Clarity begins at Home Office

There are plenty of linguistic things I could rant about on my first blog post of 2016. Perhaps I could poke fun at Larry Lamb and the British Council's drive to get people in the UK to learn a foreign language while UK politicians continue to do the hokey cokey on the subject of the country's membership of the EU. Rather than looking outwards and promoting the benefits of stronger engagement with our European neighbours and their languages, many of our deluded politicians demonstrate how isolationist you can choose to be if you live on an island.

At a house party over Christmas, a friend's sister excitedly told me how her 12-year-old daughter had recently shown talent and enthusiasm for learning German. Should I ever meet the 12-year-old, I have been instructed to chat to her in German - which I would be delighted to do. This is how any language-learning drive should work. Don't tell working adults with established careers, families, commitments and other distractions to learn a few phrases a day in another language - tell and encourage 11 and 12-year olds! They have more time and a stronger motivation. It is only by training them to become language graduates in a decade's time that the UK will have any hope of addressing the UK's multilingual malaise and missed trade opportunities. The sad reality, of course, is that language learning is on the wane in schools and universities and few people seem to care.

But I won't rant about that! I won't even rant about the new idea that forcing members of non-Christian minority groups to learn English will be an effective tool in tackling segregation and radicalisation. It's a confusing proposal, given that segregation rarely occurs due to language alone. Secondly, the majority of recent evil acts or excursions falling into this category were carried out by those who seemed perfectly able to speak either English or the language of the European country where they were based. I won't even highlight the plight of the many UK-based TEFL teachers who, according to writer and broadcaster Michael Rosen, have been made redundant in huge numbers over recent years - only to witness this apparent volte-face now that the political elite have suddenly decided that teaching English is a good idea, supported by £20m in funding.

I won't rant about 10-year-old schoolchildren who live in terraced houses and who inadvertently misspell the word and spark major police investigations as a result. In fact, I won't rant about anything today because I think this embarrassing error by a government department tells us everything we need to know about how important languages are in the UK.

Echo and the funnyman

Besides learning how to teach, if there's one thing that completing the CELTA course has revealed to me; it's how I approach what I do – how I try and engage students. My go-to English teaching handbook, a well-thumbed copy of Scrivener (2011:14)* warns against 'entertainer teaching' – the practice of a language teacher regularly regaling students with hilarious anecdotes. Now, unlike 'teacher' Robin Williams in Good Morning, Vietnam and Dead Poets Society, for instance; I cannot bring a glittering career in stand-up comedy into the classroom. Where appropriate, however, I can recall a relevant, funny event to keep students engaged, provoke discussion or bring some 'real-world' relevance to the content under discussion.

The teaching manuals and TEFL tomes also rail against the practice of echoing, where the language teacher repeats the target language that has been correctly provided by the student. At various points in my teaching practice on the CELTA course, I was guilty of this. However, my qualification is geared towards teaching adults. Some recent discussions with the children I currently teach finally revealed to me why I was previously oblivious to my penchant for echoing. Consider the following interaction between myself and a pupil (speaking German) on a day spent in the great outdoors:

Teacher: So, what did you see in the cave?
Pupil: Spinnen, ganz viele! (Translation: Spiders, lots of them!)
Teacher: Wow, you saw lots of spiders! Were they big? ...

As far as possible at the school where I teach, pupils are required to converse with me only in English. For my part, I am required to speak to all students individually and often, and at a level of difficulty close to their ability. But whereas with adult learners, who would no doubt feel patronised by me echoing their correct English utterance; the example above sees me translating a child's response as confirmation that they have correctly understood my initial question. It is merely their own command of English that prevents them – for the time being – from responding in the same language.

It should also be noted that I teach in an environment where learning in individualised and student-led. As such, teacher-led, time-bound conventional classroom teaching is rare. Teacher input serves primarily as a means of stimulating learners and providing them with the tools to discover and implement knowledge (including language) for themselves. Consequently learning opportunities arise in both formal and informal settings: within school, outdoors, in breaks during games of basketball or table tennis, as we cook and eat meals together, on the bus to and from school, as well as at public events.

So I'm becoming increasingly aware of different methods of teaching and learning – and their respective merits. It is obvious that group-based lessons with conventional, group-based outcomes are only applicable to a limited extent in environments where learning and progress are deliberately individualised. In such a setting, echoing may continue in specific cases. Whether my English anecdotes make me an entertainer or even a funnyman is not something I can judge.

* Scrivener, Jim (2011) ‘Learning Teaching: The Essential Guide To English Language Teaching’, Third Edition, Macmillan Education, Oxford

Should children still be seen and not heard?

I read with interest a BBC report of a school in the UK having banned its primary-aged children from talking or writing in their local dialect. The school has adopted a "zero tolerance" approach – presumably in the same way that many of us strive for a zero-tolerance approach to the sloppy grammar and punctuation of some adults who could do better. At the school featured in the report, children have been 'banned' from using dialectal language in the classroom. The head teacher helpfully pointed out that this ruling only related to the classroom. This appears to be a tacit acknowledgement that even he has limited jurisdiction when it comes to policing language use.

Earlier this year, another school launched an identical initiative. But I do not believe that enough attention has been paid to the distinction between written and spoken language. They've simply been lumped together, with seemingly little concern for their very different social and communicative functions. Rather than banning certain language varieties, it is surely much more valuable for children to learn about and understand the co-existence of the different forms of communication elsewhere. Input here would include an appreciation of register, formality, audience, the distinct lack of any widespread 'standard' English accent in the UK, standard grammar and other features of writing, contrasted with other forms permitted in speaking.

Any other approach leads to the criticism that we are stigmatising people's social and regional identity as expressed through their language use. Similar linguistic discrimination existed from the 1840s until well into the 20th century in Wales with the Welsh Not, where schoolchildren were punished for speaking their native Welsh language at school. Children – can cope with multiple language varieties, whether these are dialects or separate languages. Were this not the case, then no-one would ever become bilingual.

As I have no doubt mentioned previously, German-speaking Switzerland, in contrast, positively celebrates its linguistic diversity in schools and in society generally. As the form of standard German used by national newsreaders (and almost no-one else) does not enjoy the prestige of one's local dialect, I was tasked with creating a 'language code' at school, a simple rule for pupils' day-to-day language use. This has nothing to do with banning children from speaking using their own dialect(s). Rather, it has everything to do with a lack of proficiency on my part and that of my other non-Swiss teaching colleague, where our understanding of Swiss German forms is concerned. The rule states that in the presence of us non-Swiss, for our benefit, High German, English or French be used.

'Banning' children from using certain language forms can only be interpreted as disapproval of language forms that have – standard or not – served their communicative needs. Banning them arguably also does children a disservice. Children need to at least be aware of important cultural and linguistic differences if they are to be expected, at some point in later life, to interpret and work with all the language varieties they encounter beyond the school gates.

Much ado about nothing?

Along with other commentators such as popular etymologist Mark Forsyth, I've been amused this week by reports of eyebrow-raising over the German language's inclusion of the English neologism der Sh**storm in its somewhat sacred Duden dictionary. Here in Switzerland, the term was also voted Word of the Year in 2012. The term denotes uncontrollable public outrage, usually online in the context of social media posts – and often insulting in its content. As I have mentioned in previous posts, neologisms interest me, since their ability to gain currency demonstrates a social need to construct a new term for a new concept. As such, they show that a language is healthy and can adapt to the culture it expresses.

But just in case we are at a loss to understand the kind of public outrage that might warrant use of the term, the torrent of excrement gushing forth in the wake of the plagiarism row engulfing Germany's erstwhile defence secretary Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg, and then more recently, use of the term in a speech by German prime minister Angela Merkel are cited as examples. An interesting piece in The Guardian seems to highlight German's preference for swearwords with faecal rather than sexual origins, though quite how or why the term has managed to float to the top of public consciousness and usage is not really examined. Predictably, there is no shortage of verbal diarrhoea in the comments sections attached to these articles.

In this particular case, I think we are once again witnessing the Internet-driven obsession with quantifying and describing everything anew. We clearly need to find new ways to feel anger and to display it, now that previous profanities and practices so obviously date from a time when media outlets defined outrage. These days, I increasingly find that the same outlets are now more than happy to solicit public commentary, stir gently and watch events unfold. But surely this is journalistic laziness masquerading as legitimacy.

I had never heard of the term until I read it in a Swiss newspaper a few weeks ago. I do not believe it is used widely in English. As such, any attempts to cite the word as further evidence of an English assault on the German language are misplaced. Other popular pseudo-anglicisms – das Handy (a mobile phone), der Showmaster (the host of a TV show), der Beamer (a projector) among others – are then used wrongly by German speakers, who believe the term to be an English loan word. In my own experience abroad, I have occasionally used one of the above words as a kind of shorthand to aid another person's understanding. However, I then always point out that the word is a purely German invention. I believe the same is true of this latest addition to the language.

Storm mewn cwpan de?

Living abroad, I'm often asked to explain my own cultural identity and linguistic heritage. Sometimes I'm sure people wish they'd never asked when I answer them with: "I was born in England, near Liverpool, although I spent all but the first two years of my life growing up in Wales." This then opens the floodgates for more questions: "Do you speak Welsh?" "No, I gave up Welsh at school when I was 14, having been advised not to study three foreign languages (with German and French) and thus limit my skills set." "Do you feel Welsh or English?" "Well, I'm English by birth but I do support Welsh sports teams and others – especially in the face of English domination." Thankfully my Swiss colleagues, unlike former colleagues elsewhere, do understand that Wales is not "just another part of England". Linguistic and cultural pluralism in the UK is probably more acceptable to the Swiss, on account of their own country's multilingual landscape.

I've always been interested in the status of the Welsh language and even wrote an assignment about English/Welsh bilingualism for my Linguistics MA, drawing mainly on the research of Professor Colin Baker at the University of Bangor. Back then, Gwynedd was the area of Wales with the highest concentration of Welsh speakers – above 60%. Fast-forward a decade or so, and the 2011 Census reveals a slight decline in Gwynedd (56%) as well as a slight decline across Wales as a whole – with 19% of the Welsh population over the age of three now indicating that they can speak Welsh.

Against this background, I read of a recent incident where police were called to a shop in Pwllheli, Gwynedd, where a native Welsh speaker, Dr Robin Lewis, was angry that the shop assistant would not tell him his bill in Welsh, only English. Although the Welsh Language Act 1993 serves to put the Welsh language on an equal footing with English where the public sector (e.g. in councils, public bodies and road signage) is concerned, I'm not sure that there is a legal requirement covering its use in shops. This particular case is interesting because the shop assistant concerned was able to speak Welsh but, for whatever reason, chose not to. When the police were called, the first officer was not a Welsh speaker and so needed back-up. The situation was only resolved when another shop assistant conducted the entire transaction in Welsh – to the satisfaction of the customer.

This raises several questions, and I'd be interested to hear the views of people living in Wales. Does the non-compliant shop assistant belong to a subset of the 56% of Welsh speakers in Gwynedd – i.e. a smaller group of people who can speak Welsh but who don't? Was the customer right to insist that the Welsh language be used in this situation? Is this an isolated incident or a more widespread occurrence? Is it a further sign of a decline in the use of Welsh or simply a storm in a teacup?

Bonjour, Monsieur Barton!

Not being a fan of football, I'd never felt compelled to write about it in relation to language – until now. This is because today we learn of Liverpool-born footballer Joey Barton, currently on a 12-month stint in Marseille, has seemingly adopted a French accent in his own speech and, by extension, the speech patterns of native French people when they speak English. C'est incroyable, ne c'est pas? Well, when you listen to the clip of him speaking, it's not incredible at all; it's perfectly understandable. And that's the point!

The practice of modifying your speech when conversing with others who do not have the same first language as you is known as speech accommodation. It would be very easy to infer that Barton is now deliberately ridiculing his French hosts through his speech. I disagree.

Let's look at the evidence: Joey Barton naturally has a very strong Liverpool accent. Though I have studied French but have never lived there, it seems logical to me that if a Scouse footballer moves to Marseille in southern France, initially at least, he'll encounter a few problems communicating and fitting in. So since his arrival in September, if he's not yet managed to let his feet do the talking, and has yet to learn French; he will have consciously and subconsciously modified his own speech to make himself understood. 

Here are just a few features I noticed during the first 30 seconds of an extract from his interview:

"Yesterday I make one tackle, all everybody speak about is this tackle [...]"

Typical of the Liverpool accent, the words make, speak and tackle are all pronounced with the /x/ phoneme (as in the Scottish word loch) rather than with the hard /k/ phoneme. Some later instances of speak are pronounced with a hard /k/, however.

"that"

Again, the initial consonant sound of that is almost a /d/, rather than a /ð/, as lampooned in the rhetorical question "They do do that though, don't they, though?", where all consonant sounds at the beginnings of all words in that sentence are pronounced in exactly the same way for comic effect (by comedian Harry Enfield and previously, in the film Yellow Submarine).

"I'm a little bit bored from the English media."

Here the /t/ phoneme in little is pronounced; whereas Barton would normally omit this sound and replace it with a glottal stop /ʔ/, which is exactly what happens in the following word bit. No French person speaking English would ever use a glottal stop in this way, so we can speculate that Barton is subconsciously copying (not ridiculing) his French colleagues before reverting to his native speech style the closer he gets to the words English media!

But just as no French person would use glottal stops in their English; a native English speaker would instinctively know about subject-predicate agreement (see "all everybody speak about" in the first sentence above). Similarly, in the second sentence, an English native speaker would use the preposition with or by but never from with the word bored. Based on these initial features, I'd say that Barton is not out to ridicule the French. He has merely assimilated their speech style through his contact with them. That being the case, the English media should – just for once – leave the guy alone.

Lessons in life

Sometimes events change us and shift our focus onto issues and people that may not feature prominently in our thoughts in any normal week. But this last week has been anything but normal. On Monday I was asked to buy ingredients and then oversee (with four students) the preparation and cooking of enough fish pies and vegetable pies to feed our small school on Thursday. I'd never cooked for 20+ people before, so today's blog entry was due to be called 'Hey, bring me more fish!', and would record the benefits of task-based language learning as we put our culinary skills to the test – completely through the medium of English.

So on Thursday morning I made my way to school for a morning of cooking. I was psyched up; I knew who was doing what and by when. The meal was a triumph, as evidenced by one girl who needed the English translation of the word meaning to scrape off, enabling her to ensure that none of the residual mashed potato or fish bits would be thrown away. But these events had been tempered earlier by the shocking news that a former colleague (a fellow language teacher) had died. It was decided that the school would be closed on Friday morning so that as a team, all members of staff could go to the funeral, joined by older students who wished to attend. I was moved when, during the service, my late colleague's husband and her sisters played one of my favourite pieces of music – the Adagio of Mozart's Clarinet Concerto in A Major. The service was conducted bilingually in German and French and it was respectful.

And as we left the church to return to school, the head asked what food we had with us for lunch. Well, there was one fish pie left in the fridge – we'd made 10 pies altogether. There was some mashed potato left... and some bread. With the addition of some cheese, we then had enough for a shared meal. Eleven of us ate at the staff table and discussed, in English, everything from weekend plans to fairy tales that I'd never heard of. The rule for everyone at school is that English is the medium of communication when I'm around.

The culture at the school is non-hierarchical. Everyone addresses each other by their first name. Pupils and staff work in mutually supportive ways to reach group objectives as well as personal goals. This is very different from my own schooling in the UK. When was the last time you cooked a meal with your teachers/pupils to feed the whole school? When was the last time you had a communal meal with your teachers/pupils immediately after attending the funeral of a colleague? When was the last time you did either of these things in a foreign language? Shared experiences of all kinds do bring people closer together. But where I work, we generally don't learn for tests with disputed grading systems; we learn for life.

It's all relative

In February 2011, students started telling me they thought English was a "really difficult language to learn" and that German was "much easier". Comparing languages based on their perceived degree of difficulty for the learner is clearly a subjective and relative concept. In his fascinating book Through The Language Glass: Why The World Looks Different In Other Languages, on page 108, author Guy Deutscher makes the point that the relative difficulty of learning a given foreign language crucially depends on the mother tongue of the learner concerned. Most people would rightly assume that learning Italian is easy if your mother tongue is French, for example. But German and English also have many similarities. So in a bid to enthuse my disillusioned students, and thinking back to my 14-year-old self discovering similarities between the two languages; I designed a fun lesson on cognates – words used in different languages that derive from the same form.

So without going into the High German consonant shift (also called the second sound shift) or the first sound shift (also called Grimm's Law, after the linguist and editor of fairy tales Jacob Grimm), charts available online show that English and German are full of cognates. The most obvious of these are the ones whose spelling is essentially intact in both languages: hand (German: die Hand), finger (German: der Finger), ball (German: der Ball), salt (das Salz), pepper (der Pfeffer), light (German: das Licht). The list goes on and on but you get the general idea.

Now, my reason for drawing attention to the similarities was to show that in lots of ways, by sharing many of the same words, functions and ideas; many languages are not as different from each other as they seem. So you can imagine my delight at reading this morning that researchers in New Zealand looking into cognates – using analyses more commonly employed in evolutionary biology – have discovered that the origins of English, along with those of other languages in the Indo-European family of languages (comprising around 449 of the world's languages), were first present around 5000 years ago. The use of a family-tree theory about language is not new. The technique was first conceived by German linguist August Schleicher in 1853. Though having applied it in this new way using 207 cognate words, the team at the University of Auckland now believe that this Indo-European family is rooted in the Anatolian region of what is now Turkey, and as a result is actually around 8000 years old.

From a sociolinguistic perspective, we are aware that language is subjected to many different influences such as loan words from other languages, semantic shifts and cultural change. However, this new research suggests that cognates can be seen as 'linguistic DNA', such that cognates describing key concepts in the physical or natural world (such as body parts) are much more resistant to change over time. As a result, they may prove to be more reliable indicators of a language's origin. 

Thought for food

The next time you visit the local branch of that German supermarket chain, spare a thought for the translator who has lovingly translated the ingredients and description of your chosen German delicacy. In recent weeks I've come to realise that cross-cultural differences are most apparent in the world of gastronomy. Forget the urban myth about the Inuit having anything up to one hundred different words for snow; German speakers have around seven different types of croissant to contend with!

The reason why English speakers have trouble accepting multiple words to describe the same thing is precisely because in their native cultures, they are anything but the same thing – they are entirely different entities. And having a seemingly infinite number of different types of croissant or bread clearly matters in the German-speaking world.

Cross-cultural differences are one thing, but it's also about different levels of specificity. One German word that crossed my path recently was the word Schalenfrüchte, which literally translates as 'fruit with a shell on it'. A quick look in five dictionaries revealed that this word is universally translated as 'nuts'. I still cannot find a reason why anyone could not use the German word Nüsse when talking about nuts. We clearly need to understand that we are only dealing with those nuts that have a shell.

But before we start believing that German, just like Inuit, is overcrowded with multiple words to describe the same concept, there are also instances where one word is used to refer to two very different things. Take my current favourite – the German word Sellerie. This word is used to refer to both celery and celeriac. In German these two vegetables should, strictly speaking, be modified and referred to as Stangensellerie and Knollensellerie, respectively. When they are not, I have to make an educated guess. All of this might sound trivial, though as a translator it's my job to care.

It's why I love my work, though. As a fellow translator once said, it's the only job in the world where you get paid to learn something new every day. I've now experimented with fennel and have also discovered an utterly hideous member of the cauliflower family called Romanesco. I won't be buying that! Enjoy your Sunday lunch, folks!