The Language Village: September 2009

September 28, 2009

Bilingual U.S. Census Forms Debut in 2010

(The Language Village) For the first time, U.S. census forms will be distributed in both English and Spanish to 13.5 million households in predominantly Spanish-speaking neighborhoods. Advocates hope the forms will lead to a more accurate count by winning over the trust of immigrants who are often wary of government and may be even more fearful after the recent surge in immigration raids and deportations. "If the government is reaching out to you in a language you understand, it helps build trust," said Arturo Vargas, executive director of the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials. "I think the community has become really sensitive to political developments, and the census is the next step in this movement that we're seeing of civic engagement in the Latino community."

In the past, experts say, the Census Bureau has undercounted minority and immigrant communities, who are harder to reach because of language barriers and distrust of government. Census officials say they designed the bilingual forms after extensive research, using the Canadian census questionnaire as an example. Over a six-year testing period, officials said the forms drew a better response in predominantly Spanish-speaking areas. The bilingual forms will be mailed out to neighborhoods where at least a fifth of households report speaking primarily Spanish and little English, said Adrienne Oneto, assistant division chief for content and outreach at the Census Bureau in Washington. The cost of preparing and mailing the bilingual questionnaires is about $26 million, which is more than it would have cost to send only English forms, but the more accurate results will merit the extra cost. More than a quarter of the forms will be distributed in California from Fresno to the Mexican border, with Los Angeles County topping the list. The Miami and Houston areas will also receive sizable numbers of the questionnaires.

Automatic mailing of the bilingual forms debuts in 2010. As in 2000, census forms will be made available in Chinese, Korean, Vietnamese and Russian upon request. None of those other languages compares to the proliferation of Spanish. Roughly 34 million people reported speaking Spanish at home in the United States in 2007, more than all the other languages combined except English. Eighty percent of the U.S. population reported speaking only English at home.

The question is whether the bilingual forms will help overcome immigrant fears of federal authorities after seeing friends and family swept up in immigration raids over the last few years.
"It is a difficult time for immigrants and I could see where there might be concern where being counted might lead to future negative consequences," said Clara E. Rodriguez, professor of sociology at Fordham University in New York.

There are very few opponents of the plan, but Rep. Duncan Hunter, Republican from California, reportedly says the census should be conducted only in English to encourage people to learn the language. "Taxpayers should not have to carry the additional expense of providing bilingual questionnaires," Kasper said. But many say the bilingual forms make practical sense. Moreover, even though English is the most commonly used language in the United States, the lingua franca, it is not the official language of this nation of immigrants.

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September 23, 2009

Proofreading and Venting on the Web

OK, I'll admit that this comic does go beyond my usual reactions to sloppy writing. However, a little proofreading goes a long way. When writing in any language, there is no need to hire a copy editor. However, always put down the pen (or walk away from the keyboard) for an hour or so, then return to the writing in question and re-read it for glaring mistakes. Correct them. Would-be readers will thank you! --The Language Village Editor

September 19, 2009

Teens, Tech And Language: A Tired Old Tale Retold

All Thumbs

Geoff Nunberg

"Fresh Air" commentary
July 10, 2008

By 1848, the new electric telegraph was already being hailed as a modern marvel that would revolutionize commerce, journalism, and warfare. And in that year, a prominent New York attorney and editor named Conrad Swackhamer wrote an article predicting that it would transform the language, as well. After all, he noted, the telegraph required above all else that its users be brief and direct. As people got used to sending and receiving telegrams and reading the telegraphed dispatches in the newspapers, they would inevitably cast off the verbosity and complexity of the prevalent English style. The "telegraphic style," as Swackhamer called it, would be, "terse, condensed, expressive, sparing of expletives, and utterly ignorant of synonyms," and would propel the English language toward a new standard of perfection.
That was the first time anybody used the word "telegraphic" to describe a style of writing, with the implication that a new communications technology would naturally leave its mark on the language itself.[1] It's an idea that has resurfaced with the appearance of every writing tool from the typewriter to the word-processor. And now there's a resurgence of Swackhamerism as the keypad is passed to a new generation, and commentators ponder the deeper linguistic significance of the codes and shortcuts that have evolved around instant messaging and cell-phone texting.
The topic got a lot of media play last month with the release of a study on teens and writing technology sponsored by the College Board and the Pew Research Center. According to the report, more than a half of teens say they've sometimes used texting shortcuts in their school writing. The story was a natural for journalists. It combined three themes that have been a staple of feature writing for 150 years: "the language is going to hell in a handbasket"; "you'll never get me onto one of those newfangled things"; and "kids today, I'm here to tell you."
It wasn't hard to find critics who warned of apocalyptic consequences for the language. James Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said that IM and texting were bringing about "the slow destruction of the basic unit of human thought, the sentence." And the enthusiasts of the new media countered with equally momentous predictions. According to Richard Sterling of the National Commission on Writing, IM and texting will naturally erode the conventions of formal writing -- within a few decades we probably won't be capitalizing the first words of sentences anymore, but it's "not a worrying issue." In response to that prediction, the Boston Globe published an editorial called "the revenge of e. e. cummings" that had no capital letters and was laced with LOL's and texting abbreviations. It had me wondering which is more embarrassing, hearing old people use teenage slang or hearing them make fun of it.
I've got a little prediction to make myself: a generation from now all this stuff is going to sound awfully silly. Did people really imagine that rules of written English sentence structure that go back to the Renaissance would suddenly crumble because teenagers took to texting each other over their cell phones instead of passing notes under their desks in class?
The fact is that apart from contributing some slang and jargon, new writing technologies rarely have much of an effect on the language. They can give rise to specialized codes, but those tend to flow alongside the broad channel of standard English without ever mixing with it. As Conrad Swackhamer predicted, the Victorians developed a breathlessly compressed style for sending telegrams, like the message Henry James had one of his characters cable in Portrait of a Lady: "Tired America, hot weather awful, return England with niece, first steamer decent cabin." But that telegraphic style didn't leave many traces on Victorian prose -- when you think of James's own writing, "terse" and "condensed" are not the words that come to mind.[2]
The linguistic features of the new media are sure to follow the same pattern. Take emoticons. Used sparingly, they can delicately shade the reception of an email -- my dean at Berkeley is a master of the deft smiley that turneth away wrath. But it will be a cold day at the copy desk before you encounter a smiley in the pages of The Economist or the New York Review of Books. What happens in email, stays in email.
Kids catch on to this quickly. They may sometimes let texting shortcuts slip into their schoolwork, but they know there are different rules for formal writing, and that you ignore them at your peril. The people at the College Board report they almost never see students using the shortcuts in their SAT essays -- I mean, how dumb would that be?
In fact that Pew study reported that a majority of the kids who use IM and texting don't consider them to be real "writing" at all. And if you think of writing as an intellectual exercise, they're probably right. You're not going to learn a lot about organizing ideas from punching in text messages against a 160-character limit.
But there's another, more basic idea of writing, as the process of turning mental activity into automatic manual gestures. And in that sense the new technologies do make a difference. As the telegraph first demonstrated, the wonder of modern writing tools is how they can accelerate that process until it seems almost instantaneous -- they turn writing into the cognitive equivalent of a twitch game like Pac Man or Tetris. The difference is that in the old days you had to go and engage somebody to tap out your thoughts for you with his index finger. Now we can do that with our own thumbs from wherever we happen to be.

1. The OED gives its first citation for this sense from 1896, which is clearly much too late. Return
2. That isn't to say that the telegraph didn't have an important influence on James's fiction, but only that it wasn't immediately evident in his style. See Richard Menke's "Telegraphic Realism: Henry James's 'In the Cage,'" PMLA, 2000.

September 14, 2009

Preschool Children Learn Second Languages

From ScienceDaily— Interim results from an international research project which looks at bilingual education reveal that children can learn a second language as early as preschool.

The University of Hertfordshire is one of nine European partners in ELIAS (Early Language and Intercultural Acquisition Studies) which was awarded €300,000 by the European Union last year to research bilingual education and intercultural awareness in children through observational studies and language assessments in six project preschools.

The researchers use a immersion teaching, whereby children are addressed in each language by the respective native speaker and asked to respond in that language. The method mimics the conditions in which humans learn their first languages.

The study focuses on bilingual preschools in Germany, Sweden and Belgium, where the staff members are teachers from the respective country, but at least one teacher is a native speaker of English. Data is also collected from nurseries in Hertfordshire and the bilingual nursery of the German school in London. Children’s progress in English is measured through a receptive vocabulary test and a grammar task that was designed within the project. So far, 266 preschool children aged between three and five took part in the tests.

The researchers found that although not all the preschool groups performed equally well in the tests, and there was a large amount of individual variation in children’s comprehension of vocabulary and grammatical phenomena, there was clear evidence that it is entirely feasible for children to start to learn a second language in a preschool context, using immersion methods.