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.]

Wild Grass Lodge at Kaziranga

While accommodation options abound in and around the town of Kohora, for visitors planning forays into neighbouring Kaziranga National Park, one place stands out for me. It came highly recommended by an Assamese friend who also had his wedding here at the end of December 2012, just a few weeks after my stay.

The Wild Grass Lodge is located just east of the town of Kohora, a few kilometres off the main highway. If you're lucky, you might actually see the 'sign' for the place as you're driving along the highway, though most would hardly call it a sign. I don't even remember what it looks like, because I called the lodge to send a car to pick us up from Dimapur in Nagaland. It seems that there used to be clearer signage in the past, but the owner of the lodge was forced to remove it because the lodge became too popular, especially during peak periods (there's only a small window of opportunity to visit Kaziranga since the park is usually only open between November and April, and partially open in October and May depending on weather conditions).

In any case, the best way to get there is either to call them and ask for a taxi, or to ask any locals you see along the highway as you drive eastwards out of Kohora town.

The lodge is best suited for guests who have come to enjoy nature in one of India's best national parks. Most of the rooms are located in two tall buildings, and none come with television sets. There are heaps of open green spaces at the lodge. There also used to be a pool in the clearing between the buildings, but that has been removed. If you're looking for those luxuries, I would suggest going to the nearby Iora Resort - I've been inside one of the rooms there and it was pretty swanky, but for me the whole point of coming to a national park is to see nature, not hide from it.

In terms of food, we certainly never went hungry. I believe breakfast was included with the room rate, as well as lots of tea and snacks. The restaurant staff were extremely friendly and very generous with lunch and dinner. There were the usual Indian and Chinese options, but my Assamese friend had recommended that I try a number of their Assamese dishes, including their alu jolphai pitika (Assamese mashed potatoes with olives), maas bhapôt diya (Assamese steamed fish, which sort of reminded my friend of pickled herring) [Click here for a recipe by Ruprekha, who follows my blog] and their fried pork. Apart from the olives, which I found too sour for my taste, I loved all the food we got.

Bear in mind that it's best to notify the restaurant staff a day in advance so that they can obtain all the necessary ingredients fresh.

Most importantly, the guides they assign to you (and if they don't assign one, ask for one) are locals who are incredibly knowledgeable and passionate about the flora and fauna in the national park. From what I could tell, they're also pretty good at gauging the level of interest that the guests have with regards to wildlife viewing, and don't overwhelm their guests with too much information.

You'll probably be relying on the lodge's vehicles to move between your accommodation and the park. If you want to go for a walk (because you're missing TV and forgot to bring a good book), there's a large tea estate within walking distance from the lodge.

Finally, in the evenings there are often performances by either local Assamese or ex-tea tribe troupes. There may be people around to help explain some aspects of the performances, but this may require some knowledge of Assamese or Hindi.

All in all, I really enjoyed my stay at the Wild Grass Lodge. This visit to Kaziranga National Park turned out to be much more successful than my first traumatic visit to Kohora back in January 2011!

Elephant ride at Kaziranga National Park

Even though I am not in NE India at the moment, I still have a couple of things I have been meaning to post. Back in December, after the Hornbill Festival in Kohima, I took my friend Simon to the Kaziranga National Park in neighbouring Assam. It was a convenient time to go since he was already in the area. However, February to April is usually a better time of the year to visit as the grass is not quite as tall.

One of the highlights of a trip to Kaziranga National Park is going on elephant safari. There are four areas in the park that offer them, with both morning and afternoon sessions (click here for more info). An elephant safari lasts about an hour. However, I think this varies based on demand so it's best to check the day before, especially for the morning rides. Since we stayed at the Wild Grass Lodge, our guide organised it for us the night before.

We were up bright and early for a cup of tea, before driving into the park for the 5.30am safari. The mahouts were all ready and waiting for us, as well as a busload of European tourists (mainly French and Dutch, or possibly Belgian) who had only spent the night at the lodge, and were heading upriver to Majuli Island later that day.

I personally prefer mornings to evenings for wildlife viewing, but that morning it was extremely foggy. We still managed to spot lots of birds and larger mammals, thanks to our excellent mahout / guide. He was a Rabha man whose his hometown was Goalpara, or perhaps a village close to Goalpara. He had been living in Kohora and working as a mahout for about 15 years (if my memory serves me correctly). He was also very knowledgeable about the wildlife in the park. In addition to knowing all the English names (and the Assamese names, which I've sadly forgotten) for common animals in the park, he also knew where to go to spot them and had very good eyes.

One of the first animals we spotted was a hog deer. These, along with the larger swamp deer, are the most common deer in the park.

Among the group we were travelling in, our guide was the first one to spot a rhino. The Indian Rhinoceros is the one of the main reasons people come to visit the park, and you can get very close to them if you're on an elephant. Of course, by the end of that day we'd seen so many rhinos, we had already started to take them a little bit for granted...

But that morning, we even came across a sleeping rhino, who opened its eyes as our elephant got closer.

Our guide had already asked a mahout on another elephant to take a photo of us on the elephant. But he very kindly asked him again, so that we could have this awesome photo of the three of us sitting on the elephant with the rhino in the background.

I was really appreciate of our guide for doing that, since the Durch tourist on the other elephant certainly did not get a photo like this! Also, our guide took a longer route back to the drop-off point than most of the others, so our safari actually lasted longer than an hour.

Finally, some tips if you are planning to go on safari:

- Most of the mahouts / guides speak Hindi and Assamese, while guides employed by the lodges will generally speak English as well. It's great to know some Assamese or Hindi if you're going on an elephant safari, but most of the mahouts will know the English names for animals.

- As with all wildlife watching, don't expect the guide to do all the looking for you. They'll have more experience in the park, but it doesn't mean you should sit back and wait for them to point out animals to you. The more eyes on the lookout, the better.

- Don't forget to tip (at least a few hundred rupees, if not more) - these mahouts / guides don't get paid as much as the guides employed by the lodges!

Writing Hebrew and Arabic the wrong way

A few weeks ago, I visited the Singapore Night Safari with a friend who was visiting from Australia. We spotted some mugs at the souvenir shop which featured the names of 'popular' animals translated into various languages. Incidentally, this friend of mine is also a speaker of Hebrew, and quickly pointed out the glaring error on all of the mugs.

For those of you who can read Hebrew, it's a very obvious one. The word for lion in Hebrew is אריה (ari) and not הירא. While the makers of this mug have written the Hebrew word using the correct letters, they have failed to realise that unlike English, Hebrew is written from right to left, not left to right. The equivalent of this in English would be like spelling lion as noil.

Similarly, for 'African Elephant', we should have פיל אפּריקני (pil afriykaniy). Here, the word order is also incorrect, which is expected since the writer has gone from left to right, giving us the equivalent of tnahpele nacirfa.

Finally, for the 'Black Rhinoceros' mug, we should expect to see קרנף שחור (karnaf shah'or) - well you can't really see the word for 'black' in the photo, but you can see the word for 'rhino' קרנף karnaf.

Take note that in Hebrew, some letters have different forms depending on whether they occur at the end of a word or not. One example is the letter which represents corresponds to the English letter 'f'. In Hebrew it is written as פּ in the middle of a word, but as ף at the end of a word. On the mug we find the word-final form of this letter right at the end of word, if Hebrew were written from left to right. This suggests that the makers of the mug did not start with a Romanised transliteration of the Hebrew words, but translated them directly into Hebrew written in the Hebrew script (most likely using an online translator). Somehow in the editing process, whether by accident or on purpose, they moved the letters around so that they now go from left to right.

On a similar note, a picture by Bartosz Ostrowski, a Polish photographer and illustrator, has been making the rounds on Tumblr.

(Click here to see the picture.)

A number of commentators have pointed out that the Arabic for 'meow', naw naw has been incorrectly written in the Arabic script. The picture gives ون ون, when it should be نونو. Like the Hebrew script, the Arabic script is also read from right to left. Arabic letters also have different forms depending on whether they occur at the start of the word, in the middle, or at the end, and if they occur in isolation. The mistake in the picture is that the words have been written using the 'isolated' forms of the letters, and written from left to right.

Going back to the animal mugs, I do hope the manufacturers eventually realise their mistake and fix the Hebrew translations. However, given that the mistake was the reason my friend bought one as a souvenir, it may be in their best interests not to correct these errors...

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.]