneath the surface.... More


July 23, 2007

 

Just Like You Learned Your Native Language!!!

I was watching TV the other night, and I saw a commercial for language courses that made a promise that I’ve heard far too many times: you can learn [insert language here] just like you learned English! I have a particularly strong wincing reflex when I hear that phrase, because out of college I worked for a well-known language school, where I was habitually called upon to assure potential clients that with the method used by that school, they would pick up a foreign language just like they picked up their native language. I died a little inside every time I had to say that…... More


July 18, 2007

 

Croatia on the Map

Croatia has been put on the map. I just love this English expression because it acknowledges so well what great scholars and writers took tomes to explain (Said and Pamuk are two very great examples)—that our very existence, so plain and obvious to us, is actually a matter of debate and perspective. We don’t “exist” until the influential and powerful say that we do. And then, like the Ancient Egyptians, we continue to exist only in profile and not at all en face or all around, because that is the only view they could assume, or cared to assume. ... More


June 12, 2007

 

Reading the World

Two of my favorite things: languages and literature. But if you’ve ever been a beginner in any language, you know the frustrations of learning everything you need to know to get around Moscow, but still not being anywhere near the level you need to be in order to read War and Peace in the original Russian. ... More


June 5, 2007

 

Linguavision

Every May, an event occurs that restores my faith in language, humanity, and sequins. That event is Eurovision. I was first introduced to Eurovision while living in London ten years ago. I had, of course, heard of Eurovision’s most famous success stories—ABBA and Celine Dion—but even my exposure to ABBA’s greatest hits hadn’t quite prepared me for the spectacle that was the costumes, the over-the-top europop, the melodramatic ballads, and the idiosyncratic and unilateral voting process (the Scandinavians always vote for each other, as do the Balkans, and the Baltics). ... More


May 16, 2007