Linguistic Scientist

At present, I’m reading a few blogs about how to rise a family where parents speak different languages and how children grow up in an enviroment where more than two languages are spoken without “any” problem. I was born in a monolingual family, but during more than five years in my childhood we lived in a bilingual enviroment. Maybe because of that I’m so interested in languages and multilingualism. Maybe not. The fact is that as a linguist I’d like to bring up also a multilingual family (why not?) and when I read those blogs I realize that it’s not as difficult as it could be. OPOL, tenacity, and come in! Just look at these fantastic blogs!

http://multitonguekids.blogspot.com/

http://bilingualbabes.blogspot.com/

http://babybilingual.blogspot.com/

Currently, the UNESCO work with languages in danger is increasing each month. Today I write down some information about an amazing tool: an Atlas on line [here] that can saw you near 2.500 languages endangered all around the world. It’s been a hard work started in 2002 – 2003 by a group of 30 linguists and leaded by Christopher Moseley.

You can also download a map [here] with all of them (but without information, only with their names, the level of danger and the approximate location) and -only an idea- you can print it and hang it in your class or office, it doesn’t matter, I’ll be perfect and very useful!

I’ve found more maps like this [here, from Linguamón] with not much differences but also very useful -for example, in this case, languages are painted-.

And, on the other hand, the UNESCO courier (2009, n. 2) speaks about the link between endangered languages and endangered thought with 5 interesting articles [here]… Great job!

In this lecture, Albert Costa, expert on cognitive neuroscience, talks about the advantages and disadvantages about being bilingual or multilingual.

In one hand, the fact of being bilingual means spending more time on producing speech because the brain has more information to process. In the other hand, we can resume the advantages in five points:

• Bilinguals had acquired the method to learn and change into a third language.
• Bilinguals can ignore better than monolingual irrelevant information.
• Bilinguals can change faster the language they speak in.
• Bilingualism don’t affect  the orientation faculty.
• Bilingualism improve the procedural control.

Today I show you the video of a conference about language diversity made by David Harrison. He’s a linguist that has spent many years around the world recording and filming languages near the extinction. It’s amazing to listen him…

The URL is:

http://dotsub.com/view/d88e920e-9d6b-4862-a712-7259003bd00a

Today I’ve done a little lecture (about 15 minutes) at the ICE of the University of Zaragoza (Aragon, Spain). It was an experience to show how future teachers of high schools can make a class.

I’ve made a resume about the language diversity, the number of languages that are spoken and the number that will die, the UNESCO’s recommendations, and the results of an interesting study: the National Geographic Enduring Voices Project (conducted in collaboration with the Living Tongues Institute for Endangered Languages). I think that it’s the best way to show them how big the problem is in few words an with an useful view.

Finally, and it’s the matter I wanted to comment with you, they’ve done groups to discuss different ways and ideas to stop the massive extinction of languages. It has been so interesting, so I write down here some ideas they have thought.

• We can do nothing, its impossible to look after all the languages of the world.
• Governments should protect and promote endangered languages.
• People should learn and speak more than one or two languages.
• It’s very important to record and film all those languages near the extinction.

Well, despite of the fact that the first one is not my best option (and neither the majority option) it’s a thought very assumed in our society. The last idea is also possible but then, there is the problem of what can we do with all of the recordings… Finally, the second one and the next options are the more difficult to work in but all of them realize it was the best. I agree with them and, because of this little workshop, I understand that it’s necessary to expose this subject to future teachers if we want to make a different world starting by high school students.

This year, UNESCO celebrates the International Year of Languages and this organization invites “governments, United Nations organizations, civil society organizations, educational institutions, professional associations and all other stakeholders to increase their own activities to promote and protect all languages, particularly endangered languages, in all individual and collective contexts.” They also are elaborating a database of projects that have to do with multilingualism and languages were you can fill in and, I think the most important goal, they want to improve our linguistic investigations: “Projects in the field of science aimed at enhancing communication and collaboration between scientific researchers and institutions across linguistic divides; translating and disseminating scientific materials to communities in order to overcome language barriers; recognizing the central role of vernacular languages in indigenous ways of knowing”. There’s the UNESCO’s main page. I’m really sure this year is going to be amazing… all of us can increase our efforts to make that possible. In fact, I also recommend you The UNESCO Courier, an issue were you can read lots of articles on languages, some of them, really interesting. Go on!

Nice video in Euronews on european multilingualism and the importance of our languages, have a look!

“More than 60 regional or minority languages are spoken across Europe. But some of these have louder voices than others. Next year, marks the 10th anniversary of the Council of Europe’s Charter for Regional or Minority Languages. The Council wants more of its 47 member states to ratify the Charter in order to protect and promote such languages. Europeans examines the situation of the Welsh and Breton languages.” (source: Euronews).

It’s been developed by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Madrid’s School of Computing. The system is based on the famous lexical database WordNet built at Princeton’s Cognitive Science Laboratory. The key is the concept of universal word: an English language word disambiguate with equivalents in any other language.

“This is a breakthrough for multilingualism” explains the website. It seems to be a precise method, because it can reach a 88% of reliability and accuracy.This system is being used at the same School to build a multilingual thesaurus Spanish, English and Russian. Despite of this first phase, the method will be adapted to other languages.

For more information: UPMPress.