The virtual linguist

Babies cry in a French or German accent

Some German biologists are claiming that babies cry in different 'accents' depending on the native language of their mother. This has led the researchers to hypothesise that babies begin to pick up language before they are born. Here is an informative and erudite article from today's Times, and here is a rather less erudite one from the Daily Mail entitled Ee wah gum! Babies cry with regional accents. The German study compared the crying of French and German infants. The Daily Mail has its own hypothesis, namely that British babies born in different regions of the country to parents speaking different dialects and with different accents, will also have their own distinctive crying patterns.

Not all linguists are convinced by the study, which showed that French babies' cries built up from a low to a higher pitch, while German infants' cries were the other way around, matching the intonation rhythm of the French and German languages.

Ee wah gum, by the way, is meant to be a pun on the northern dialect phrase ee bah gum, which means 'golly!' or 'well I never!'. It's supposed to be a Yorkshire phrase but I went to university in Leeds in Yorkshire and can't remember ever hearing anyone say it. The phrase by gum is in the OED. Gum is a corruption of God, as is the interjection golly.

Disappearing languages

The French linguist Claude Hagege was on the Today programme on Radio 4 this morning (article and interview here) talking about endangered languages. He reckons there are about 5,000 languages in the world today, but this number is dwindling by 25 a year, so a century from now he estimates that there will only be 2,500 languages spoken in the world.

Some linguists argue that as cultures evolve, their traditional languages become irrelevant, but Claude Hagege regrets the death of any language as he says that language and culture are closely inter-related, so if the language dies, so does the culture.

In his interview he praised the fact that Cornish, a language that supposedly died out 150 years ago, has been revived. Languages that are written down, like Cornish, can do this - Hebrew did it successfully, for instance. Admittedly there needs to be a very committed body of people to bring it back to life.

You can hear a short tale in English, common Cornish and modern Cornish on the aforementioned BBC page. These two varieties of Cornish are both modern (they were developed in the 1980s), but use different spelling conventions. Cornish words sound nothing like English words, but I thought the reader's intonation sounded very similar to English's.

There is a Cornish-language version of Wikipedia here.

Glaswegian interpreters sought

A translation company has advertised for Glaswegian interpreters to help business people understand the Glasgow accent. It has been inundated with applications, apparently. The Glasgow accent and dialect are incomprehensible to a lot of us south of the border; apparently in the 1960s and 70s MI5 tried to bug the Communist Scottish miners' leader Mick McGahey but were completely foxed because they didn't understand a word of what he said.

There is an article here with links to some recordings so you can listen to the dialect. There was also an interview on Radio 4's Today programme this morning. That will be here for another week; scroll down to 08.50.  

British businesses use English too much

A British Chambers of Commerce (BCC) survey showed that small British businesses were losing up to a quarter of a million pounds in business because of poor language skills. 11% of the companies surveyed in the report said that it was language factors that put them off exporting and another 5% said it was cultural barriers. Even among those businesses that do export, there is a bias towards exporting to English-speaking countries, and these are not the world's rapidly growing economies. 14% of companies said they only chose a particular export market because of linguistic and cultural similarities with the UK.

British businesses tend to assume that their customers are willing to learn English, but research in the USA has found that people with poor English are six times less likely to buy online than those with good English. People are also happier to spend more money when a company website is written in their language.

Despite all these findings, few British companies have any intention of changing and suddenly taking up a foreign language. Only 5% of the members surveyed by the BCC said they would appreciate subsidised language training.

More on the report here.

Scottish Gaelic to be used at the EU

Scottish Gaelic may now be spoken by Scottish government ministers and officials at EU meetings, after a memorandum of understanding was signed last week. Gaelic does not become an official language (large languages like Basque and Catalan are not EU official languages either) but people may write letters to the Commission in Scottish Gaelic and receive a reply in the same language. Ministers may speak Scottish Gaelic if they give sufficient notice so that interpreters may be found. No Scottish ministers, incidentally, have more than a smattering of the language and the Scottish First Minister Alex Salmond doesn't know any.

A similar memorandum was signed last year regarding Welsh and I blogged on that at the time. Several Welsh ministers, including First Minister Rhodri Morgan, do speakWelsh, however.

A BBC report on the story can be read here. You can also learn Scottish Gaelic via the BBC website. I normally skip over any programmes in Scottish Gaelic when looking to see if there's anything worth watching on BBC iPlayer, but I discovered a documentary programme about the Russian investigative journalist Anna Politkovskaya had been on BBC Alba (Scotland). The narrator spoke Scottish Gaelic but there were English subtitles. There was a lot of Russian spoken in the programme and there were English, but not Gaelic, subtitles for that. If you are in the UK, you can watch the programme for a few more days here.  

Russian alphabet song

My children learnt their alphabet from the Sesame Street song. If you'd like to learn the Russian alphabet, or refresh your memory, you can see a cute video from the Sesame Street Russian version here.

2 Ls in Googlle and in Welsh

Google has spelt its name with two Ls today on its home page because it is its eleventh birthday. I thought at first it must have something to do with Welsh, as there is a consonant in Welsh which is LL. This counts as one letter, although it is a digraph ie made up of two characters. If you do a Welsh crossword, the two Ls go in one cell (see here: click on Atebion and see 32 Across and Down), and in a dictionary lw would come before lla.

Ll is a sound that doesn't exist in other European languages. It is a voiceless lateral fricative. I'm not Welsh, nor a Welsh speaker, but to me it sounds like the chuckling sound "hee hee" but with the tongue higher in the mouth and touching the alveolar ridge behind the teeth. If you say the H sound of the surname Hughes, and spread your lips as you say it, and emphasise it a bit, that approaches the Ll sound, too.

It's a fairly common letter in Welsh. A lot of place names begin Ll as llan is Welsh for a church, eg Llanelli (Church of St Elli), Llandudno (Church of St Tudno) and the small Anglesey village of Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerych-wyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch, most famous for its name (note the four Ls together!). Lloyd, spelt with two Ls (pronounced L, not the Welsh way) is a common surname in England these days - and one of the big banks is Lloyds TSB - but it was originally Welsh and meant 'grey-haired'.

European Day of Languages 2009

Today is the European Day of Languages, organised by the Council of Europe.

The European Day of Languages was set up in 2001 as a way of celebrating linguistic and cultural diversity in Europe. Lots of events are organised where people can try learning a new language, or using their existing language skills. You can read about typical activities here. They include Croatian primary schoolchildren who learnt the song Frère Jacques in French, Irish schoolchildren designed a logo, Italian children created slogans, poems and acrostics, Lithuanian children did a project based around their favourite foreign-language word and Belgium had a project called 'Show your tongue'. Students at Tbilisi University in Georgia had to be satisfied with a talk given by a French professor on the significance of the European Day of Languages (Georgia is one of the 47 members of the Council of Europe, as are Armenia and Azerbaijan).

Unfortunately the European Day of Languages website itself is only written in two languages - English and French.

Lullabies of Europe

If you want to hear some snippets of lullabies in Danish, Turkish, Greek, Italian, Romanian and Czech (as well as Twinkle, Twinkle, Little Star in English), you can do so on this site. The words are given, as is the translation.

The collection of lullabies on one CD resulted from a European Union-funded project called Languages from the Cradle.

Cambridge University's dying languages project

Cambridge University has launched a project (the World Oral Literature Project) to create records of some of the world's dying languages. Speakers of these languages are being encouraged to record their songs and myths using multi-media tools. The languages include the Barasana language of Colombia and Lowa, spoken in Nepal. The project concentrates on non-Western languages and cultures, even though, as one of the researchers admitted, there are pockets of threatened languages in the UK and Europe too (Cornish, Breton, eg).

For more information on the project see this Daily Telegraph article.