A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland

So I should probably apologise / apologize for my lack of updates the past year or so. It's been pretty crazy since I started grad school - I'd have to spend many a blog post explaining all the wonderful things I've been able to do since I started in the linguistics PhD programme here at the University of Oregon.

In the meantime, in the 'American' spirit of self-promotion, I thought I should mention that I finally finished revising my University of Melbourne MA thesis A phonological and phonetic description of Sumi, a Tibeto-Burman language of Nagaland and got it published with Asia-Pacific Linguistics in Canberra.

It's an open access ebook (print on demand), and you can download it right here at the ANU digital collections page here.

I have too many people to thank for this, especially my family who've supported me all through this crazy journey, as well as the Sumi community / my Sumi family. I'm so thankful for all the amazing people I've met along the way, and all the help I've received in making this possible. Noshikimithi va na!

The examples linguists use

My apologies to all my readers, I just haven't had all that much time to blog since I started grad school, though I have a lot of things I'd like to blog about! (I'll be making time after finals week next week to catch up on my posting.)

Thanks to the Nom Nom Linguistics Facebook page, I just found out about this Tumblr site called
Linguistics Sample Sentences: http://lingsamplesentences.tumblr.com/

Here you can see a selection of the weirdest / funniest / slightly more obscene examples that linguists use to illustrate various points about the grammars of other languages. Sometimes linguists need these 'weird' examples to see how a language performs a certain function. Sometimes these examples highlight how creative the speakers of a language can be.

And sometimes linguists just choose the weirdest examples for comic relief. (Because talking about grammar.)

In general, I'm told we sound like a violent bunch. If we're trying to study something like transitivity -simply put, the ways in which languages describe an event that involves more than 1 participant- the most common examples you see tend to involve a verb like hit, e.g. John hit Mary or Mary hit John. However, I've even been told that hit is not always the best example of a transitive verb (for the linguists: this is because in some languages, the verb hit may take an argument with locative marking instead of patient marking), so what you really need is a verb like kill to illustrate the point!

Great, even more violence.

I think the weirdest sentence I've had to elicit from a language consultant was "The man cooked me for the chicken." But I'm sure there'll be weirder ones to come!

[Note: the point of such examples is not and should not be to make fun of a language or speakers of a language - if anything, we're both showing appreciation and poking fun at the nature of the science  for (a) making linguists ask speakers of a language to say a particularly unnatural utterance; and/or the linguist themself for (b) choosing that particular example to put in a publication just to illustrate a certain point, when another (though less humorous) example would have sufficed. But it's what you have to do if you're trying to work out the genius and creativity underlying any spoken language.]

Fun with tone sandhi - The solution!

Okay, I apologise for the long delay, but finally(!), I present you with the solution to the problem set I posted in my last blog post, many months ago (see here).

(Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'.
Or click here for an image you can magnify.) 

The language is Singaporean Teochew, as spoken by an aunt of mine who lives in Singapore. It's part of the Min Nan group of languages, but Singaporean Teochew is said to have undergone dialect leveling with Singaporean Hokkien - the two are much more mutually intelligible than their counterparts still spoken in China today. Also, although most descriptions of Teochew give 8 tones, I've only been able to find 7 contrastive ones - but there might still be an 8th one that I've missed!

I know I was supposed to post this in mid-June, but a lot of stuff came up, including a move to the United States (via Australia). As some of you may already know, I've just started grad school at the University of Oregon, where I am pursuing a PhD in Linguistics. It's a really exciting time for me. I'll be heading back to India at some point during my course, but unfortunately not this year.

Looking forward to posting about all the cool linguistics topics I'll be looking at during the next year!

Fun with tone sandhi

The past few months, I've been learning a language here in Singapore that's been noted for its crazy mind-bending use of tone sandhi. I thought I'd write a little about it in this post, since it's a phenomenon that some linguists may not be familiar with (given the tendency for many to run away at the first 'hearing' of anything tonal). At the end of this post, I'm also going to throw in a little puzzle set that I created, just to give people a chance to see the sorts of data some linguists work with. I'm hoping it'll appeal to all the puzzle solvers out there.


Tone sandhi in Mandarin Chinese
Experienced learners of Mandarin will already be familiar with the phenomenon, exemplified by the initially confusing and dreaded rule that specifies that Tone 3 becomes Tone 2 before another Tone 3. This prevents you from saying two Tone 3s, one after the other. For example, the word for 'you' in Mandarin is 你 nǐ (with Tone 3) when said on its own and the word for '(to be) good' is 好 hǎo (also Tone 3). However, when you put them together to get the ubiquitous Mandarin greeting 你好, written as nǐ hǎo in Pinyin, you find that 你 is now pronounced ní with Tone 2. (This makes it homophonous with 泥 ní 'mud', but most speakers can work out from context that you're not talking about the quality of earth.)

Importantly, the rule applies whenever two Tone 3s occur next to each other in the same phrase, regardless of the actual meaning of the words. Using another example, 很 hěn, an intensifier with the meaning of 'very', remains as Tone 3 in phrases like 很多 hěn duō 'a lot' and 很快 hěn kuài 'very fast', since 多 duō has Tone 1 and 快 kuài 'has Tone 4. But if you want to say 很好 hěn hǎo 'very good', you would have to pronounce 很 as hén, with Tone 2.

Ask a native speaker of Mandarin why on God's less-than-green earth they would say 你好 or 很好 this way, and they'll probably just say that 'it sounds nicer'. There's also actually no physiological, or aesthetic, reason preventing you from producing two Tone 3s in a row. The thing is, tone sandhi rules are language-specific: some tone languages do allow sequences of similarly low (and creaky) tones to occur next to each other, while others may disallow sequences of two falling tones, which Mandarin does allow.

Of course, if you're only interested in learning a tone language that does have tone sandhi, it doesn't really help to ask why it happens, or for instance, why Tone 3 becomes Tone 2 and not Tone 4. You just need to accept that it does happen and that it happens the way it does. And then you need to learn how to apply the tone sandhi rules in actual speech so you don't sound completely moronic.


Tone sandhi vs Tone change
On the other hand, if you're in the business of describing tonal languages, tone sandhi is something that pops up again and again. It can sometimes be a little tricky to talk about, since there's still some disagreement as to how to what the term 'tone sandhi', sometimes called 变调 biàndiào in Mandarin, should include. At least, it is generally accepted that 'tone sandhi' differs from 'tone change', or 变音 biànyīn, which describes similar kinds of tone alternations that are restricted to specific words, largely due to historical reasons. For example, 好 when pronounced hào with Tone 4, means 'to be fond of' (example taken from Chen 2000: 31) - here you can see the connection with 好 hǎo '(to be) good', which indicates a likeable quality. However, this correspondence between Tone 3 and Tone 4 is specific to 好, and changing Tone 3 on another word to Tone 4 is not likely to yield a similar change in meaning.

In contrast, tone sandhi rules, which can also be the products of historical changes in a language, are more 'general', in the sense that they almost always apply regardless of the meaning of words as long as the necessary sound environment condition is present. However, there are instances when tone sandhi rules are not strictly observed - even native Mandarin speakers may sometimes fail to observe the rule described above when confronted with new compound words consisting of Tone 3 + Tone 3.


A tone sandhi puzzle
In the process of learning this tonal language in Singapore, which I'm calling 'Language X' for the moment, I came up with a little puzzle involving tone sandhi. It's similar to the problem sets we give out to undergraduate linguistic students, except I've simplified it a little so you don't need a lot of linguistic knowledge to solve it. I've used the letters A-G to indicate the tones, as well as some symbols known as Chao tone letters which give a visual representation of the tones. The 'stopped' tones refer to tones on words that end in the consonants k and h.

You can view a draft of the puzzle below. Now this may not be the easiest puzzle to cut your linguistics teeth on, but I hope it gives you a taste of the sorts of data linguists work with, and the kind of analytic skills required to describe languages.

(Right click the image below and select 'Open Image in New Tab'.
Or click here for an image you can magnify.) 

The solution will come in mid-June!

[I may have to post less frequently than I already do this coming month because I'm busy revising my Masters thesis to get it published.]

Reference

Chen, Matthew Y. 2000. Tone sandhi: Patterns across Chinese dialects. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Issues with Ice Age linguistics

Last week I had a few friends ask me about a recently published study titled "Ultraconserved words point to deep language ancestry across Eurasia" by Mark Pagel, Quentin D. Atkinson, Andreea S. Calude and Andrew Meade. It's been making headlines all over the globe in articles with titles like "English May Have Retained Words From an Ice Age Language" (Wired.com), "Ice Age language may share words with modern tongues" (News.com.au and various sites) and "15000-year-old 'fossil' words reveal ancestral Ice Age language" (LA Times).

You can download their report here. Also, the data for the study comes from the Languages of the World Etymological Database, which can be accessed at this site.

As always, Language Log has a great post by Sally Thomason that highlights many of the issues about the study here, including issues with both the data and methodology. Similarly, another post at GeoCurrents by Asya Pereltsvaig rubbishes the study.

Now, before you go and cry 'Academics marking territory!', there are very good reasons to take the study by Pagel et al. with a sea-ful of salt. But let me start with a short personal anecdote and brief introduction into the world of historical linguistics. Also, if you're a believer in Nostratic, you should probably just ignore this post altogether.


Nagaland and the Yucatec Peninsula?

A few years ago, a friend of mine from Nagaland in North-East India saw Mel Gibson's Apocalypto and was astounded that her language and Mayan (technically, Yucatec Maya) shared a number of words in common. She thought the two languages might be related and asked me about it. I told her this was highly unlikely given (a) the geographic distance between the two and (b) the lack of any recent contact between the people of Nagaland and the Mayans. Of course, I could tell she was still sceptical of my response even some time after.

Now my dismissal of her theory wasn't just because I found the geographic distance and lack of recent contact problematic (or the fact that she was basing her observations on translations given in the subtitles). It was the fact that given the geographic distance and the lack of recent contact, the words she cited were just too similar in both pronunciation and meaning. Such similarity between cognates, that is, words in related languages that are descended from the same etymological source (and not through borrowing), is actually highly unlikely. Such words rarely keep both their original form and meaning as time goes by, and the languages they belong to drift apart. As an example, let's look at the Italian word for 'dog': cane (pronounced /ka.ne/, like 'car-nay' with a [k] sound at the start). The French equivalent is chien (pronounced /ʃjɛ̃/ with a sound usually written in English as sh). Despite both words deriving from Latin canis, the modern equivalents in Italian and French sound quite different.


Historical Linguistics 101

(Image by Koryakov Yuri, taken from Wikimedia Commons)

To address this problem of sound change, most historical linguists apply what is known as the Comparative Method. The idea is to look for sound correspondences across a number of words in two languages, and not just individual words in each language that sound identical and mean the same thing. Applying this method reveals that the /ʃ/ 'sh' sound in French (written as ch) regularly corresponds to a 'k' sound in Italian (written as c): compare French chanter with Italian cantare 'to sing', French bouche with Italian bocca 'mouth'. It is these regular sound correspondences that form the basis for genetic groupings of languages, not similarities in the actual forms of the words themselves. Historical linguists will then use these sound correspondences to attempt to reconstruct a 'proto-language' from the forms in the modern languages. Such proto-languages are always theoretical - even 'proto-Romance', a proto-language reconstructed based on modern Romance languages like Spanish, Sardinian and Romanian, is not identical to Vulgar Latin, which had many varieties spoken in across the Roman Empire.

However, even before historical linguists can begin to establish sound correspondences, they first need to identify cognates in various languages. This process of identification is complicated by the fact that words don't just change in pronunciation, they also change in meaning. For example, English dog and Swedish hund /hɵnd/ 'dog' sound nothing alike, even though they share the same meaning. On the other hand, English hound /haʊnd/ and Swedish hund share many similarities in pronunciation, with similar consonants both at the start and end of each word. However, Swedish hund refers to any kind of dog, while English hound refers to only a specific breed of dog. Which word in English would we say is cognate with Swedish hund then? Given the similarity in pronunciation and the somewhat related meaning, hound is the more likely answer.

Now this may not look like a huge semantic leap that could cause much confusion, but a combination of both sound drift and semantic drift can make it difficult to locate cognates. Take for instance, the Swedish word for 'animal', pronounced /jʉːr/, almost like English you're. Based on this spoken form, can you think of a word in English that might be cognate with this?

Unless you know something about proto-Germanic linguistics, I'm guessing that you probably weren't able to work out that the Swedish word for 'animal', written as djur, is actually cognate with English deer. (Yes, the spelling might have helped, but imagine you're working with languages that have no written records.) The word deer in English does not refer to animals in general, but to a specific kind of animal, somewhat analogous to English hound. Speakers of German may have seen the connection, since German Tier means 'animal (in general)' and still sounds similar to English deer. However, the point here is that as languages diverge more over time, the task of identifying cognates between them gets increasingly difficult.

Certain types of sound and semantic change are quite common, and follow well-established patterns. For example, in a number of languages, the word for 'five' is historically derived from the word for 'hand': compare Malay lima 'five' with Hawaiian lima 'hand' (see here for more words for 'hand' in Austronesian languages). However, the rules governing such changes are not necessarily predictive, and at best can only give a probability that a word developed from a particular source. This is when historical linguists can get rather creative in deciding whether two words are cognates or not - disagreements over what words should be used as cognates can lead to rather different reconstructions of what is supposed to be the same hypothetical proto-language.


Swooning over Swadesh lists

To help identify cognates, many linguists start by comparing items from Swadesh lists in various languages. The list was first developed by Morris Swadesh in the 1940s and 50s and contains words that are viewed as belonging to the 'core vocabulary' of all languages, as opposed to culturally-specific vocabulary. Depending on the version of the list, there may be 100 or sometimes up to more than 200 items on the list. The items include nouns referring to body parts like 'heart' and 'tooth', personal pronouns like 'I' and 'we', kinship terms like 'father' and 'mother', some verbs of motion, the numerals 1-5, etc. It was originally assumed that such 'core vocabulary' was more stable over time and underwent replacement by other words in the language at a slow but constant rate, analogous to the process of radioactive decay. Furthermore, there was the implicit belief that words for such 'basic' concepts were not likely to be borrowed from other languages.

Based on such assumptions, Swadesh applied a method called glottochronology to these word lists, which then allowed him to propose dates for when various languages / language families split from each other. Today, this method has been largely discredited, mainly for its flawed assumption that word replacement happens at a steady rate across languages and across all words in a language - although there do remain proponents of this type of research. Furthermore, 'core vocabulary' is not always resistant to replacement by borrowed words. One notable example of this is the adoption of the Chinese numeral system in the genetically unrelated Japanese, Thai and Vietnamese languages.

Despite all these limitations, many field linguists and historical linguists see the Swadesh list as a useful starting point, myself included. But any decent fieldworker or historical linguist would also know that you need to move beyond a Swadesh list consisting of some 200 items (at the maximum) if you want to get any real insight into a language and its past. One needs to go beyond studying the etymology of only 'core vocabulary' and look at other areas like morphology (e.g. prefixes and suffixes), syntax, as well as sociolinguistic variation. Some linguists would also argue for the need to look at vocabulary associated with agriculture and material culture, words that the Swadesh list deliberately omits. In a sense, Swadesh lists are the 'standardised testing' of historical linguistics, designed to make quick and 'consistent' comparisons by omitting large amounts of information and disregarding any subtle nuances in the data. A study that uses data drawn solely from Swadesh lists is inevitably going to be woefully inadequate, just like education policies based entirely on the results of standardised testing.


Words frozen in time?

Coming back to Pagel et al's work, which I now have the overwhelming desire to call the 'Ice Age language study', I hope you can start to see some of the problems with their methodology. Now I'm certainly not saying that their methodology is as basic as my friend's casual linguistic comparison of what are essentially false cognates (pairs of words with similar pronunciation and meaning but very different sources) in her language and Yucatec Maya.

Nevertheless there are issues with their study, as listed here:

(1) They only use Swadesh list data.
(2) There are a number of inaccuracies in the data used to reconstruct certain proto-words, as noted by Thomason.
(3) They apply the Comparative Method to reconstructed proto-words, which are themselves hypothetical and disputable, to reconstruct even older proto-words. (Note: this is acceptable, but only if your first reconstructions are solid.)
(4) There are some questionable judgements about which words to treat as cognates, although this is always going to be a subject of debate in any historical linguistic research. Some linguists simply err on the side of caution, while others are more liberal in their judgements.

It should be obvious by now that this is not an exact science - you can apply all the statistics you want, but if the initial data is based on somewhat subjective judgements, the results of the statistical analysis are not going to be very convincing. To their credit though, they try to show that the rate of word replacement can be correlated with frequency of use, and provide a more empirically-based study than what Swadesh did, even if this study is based on just 200 items on the Swadesh list.

Personally, I find questions about the origins of language families fascinating because they are intimately linked to human migration in prehistoric times, and going back deep enough, to our origins as a species. Judging by the amount of media coverage, this also seems to be an issue that media outlets believe people are interested in reading about. All that I've said doesn't mean that I don't believe that a super 'Eurasiatic' / 'Ice Age' language could have ever existed - I'm certainly in no position to say if one did or did not. I just don't think the evidence provided is compelling enough to suggest that one did. And given the time depth we are talking about, it's doubtful that we'll be able to recognise true cognates using the Comparative Method.

I don't think linguistics by itself will be able to give any satisfying conclusions about our origins, or about prehistoric human migration. But this doesn't mean that we should abandon the collection of linguistic data altogether. Comparative work like this calls for a lot more subtle attention to detail than lists of 200 words. Linguists, such as Roger Blench and George van Driem have also increasingly started to collaborate with anthropologists, archaeologists and geneticists to try and corroborate findings for each field in order to provide a better picture of our prehistoric movements.  More sophisticated statistical, genetic and geography-based computer modelling are also being developed and some are being applied to linguistic data. With any luck, some of these will bring promising results in the future.

The trouble with Chinese language policies in Singapore

Recently, I joined the Facebook group "Heritage languages of Singapore", and was immediately directed to an online petition by a group called 'Creatives For Causes' to reintroduce Chinese dialects on local TV and radio programs in Singapore. Judging by the number of signatures (only 238 at the time of writing), it seems that either it's been poorly publicised, or people just don't agree with the need for these dialects.

[Note: I will be using the term 'dialect' in this post, even though linguists would consider Hokkien and Cantonese to be separate languages from Mandarin. In my experience, the term 'dialect' seems to be preferred in everyday speech because to most people, these languages exist mainly as spoken vernaculars and are not used in written texts.]

This call comes after over 30 years of aggressive Mandarin promotion by the Singapore government, which had earlier designated Mandarin as the 'official' Chinese language to be used as a means of uniting the various Chinese groups in Singapore. The reason why dialects have been banned, and continue to be banned stems from the belief that their use is detrimental to the learning of Mandarin. The people behind the petition argue that this belief is wrong, given linguistic research that shows that young people can in fact grow up multilingual. On a slightly different note, they argue that we need dialects to prevent the elderly Chinese population who may not speak or understand much Mandarin from becoming isolated, as younger generations of Singapore shift towards English and Mandarin.

I fully support the petition, and I urge others to support it as well. But my reasons go beyond what has been mentioned on the petition site. In particular, I would like to talk about the reasons why Mandarin was introduced as the official Chinese language, and then raise some of the issues with Lee Kuan Yew's reasons for stamping out the use of dialects. Some of these are mentioned in an interview published in the Sunday Times, 11 December 2011. You can find a copy of the article below.

"Out with dialects, in with Mandarin" Sunday Times (11/12/11)

Why Mandarin to begin with?

In 1959, "the Hokkien group was the largest, forming just over 40 per cent of the total ethnic Chinese population. The Teochew group was next with nearly 23 per cent, the Cantonese third with 18 per cent, and the Hainanese and Hakka groups followed with about 7 per cent each. Mandarin was spoken only by a few educated people, such as schoolteachers, journalists, writers and artists, who had come to Singapore to teach or work."

Although not explicitly stated in this article, the usual narrative is that Mandarin was chosen to unite the various dialect groups, as well as form a link with ancient Chinese culture and values (Wee, 2009). The fact that it was the national language of China would have also contributed to its choice. In more recent times, the reason for promoting Mandarin has become more about gaining access to business, educational and cultural opportunities in China (Teo 2005).

Looking at a speech by Lee in 1984, we can examine the notion he held that Mandarin is the sole linguistic conduit for the transmission of traditional Chinese values:

"It [Mandarin] reminds us that we are part of an ancient civilization with an unbroken history of over 5000 years. This is a deep and strong psychic force, one that gives confidence to a people to face up to and overcome great changes and challenges. To be able to speak Mandarin and read the Chinese script, is reassuring. To look at Chinese characters, to see them as mysterious hieroglyphics, is to be emotionally disadvantaged. A little effort and the magic of the characters will reveal itself. . .. Parents want . . . their children to retain traditional Chinese values in filial piety, loyalty, benevolence, and love. Through Mandarin, their children can emotionally identify themselves as part of an ancient civilization whose continuity was because it was founded on a tried and tested value system." (Lee, 1984, p. 3) (cited in Teo, 2005)

These statements are problematic, because they are based on the flawed notions that:
(a) Mandarin, as it is spoken today, has been the language of Chinese civilisation for over 5000 years; and
(b) that it is intrinsically linked with the Chinese writing system, to the exclusion of all other Chinese dialects.

Firstly, Middle Chinese (spoken around the Sui and Tang dynasties) did not sound like Mandarin. (And Ancient Chinese would have sounded even less like modern spoken Mandarin since it didn't even have tones.) We know this about Middle Chinese because of sources like the 切韵 / 切韻 Qieyun, a rime dictionary from the Sui Dynasty that described the contemporary pronunciation of Chinese characters by using a system that divided the first sound of a syllable (the initial) from the rest of it (the rime). It also provided rime tables, which grouped pronunciations of Chinese characters together by tone, initial and rime. Most of these groupings would not make sense if we relied on the modern Mandarin pronunciations of these characters. (Note that the name Qieyun itself is written in pinyin and only reflects the current Mandarin pronunciation, not the pronunciation at the time it was written.)

Secondly, it is a mistake to think that dialects like Hokkien and Teochew cannot be written using Chinese characters, and that the only way to access Chinese writing is through Mandarin. In 1883, a Presbyterian missionary named Adele Fielde published a Teochew-English dictionary, based on the dialect spoken in the city of Swatow. In that same year, another missionary, John Macgowan, published a Hokkien-English dictionary, based on the Amoy dialect. In both dictionaries, Chinese characters are used to write Teochew and Hokkien.

Click here for options to download Fielde's (1883) A pronouncing and defining dictionary of the Swatow dialect, arranged according to syllables and tones.
Click here for options to download Macgowan's (1883) English and Chinese dictionary of the Amoy dialect.

Language and Racialisation - the problem of the Singapore Mother Tongue

"Our ideal was that the Chinese would be able to speak English and Mandarin, Malays would be able to speak Malay and English, and Indians would be able to speak Tamil and English. Alas, the situation did not develop as we had hoped."

Underpinning this statement is the belief that Chinese people should have had little trouble learning Mandarin, on account of their Chinese-ness. This is supported by the use of the term 'mother tongue' in the Singapore context, to refer to the language associated with one's race (or designated race) - unlike most other countries in world, 'mother tongue' and 'first language' do not mean the same thing here.

Taking myself as an example, Mandarin was designated as my mother tongue. I have a Chinese surname and thus my race is 'Chinese'  in all official documents here. This ignores the linguistic realities of my home, where both my parents do not speak Mandarin (nor does my maternal grandmother). In fact, my parents are much more fluent in Malay, a language I was not allowed to study as a mother tongue (despite my Peranakan / Straits-born Chinese heritage which was not recognised by the government). Similarly, my forced inclusion into this world of 'Chinese-ness' mirrors the forced exclusion of ethnic Malays and Indians were until very recently were not given the choice to study Mandarin in school.

Certainly, there are some similarities in grammatical structure and pronunciation across Chinese dialects, which would enable say, a native Hokkien speaker to pick up Mandarin faster than a native Malay speaker, but it does not mean that the Hokkien speaker will pick up Mandarin automatically, as a child being born into a Mandarin-speaking environment will. In fact, for many dialect speakers it would have been almost like having to learn two foreign languages in school, since many of them would have almost no exposure to either English or Mandarin outside school. Their real mother tongue (the way the term is used around the world, and by UNESCO) would be their home dialect, not Mandarin.

Removing the familiar and bringing in the unfamiliar

Lee seems to have made a similar realisation, following the 1979 Goh Keng Swee Report, and his controversial conclusion is one that he holds until today.

"If our students were learning English and Mandarin in school, and also learning dialects at home, they were in reality learning three different tongues. Given that their exposure to dialects at home was longer than their exposure to English or Mandarin, it was not surprising that their command of dialects was stronger than their command of the latter two."

In view of this situation, Lee and Goh's solution was to eradicate the language that these students had had the most exposure to. This involved the ban on the use of dialects in local media. These dialects were viewed as an extra learning burden for speakers, who also had to learn English and Mandarin (Wee, 2009). Unlike the prestige languages English and Mandarin, dialects were seen to have little functional benefit.

Over the past few decades, a lot of work has demonstrated that with well-implemented bilingual programme, students with a good foundation in their home language / mother tongue (not the Singapore sense of the term) can actually progress further in a dominant national or foreign language than students who enter a program taught entirely in that dominant national or foreign language. For more information, you can look at the UNESCO site for Mother Tongue Multilingual Education which includes materials that advocate the promotion of the mother tongue. [EDIT: The main purpose of many of these programs is to bridge the gap between the home language and the national language, not to have students come out of school only fluent in their home language, which alone does not give access to jobs and further education.]

The rationale for this is: children first learn about the world around them through the language used at home. By the time they start going to school, they already know a lot about the physical and cultural world around them. A good primary education program uses what they already know and promotes cognitive development by building up from simple concepts to more complex ones - it guides the child into the unfamiliar by using the familiar. Naturally, such a program uses a language that the child already has some knowledge of, and requires curriculum planning, teaching material development and teacher training.

In a similar analogy to one raised by Lee, I sometimes ask my monolingual English friends in Australia to imagine what it would be like if they only had exposure to English at home, but went to school and discovered everything was taught in Russian - not only would they have to learn the Russian language, but they would also have to learn mathematical (and basic scientific) concepts in Russian at the same time. Some children may do well because their families can afford to give them more exposure to Russian, but these are children who do well in spite of the system. This is similar to the situation faced by many indigenous people around the world, who are forced to go to school where a national language that they may not have access to outside the classroom is used. In many cases, plunged in a completely alien language environment, they either learn to memorise what they need to in class, which they promptly forget when they leave school, or they simply drop out of school - scenarios not unlike what Lee encountered in Singapore in the 1970s.

Like in so many places in the world, spoken vernaculars in Singapore were (and are) seen as the 'burden' as opposed to prestige languages like English or Mandarin, despite the fact that the use of dialects could have been instrumental in easing the burden of learning English and Mandarin. The government may have also needed to compromise on the original expectations that all Chinese people become fluent in both English and Mandarin. Instead, what we have now is a significant section of the population that are viewed as speaking both English and Mandarin poorly.

But rather than lament policies that cannot be turned back, [EDIT: and I think it's too late to overhaul the education system], we should look at things that can be changed. In light of what's been discussed, it's time to realise that dialects are not the main cause for the poor standard of Mandarin here. There is very little reason why dialects should not return to TV and radio, apart from maybe some difficulty in finding energetic young hosts who are fluent in their respective dialect. It has been done in Taiwan, where in the last 10 years, a Hakka channel and even an indigenous channel have appeared on local cable television.

Back to the older generation

This brings me back to the main purpose of this post. I am not criticising the government's policies for the sake of it - I simply wish to point out flaws in the reasoning behind the language policies, because I believe that people are suffering because of them, and that a change to the policy will result in less suffering.

The petition site talks about why we should support this case for the sake of the elderly. However, apart from just providing entertainment and intellectual stimulation, the elderly have a right to information. If we really are a maturing democracy, how can we have citizens who do not have access to information about how their lives are run - citizens who have spent most, if not their entire lives here (and many of whom are actually older than the country itself)? Surely they have a right to know about things like the White Paper, or be kept up to date when the next big outbreak like SARS strikes. 

The sad irony is that the very language viewed as a means for cultural transmission is now the reason for the growing linguistic and cultural gap between many older and younger Chinese Singaporeans. Bringing back dialects would be a small but important step in rehabilitating this relationship.

References

Teo, Peter. (2005). "Mandarising Singapore: A critical analysis of slogans in Singapore’s ‘Speak Mandarin’ campaign." Critical Discourse Studies 2(2). pp. 121–142.

Wee, Lionel. (2010). "‘Burdens’ and ‘handicaps’ in Singapore’s language policy: on the limits of language management." Lang Policy 9:97–114.

[Here's a related post I write back in 2010 when I started this blog: Diverse Languages, One Identity
My next post The persistence of Singapore English and Mandarin also discusses other language issues in Singapore.]

Expressing the agent in Chinese

I've been meaning to post this for a while now, since I saw this advertisement at my uncle's clinic here in Singapore. It's an ad for some type of hair loss treatment.

In English, the ad reads: "Male pattern hair loss can be treated".

In contrast, the Chinese (Mandarin) ad reads: 医生可以治疗你的脱发问题。yīshēng kěyǐ zhìliáo nǐ de tuōfà wèntí which can be roughly translated as 'The doctor can treat your hair loss problem.'

For now, let's just ignore the fact that English version obligatorily requires some sort of article with doctor and that doctor must be specified as being singular or plural, while the Chinese one does not. (Given the ad's location in a clinic where it was in full view of waiting patients, I interpreted it as referring to the doctor working in the clinic that day, whom the waiting patient was going to see.) Also ignore the fact that the English one specifies this as a male problem, while the Chinese one assumes that the reader is male.

What's important to note is that the Mandarin version actually specifies the agent, the person who will be undertaking the action, 医生 yīshēng 'doctor'. On the other hand, the English version uses a passive construction where the agent no longer needs to be mentioned, though it could be if we wanted to, by simply adding the phrase by the doctor. By using the passive voice in English, one can omit the agent / doer of the action and still construct a grammatical sentence. This is one common use of the passive voice in English, and a fairly important one, so please ignore 'blanket rules' that state to 'avoid the passive voice' at all costs - it does have its uses!

With the current buzz on language and its potential effects on thought and behaviour, and given that only the Mandarin one expressly mentions an agent, the 'doctor', I would be tempted to ask this question: If the treatment fails, would a Mandarin speaker who has read the advertisement in Mandarin be more likely to blame the doctor than an English speaker who has read it in English?

The obvious hypothesis would be that a Mandarin speaker would be more likely to assign blame to the doctor if the treatment fails than an English speaker would. Why? Because in the Chinese version, 医生 'doctor' is explicitly mentioned.

Now, if this hypothesis were proven correct, could one then conclude that it was due to some fundamental difference in the way that Mandarin and English are structured or view the world?

I would definitely say, no.

The problem is, the English version could easily have read: A doctor can treat your hair loss problem, using the active voice which means that the agent has to be mentioned / one must mention the agent. Mandarin also has a way of marking the equivalent of the passive using 被 bèi (see here for more info), although writing 脱发问题,可以治疗 would be acceptable, and would be closer to 'Hair loss problem can be treated', with 脱发问题 'hair loss problem' placed at the front as a topic.

You might then say that it is more common in Mandarin Chinese to mention the agent here - a Google search for 脱发问题可以被治疗 'hair can be treated' (using 被 bèi)  doesn't come up with identical results, while most results mention some sort of force / process, e.g. 头发移植 'hair transplants', 锌 'zinc' and 中草药 'Chinese herbal medicine' that might cure hair loss problems.

The problem is, there are numerous reasons why 医生 'doctor' was mentioned explicitly in the Chinese version, and not the English one. One reason might be a cultural expectation among Mandarin speakers (or in the case of Singapore, older Hokkien and Teochew speakers who also know Mandarin) that it is up to the doctor to help them. Older Chinese speakers, who are less likely to know English, are more likely from a generation that held doctors in the highest esteem and would not question their actions. By mentioning 医生 'doctor', the copywriter / translator of the advertisement in Chinese could simply be tapping into the revered status accorded doctors, since this would likely promote sales. Another reason might be that the copywriter simply felt the need to be more explicit in directing Chinese speaking patients to the doctor for help.

Clearly, it would be impossible to simply compare two versions of a sentence in two different languages and start making hypotheses about the effects of language on thought and behaviour. However, I thought it would be a nice way to illustrate some of the problems faced by researchers in this field, especially if we start considering a feature (like an agent) that could be omitted in a language, but are often not. Is such a tendency the result of the structure of a language affecting thought, or is it thought and cultural expectations that result in this particular use of language / stylistic choice?

In order to exclude the possibility of the latter, we go to Roman Jakobson's quote “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”. It would therefore be more fruitful to look at features of English that must be mentioned, like the use of either an indefinite or definitie article with singular nouns in English or the marking of all countable nouns as either singular or plural - all features that Chinese does not oblige its speakers to mention.

[On a related note, here's a link to Lena Boroditsky's article in the Wall Street Journal on her work with English, Japanese and Spanish speakers and the perception of blame (23/07/2010): Lost in Translation
Here's a Language Log post that critically examines this study (26/07/2010): Boroditsky on Whorfian navigation and blame]

'Futureless' languages?

[If you've come to this post because you're wondering if a particular language is 'futureless' or not, skip down right to the bottom for a summary of the various points I make in this fairly lengthy post.]

This post follows on from my previous one about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. To recap, Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak may affect your savings behaviour, depending on how your language grammatically encodes statements about the future. My point in my first post was that he was drawing on research that suggests a link between language and thought, the hypothesis being that speakers of a certain language must pay attention to particular features of the world around them on a habitual basis because the language they speak makes it obligatory for them to mention such features.

My concerns about his work however, start when I look at Chen's application of these ideas to the tense systems of the languages in his study, and how these languages have been analysed for tense.

'Futureless' languages?

The term 'futureless' languages comes up in Chen's work (although he actually rejects it in favour of a different term) and deserves some clarification. Contrary to what the TEDx talk description says of 'languages without a concept for the future', in Chen's work, he cites Östen Dahl's definition of 'futureless languages":

Dahl defines “futureless” languages as those which do not require “the obligatory use [of grammaticalized future-time reference] in (main clause) prediction-based contexts”. In this framework, a prediction is a statement about the future that has no intentional component. (footnote 3, p. 1)

[Click for a copy of: Dahl, Öster. 2000. Tense and aspect in the languages of Europe.]

I'll explain why Chen needs to add the part about 'no intentional component' a bit later on. What is important to note here is that the term 'futureless' language does not refer to 'a language without a concept for the future', but rather to a language that does not obligatorily force its speakers to use some sort of grammatical marking e.g. a future tense inflection on a verb, when describing an event situated in the future. For this reason, Chen actually uses the more neutral term 'weak future-time reference (FTR) language' instead.

Mandarin Chinese, the main inspiration behind Chen's work, is a prime example of a 'futureless' language in this discussion, because it does not typically oblige its speakers to mark for futurity (most obviously because verbs are not obligatorily marked for future tense). However, this is not the same as saying that Mandarin does not have a concept of the future, or that it prevents its speakers from talking about events in the future. Mandarin speakers know that they can always use adverbs of time to specify if an event is going to take place in the future, e.g. 明天 míngtiān 'tomorrow'. It is simply not obligatory that speakers use such adverbs in order to construct grammatical sentences in Mandarin.

But the world isn't simply made up of 'futureless' and 'futured' languages, with nothing in between. And this analysis of Mandarin may not be entirely correct either, as we shall see later. If we look at the chapter on 'Future Tense' on the World Atlas of Language Structures Atlas, written by Viveka Velupillai and Östen Dahl himself, we find this observation:

"It is relatively rare for a language to totally lack any grammatical means for marking the future. Most languages have at least one or more weakly grammaticalized devices for doing so."

In fact, rather than thinking of two discrete categories, it might help (at this stage at least) to think of it more as a cline between a strong tendency to mark for 'futurity' and a weak tendency. In a study like Chen's, how does one draw the line between what is a 'futureless' and 'futured' language, which you may agree is a fairly subjective decision to make?


A European framework for a global study

Chen's solution to this question is to rely on a framework set out by the European Science Foundation’s Typology of Languages in Europe (EUROTYP) project which has criteria to determine what is a 'strong' future-time reference (FTR) language and what is a 'weak' FTR language. The guidelines state that the data collected for the project came from primary texts and responses to questionnaires developed by Dahl (see here for details), though I do not know how percentage of the data was textual and what was elicited through the questionnaire. Descriptive linguists will also be quick to point out the problems of relying too much on data collected using a questionnaire, since these often do not reflect actual language use.

Of greater concern is the inherently Eurocentric basis for comparing languages of the world in Chen's study. Chen states that, "to [his] knowledge, the EUROTYP project is the most extensive typological research program to study the cross-linguistic grammaticalization of FTR" (p. 9), but it does not change the fact that all the languages looked at are European. The survey itself cannot give a good idea of the kinds of grammatical categories one finds in languages all over the world. For instance, Kayardild, an indigenous language of Australia, can mark 'tense' on nouns - this may seem like a rare and extreme example, but it demonstrates that a set of criteria developed for only European languages will necessarily omit categories that may be found in other languages of the world.

To use an analogy from an article about Joe Heinreich's work on human behaviour by only looking at Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) people: it is like studying penguins while believing that one is learning insights applicable to all birds.


Wherefore the weather forecast?

This brings me to the analysis of English as a 'strong' FTR language. A number of people have raised similar examples to the one I'm about to use here to suggest that English is not a 'strong' FTR language:

(1) I am going to the shops now. (I'm on my way there as I say this.)
(2) I am going to the shops tomorrow. (I intend to go tomorrow.)

The main observation here is that in both sentences, the speaker is using a form that is described in English grammar as the 'present continuous' tense. However, while (1) refers to an event taking place at the time the speaker is uttering the sentence, i.e. 'the present' for the speaker; (2) refers to an event that might take place in the future.

[Note: Both (1) and (2) are perfectly grammatical and acceptable to native English speakers. One should not start thinking that (2) is wrong because it uses the 'present tense' to refer to the future! Think about the sentence I go to the shops every Friday. - you are using what is called the 'simple present' tense in English to describe an activity that you habitually do, not something that is happening at the very moment you utter the sentence.]

In both sentences, I could omit now and tomorrow and still have a grammatical sentence referring to an event in either the present or in the future. This shows English can actually be similar to Mandarin in not grammatically distinguishing between the present and the future on the verb, but through the use of an adverb of time.

So how does Chen get around this problem? He draws on an analysis by Bridget Copley, published in her 2009 book.

"Copley demonstrates that in English, “futurates” (sentences about future events with no FTR) can only be used to convey information about planned / scheduled / habitual events, or events which arise from law-like properties of the world." (footnote 9, p 4)

Using this argument, he then omits examples like the one I gave in (2), which describes a planned event. This is the main reason that has led Chen's study to focus on the language used in weather forecasts, since they do not have an intentional component to them. His own corpus study involved getting students to scour the internet for examples of weather forecasts in various languages and coding the verbs for FTR making.

This is one of my biggest problems with the research. The reason given for omitting the kinds of sentences that Copley lists is just not good enough. How can you just omit such a large chunk of data showcasing the way English speakers use English? What it looks like here is Chen trying to make English fit into the 'right' category so that it can then match his hypothesis / results.

On top of that, I've seen comments about how weather reports are not examples of typical or 'natural' speech, or how they may not even require the use of verbs, e.g. 'Tomorrow. Cloudy. Maximum temperature, 25 degrees." Chen notes that his study was confined to only languages that are widespread on the internet, but there is an underlying assumption that the 'weather report' as a genre exists for all language communities in his study. What about places that don't have a dependable meteorological service to announce the weather? Maybe a language might have a difference when talking about the weather that's likely later in the day and the weather that's likely in a few days' time?

Finally, even if Chen could convince me that weather reports are a reliable source of data for this cross-linguistic study, there is still one fundamental problem. If we consider the data that he has already collected (see Appendix B of his working paper), we find a set of 'verb ratios', referring to the percentage of verbs in a weather forecast about future weather which are grammatically marked as  future-referring. Some of these ratios are not 100% - this means that not all the verbs about future weather are grammatically marked as future-referring. Consequently, what we are looking at isn't obligatory future marking, but rather a tendency to do grammatical future marking. (Interestingly, Hungarian only has a 25% verb ratio, but it is still coded as being a strong FTR language.)

This goes against the basis for the hypothesis that an obligatory aspect of a language will make its speakers attend to it habitually every time they speak. Current research looking at the potential effects of language on thought is still in its nascent stage and it has necessarily been limited to testing hypotheses about obligatory features of a language. Once we start including a more general tendency to use a particular feature, the argument that it is the linguistic feature shaping how the speaker thinks becomes far less tenable: can we even tell if such a tendency is the result of the structure of a language affecting ways of thinking, or if it is something like a cultural norm that results in this particular use of language?


And if you're still in the mood...

As a final point, I should also point out that linguists rarely talk about 'tense' by itself, but 'tense, aspect and modality / mood' (TAM).  This is because languages rarely have markers just for 'tense', without conveying information about the other two. Simply put, 'tense' refers to the location of an event in time, 'aspect' refers to how the event relates to the flow of time, and 'modality' / 'mood' to the attitude of a speaker towards an event. (Click here for more info on the WALS site.)

For instance, the use of 'will' in English statements like 'It will rain' does not just convey information about when the event will take place (tense), but also the speaker's level of certainty that it will take place (modality/mood). Some Mandarin speakers might criticise Chen's study by saying that Mandarin too can convey future meaning on the verb, using the auxiliary verb 会 huì, which marks both futurity and certainty (much like English 'will') and is necessarily used when one wishes to convey both futurity and certainty.

In general, describing the TAM system of any language is very tricky. Two analyses of the same language by two different linguists may look very different, depending on such factors as the linguist's native language(s); the linguist's own theoretical orientation; the methodology used to collect the data; and the linguistic intuitions of the language consultant providing the data. At the cross-linguistic level, it is also very difficult to compare the TAM systems of different languages - it is not as simple as translating a sentence from one language to another and looking for a one-to-one correspondence. For instance, consider:

(3) Je suis à Lyon. 'I am in Lyon.' (I'm in Lyon now!)
(4) Je suis à Lyon pour 7 jours. 'I am in Lyon for 7 days.' (I intend to stay in Lyon for 7 seven days.)
(5) Je suis à Lyon depuis 7 jours. 'I have been in Lyon for 7 days.'

In French, all three sentences use the same present tense form suis (from the verb être 'to be'), while in English we see the present tense form am (from the verb to be) in only (3) and (4), not (5). Can we then say that the 'present tense' in French is the same as the 'present tense' in English?


As I mentioned in my last post, Chen's study is informed by more recent work on the relationship language and thought. However, there is one fundamental flaw in the application of this hypothesis to the data - namely, it starts to look at tendencies within a language rather than obligatoriness. The nature of the data collected in his study is also problematic, as is the reliance on what is a rather subjective way to code languages for tense. Admittedly, this lack of agreement when describing a language's TAM system and when comparing the TAM systems of different languages is something for linguists to work out, assuming consensus can ever be reached.

Given all that I've written, I actually do wonder what correlations Chen has found, since he seems to be convinced of many of the correlations he's found. I'd actually like to see more work on the potential impacts of one's language on behaviour, though perhaps not at the scale Chen has worked at, which is something I might write about soon. I might also spend one more post discussing some of the issues I have with the survey / census data Chen has used for his study.


[ADDENDUM (12/03/2013): If you've come here looking to see if a particular language is 'futureless' or not, there is no easy answer to this. Languages are not either 'futureless' or 'futured', and where you draw this subjective line depends on the criteria you choose. As in Chen's study, such criteria may also lead you to allow or ignore particular types of sentences from the language you are considering. Finally, you also need to consider the analysis of the language you are using, since grammatical analyses of languages can and do differ from scholar to scholar.]

Language and savings correlation?

There's been quite a bit of internet buzz this past week about the work of Keith Chen, a behavioural economist at Yale. You can see his TEDx talk here: Could language affect your way to save money? as well as an attention-grabbing and rather misleading BBC article about his work: Why speaking English can make you poor when you retire. Chen's central hypothesis is that the language you speak may affect your savings behaviour, depending on how your language grammatically encodes statements about the future.

(If you're also interested, Chen's working paper can be downloaded here. The Language Log blog actually discussed his work a year ago in two posts: Keith Chen, Whorfian economist, where Geoff Pullum critically examines the linguistics behind the proposal; and Cultural diffusion and the Whorfian hypothesis, where Mark Liberman questions the interpretation of the statistics. Chen was also invited to write a response to those raised concerns, which can be read here: Whorfian economics.)

First of all, I should state that even though I still have a lot of doubts regarding this study, I absolutely love the cross-disciplinary nature of the work. This is the sort of work that needs to be actively encouraged. It doesn't matter if Chen himself is not a linguist - inter-disciplinary work will often lead one into territory that one is unfamiliar with, and it doesn't help if the other side is aggressively marking their territory. He has clearly done a lot of research, and is not basing his claims simply on personal observations and anecdotes. All the media attention should also not detract from the fact that Chen has put in a lot of thought and effort into the study. And given that much of academia these days is being starved of funding, a little media attention really shouldn't hurt.

With regards to this study, there are three broad areas that I think would be fruitful topics of discussion: (1) the link between language and thought; (2) the idea of 'futureless' languages; (3) the data that was used in this study and the problem of a 'monolingual' mindset in linguistics. In this post, I'd just like to start off with the first topic.

Language and thought

A very common assumption that I've come across is that if Language X has a word for a particular concept (usually one's own language), but Language Y doesn't have a word for it, then that concept must not exist in Language Y. One argument against this is that it doesn't matter if there's no single word translation if a full sentence can capture the same meaning. Others may argue that it's just not the translation in Language Y just doesn't have the exact same meaning as in Language X. Some people may then put this difference down not to language, but to culture. This may then lead them to try and tease language from culture, while others argue that it can't be done. What we have then, is a hypothesis that cannot be proven or falsified either way.

Thankfully, this assumption is not the premise for Chen's research. Despite the unfortunate wording on the TEDx talk page, he is not making the point that just because a language doesn't have future tense marking, its speakers don't have a concept of the future. Rather, he is tapping into a growing body of work that suggests that the language you speak subtly influences what you pay attention to in the world. Much of this work is built around Roman Jakobson's observation that “Languages differ essentially in what they must convey and not in what they may convey”, a quote that Chen cites in his research.

The point here is not about whether Language X has a word or a tense that Language Y has, but whether Language X obliges speakers of that language to talk about something in a way that Language Y does not. One widely cited example is that of Guugu Yimithirr, a language spoken in Australia, whose speakers are forced to use cardinal points to describe the location of a person or thing in relation to another one, given the lack of what we would consider to be terms like 'left' and 'right' in English, i.e. speakers have to say something like 'He is sitting to my north'. It has been found that speakers of this language are much more aware of their cardinal orientation than speakers of languages that aren't forced to habitually make reference to cardinal points. (This is grossly simplified, but you can read more about this here and in Levinson's 1997 paper). The point here is not that English lacks the resources to say 'He is sitting to my north'. It may sound odd, but it is perfectly possible. Rather, the point is that speakers of English are not obliged to habitually note their cardinal orientation, while speakers of Guugu Yimithirr are.

In his TEDx talk, Chen highlights the problem of translating 'uncle' into Mandarin Chinese, since you are forced to specify whether the person is your father's sibling or your mother's, and whether they are older or younger than your father or mother. In English, you could certainly use the phrase 'maternal uncle who is older than my mother' but you are not forced to. Therefore, one might argue that a speaker of Mandarin has to be constantly aware of such relationships much more than an English speaker.

Here, Chen's example is not the best. I come from a Chinese family myself, and many of these relationships and the terms to address various extended family members were 'calculated' by my parents when I was pretty young. From then on, the name got associated with that person, and I'm not actually forced to habitually make these calculations anymore. A better example would have looked at information that a language compels its speakers to specify, suggesting that they have to habitually pay attention to such information, e.g. how Russian obligatorily forces speakers to say whether they walked or travelled by vehicle; or how Sherpa obligatorily forces speakers to say whether an action was done on purpose or not.

In general, I would say that Chen's work is informed by current linguistic research into the relationship between language and thought. This can be seen in his working paper:

[...] English forces its speakers to habitually divide time between the present and future in a way that Mandarin (which has no tenses) does not. Of course, this does not mean that Mandarin speakers are unable (or even less able) to understand the difference between the present and future, only that they are not required to attend to it every time they speak. This difference, in the obligatory marking of future events is a central characteristic of the weak vs strong FTR classification (Thieroff 2000), and is the difference between languages I exploit in my study of savings behaviors.

Bear in mind that within linguistics, the debate about the relationship between language and thought is by no means over. The Economist website held an online debate in December 2010 on just this topic. Suffice it to say, there is even less consensus on the effects language might have on behaviour, or the mechanism by which this might occur. Even if Chen's findings are robust enough to show a strong correlation between language and saving behaviour, there is a lot that needs to be done to show that it is a causal relationship, i.e. it is the language causing a change to saving behaviour.

However, my main concern with Chen's work is the actual application of this to tense systems of the world's languages. This will be the subject of my next post.

[Guy Deustcher's article in the New York Times (26/08/10): Does Your Language Shape How You Think? provides great coverage of the research in linguistics to a non-specialist reader.]

How many languages...

On the weekend I was having brunch with a polyglot friend who asked me, "How do you answer the question, 'How many languages do you speak?'"

Before I continue, I should point out that just about everyone I know who has had to say, "I'm a linguist" or "I study linguistics" has also faced the inevitable question, "So how many languages do you speak?" It's such a common phenomenon that most language / linguistics-related blogs would have a post covering the topic and there's even a Facebook group named 'You're a Linguist? How many languages do you speak?'
(The other usual comment is "I'd better watch what I say around you" and I've even had a good friend who was shocked when he realised I wasn't a grammar Nazi or a punctuation Nazi (like srsly, wtf?))

Anyway (and before this post spirals into a rant about how linguists should not be expected to be polyglots), the question asked by my friend raises two issues that gives me constant grief: since I am a polyglot, how do I quantify the number of languages that I speak? And more importantly, how on earth do I give an answer that will satisfy both me and my interrogator?

Measuring language competency, or rather 'competencies', is a pretty big issue in language testing and personally, I always have a (self-assessed) 'Language Competencies" section near the start of any CV I submit. Following the format of a professor's CV, I list English as my native language, then specify my 'reading/written competence' and 'spoken/listening' competence for each subsequent language. It looks like this:

• English (native language)

• French (full reading/written competence and excellent spoken/listening)

• Mandarin (...)

• Russian (...)

• (random 5th language) (typically 'basic reading and speaking')

I always put a maximum of 5 languages (depending on the job, I might just list 3 so I don't look too much like a wanker). The adjectives I use with regard to competence are 'full', 'excellent', 'good' and 'basic', whatever 'full' means since I'd still need a bilingual dictionary if I was reading a French book. And yes, I might sometimes overstate my competencies. After all, it is a CV, and I do want to highlight the fact that I possess more language skills than your average monolingual English speaker. And breaking down the competencies into two categories seems to be a more 'honest' reflection of my language skills, even if what I'm referring to are different aspects of grammatical competence (using Canale and Swain's 1980 terminology).

It still doesn't make answering the question "How many languages do you speak?" any easier though. If I listed out all my competencies in a normal conversation, I'd sound like an academic suffering from Aspergers (or, maybe just an academic). It's worse as a linguist interested in phonetics and morphosyntax, because I know a lot of stuff about languages that I don't speak. For instance, I wouldn't even consider myself a speaker of Sumi, even though it's the language I worked on for my Masters. It also doesn't help that I know short phrases from Greek to Japanese to Sherpa...

So lately, I've begun responding to the question by saying, "The better question would be to ask: how many languages can you survive in?" I suppose when I talk about survival, I mean being able to handle a wide range of communicative contexts in a particular language. I then list 3 or 4 languages.

Of course, this brings up the issue of how many such 'contexts' are needed for me to qualify as being competent. For instance, in Guwahati I'm happy to jump into an auto and give my driver basic directions in Assamese, but I would not be as comfortable trying to buy a SIM card only relying on Assamese. (I wouldn't be able to hold an entire conversation in Assamese either.) Also, 'survival' implies strategic competence (using Canale and Swain's terminology again): I could still survive in a foreign language situation with minimal language skills by relying on non-verbal means to get my message across.

So I guess It's not ideal, but most people really don't care for that much detail anyway.

I mean if I felt like it, I could always go with my other measure of language ability:
How many languages do I speak well enough to swear at people in?

Back in business

It's been 6 months since my blog post. A lot has happened since then, not all of it India-related. But I'm back and eagerly awaiting my return to Assam and Nagaland.

First, a shout-out to my friend Abokali for the amazing work she's been doing the past year keeping up the documentation of traditional Sumi songs and knowledge. She's got her own awesome blog here at:
http://thevillagemicroscope.blogspot.com/

Her brother Canato also has a blog - check out his fantastic artwork at:
http://canajimo.blogspot.com/

So the big news is that we've received two grants this year. One from the Firebird Foundation for Anthropological Research, and another from the Endangered Languages Documentation Programme (ELDP), the granting component of the Hans Rausing Endangered Languages Project. These grants are for project that aims to document traditional songs and stories of the Sumis of Nagaland. I was around last year to help with a few pilot recordings last December (see photo below) and with some local fundraising (not fun) in the town of Zunheboto. With the funds, we will be able to purchase new equipment, purchase gifts / offer payment to performers, hire staff to do transcription and translation work, and produce a book and DVD for the community.

In the meantime, I'm trying to sort out my travel arrangements...

More posts will come, now that I'm back.

(Also, check out L.'s new linguistics blog at:
http://www.superlinguo.com/)

Closing this chapter

I've made it back to Melbourne, in more or less one piece. Got back on Tuesday and have spent the past few days catching up with friends and sorting out the apartment. To be honest, I'm already looking forward to going back to India. But there's a lot of stuff that needs to be done in the meantime.

Friends have been asking me what I've been doing over in Nepal and India. Though I'd love to condense it all into a 30 second speech that I can repeat over and over again, it's just not going to happen. I tell them I'm looking at minority language education (MLE), especially teaching kids to read and write in their home language, not a foreign language. I also look at language documentation projects for minority / endangered languages, including recording traditional songs and stories, as well as dictionary making.

The push for MLE is particularly strong now, given that more and more parents are sending their kids to schools where a dominant language like English (or Nepali in Nepal) is the main / only medium of instruction. Most people think it would be better to do this, so that the kids will have better English and thus be able to get a better job, and it does sound good in theory. The reality is that children who go to such schools with very little exposure to the dominant language like English at home find school frustrating and quite traumatic. Imagine being dumped in a foreign environment for a few hours a day (this is not an immersion programme) and forced to learn everything from how to read and write to how to count in a foreign language. Children either slog it out and memorise things without understanding them (so there's little cognitive development) or worse, just drop out of school altogether.

Research has shown in places like the Philippines that students who go to schools which implement MLE for the first few years of a child's education and slowly transition to English as the medium of instruction (after introducing it as a subject) actually end up doing better in both their home language and in English. Of course the success of such programmes depends on other factors, including the teachers and the actual curriculum, but it's not hard to imagine the opposite, where kids get frustrated at school when they can't understand much of what's happening.

This brings me back to a point that my friend Linda brought up while we were in Tezpur for the NEILS conference. It was about how sometimes linguists appear to be telling people to preserve their own language, even if the speakers don't see any economic advantage. And I agree, I don't see why linguists should have a say in it. I know people who regret the loss / decline of their language a generation or two later - I belong to one such group, but I'm actually not that sentimental about language loss. Sure, we're losing 'windows' into different worlds, but you can't tell someone to keep speaking a language they don't see value in just so they can keep the language alive for the sake of keeping it alive. I suspect, the fear is the loss of linguistic data which is the driving force behind many a linguist (including one I met up with in Singapore earlier this week who completely disgusted me with the way he treated his language consultant).

While I am not for telling speakers what to speak, I do believe that if there is evidence to show that teaching kids in their home language actually helps significantly with their schooling, I am all for presenting the evidence and advocating to schools and parents that this is what they should be doing.

Now this sounds a lot less impressive than it really is, considering that I'm not trained in producing educational materials for primary school children. But I do know people who work with communities to develop minority language materials for schools in NE India and will be looking at the opportunities to collaborate with them and run workshops in Nagaland to produce said materials.

There's a lot more that needs to be said about this, but I'll be revisiting this stuff later this year. For the time being I'd like to thank everyone who's been keeping up with my updates. The blog will return from hiatus sometime in late 2011.

As a final note, a linguistics professor once said that she had been asked whether she spoke to the language she worked on. She didn't, so the next question was how she could study something she didn't speak. Her response was that a physicist can study the motion of a ball - its speed and trajectory, but it doesn't mean the physicist can play basketball.

That was her metaphor. I'd like to extend that by saying that yes, physicists don't necessarily play basketball. But physicists would never tell basketball players how to play ball, so why do linguists tell speakers what to do with their language? In basketball we have coaches who understand the physics (they don't dedicate their whole lives to observe how particles move) and also have experience with the game. Similarly, we need people like that to bridge the gap between theoretical linguistics and actual language development programmes.

Surviving fieldwork: Coming home

I think the last time I came back from India I was feeling much more traumatised, and I'd developed some weird allergies that I hadn't before (like to the feathers in the doona which I had been using for a whole year in Melbourne). I just constantly felt itchy and dirty. Watching Slumdog Millionaire didn't help either, especially that scene when the male protagonist as a boy gets to meet Abitabh Bachchan.

I suppose after any long trip to a place that's different from home (doing fieldwork or not), coming back can be a little of a shock. Reverse culture shock, they say.

I don't think I've ever experienced (severe) reverse culture shock. Returning home - whatever 'home' means - has often been a relief for me. I suppose it also helps that I'm 'homeless' in that I often refer to both Melbourne and Singapore as 'home' but don't feel like I quite belong in either place. But coming back, there are things I often need to adapt to again. Some are 'nice' things to be reacquainted with, like potable tap water and meals not based on rice - things I pointed out in my previous post. Some are somewhat harder to readjust to.

The main thing I suppose is the price of stuff in general. Everything's started to feel expensive, and I'm only in Singapore now. Wait till I get back to Melbourne and have to pay A$3+ for crappy public transport or A$10 for a 'cheap' meal...

Also, yesterday as I was coming out of the pool, I had this sudden urge to cough and spit out some phlegm. I caught myself just in time and even choked a bit when I remembered I was in Singapore. Now, as disgusting as people find it (myself included after a period of time being home), I find being able to spit in public quite a liberating experience. I did it all the time in China when I lived in Urumqi, and I did it often in India - of course given the amount of pollution I was inhaling, I would rather have it go out than stay in!

But the hardest thing I think is the constant explanations to people about what I've been doing and where I was. There are some people I've been chatting with online who seem to ask the same questions over and over again. 'Are you still in Nepal?', 'Where's Nagaland?', 'What are you doing there?'. The questions certainly don't stop when I get back, and while I don't expect people to keep up with everything I do, it does get a little tiring having to explain myself over and over again. Some days I'm glad I'm not actually from Nagaland, if only because I'd get so tired of explaining where Nagaland was every time I met someone from abroad - it was bad enough having to explain to people in Europe where Singapore was all the time!

Oh well, at least I've got my little speech about what I'm doing and where I am / have been all prepared. And frankly, it's only when the small minority of people I find myself repeating basic stuff to that annoys me (like the person who thought I was doing 'logistics'). I'm usually more then happy to talk about what I've been doing and what I will be doing.