From English to "Globish": How a Language has Evolved

Image by Simon Howden

Have you ever wondered how the English language evolved and how it has become the language of business and intercultural communication? If so, read on. The article below landed in my inbox back on June 4th, 2012 and I have been sharing it with students in my Introduction to Language course ever since. I'm posting it here now because it is such a concise history of English as a language. Enjoy!

Original article from NPR Books on Morning Edition:

How did a mongrel tongue born on a small island in the north Atlantic become the globally dominant language now known as English?

That's a question Robert McCrum tries to answer in his new book, Globish, which explores the way English took the world by storm over the course of several centuries. It's a story that begins back in the first millennium, when the language spoken in England wasn't even called "English."

Another Misguided Push for "Official" Language

HARRISBURG -- It's a hot political issue that divides the state's conservatives from liberals, rural residents from multicultural urbanites, and people whose main language is English -- that is, most Pennsylvanians -- from those who speak it only as a second language, with Spanish usually the first.

Two bills have been introduced in the Legislature to make English the "official" language of the Keystone State, meaning there no longer would be any state government pamphlets or publications printed in any other language.

"This is our country, our culture, our lifestyle and our language," Rep. Scott Perry, R-York, said. "If our language doesn't suit you, no one forced you to come here and no one is forcing you to stay."
Read more: http://www.post-gazette.com/pg/11258/1174808-454.stm#ixzz1Y8bFHCVB

Words on Radiolab

It’s almost impossible to imagine a world without words. But in this hour of Radiolab, we try to do just that.

We meet a woman who taught a 27-year-old man the first words of his life, hear a firsthand account of what it feels like to have the language center of your brain wiped out by a stroke, and retrace the birth of a brand new language 30 years ago.

The New English Words of 2010

The Global Language Monitor has announced that Spillcam is the Top Word, Anger and Rage the Top Phrase and Chinese Leader Hu Jintao the Top Name of 2010 in its annual global survey of the English language. Direct from the GLM, here are the top 10 new words of 2010: CLICK FOR FULL ARTICLE

The Communication of Clouds

A newly-published scientific study has identified a new and exciting cloud structure: wisps of clouds that form a honeycomb-like structure and behave in an amazing and fun-to-watch manner...CLICK FOR FULL ARTICLE

Honeycomb Cloud "Communication" | EARTHLY HAPPENINGS

Creating Better Translation Software

Anyone who's turned to a website to translate a foreign language knows that perfect computer translation remains elusive. That's especially true for hundreds of lesser-known languages.
So linguists are trying to harness the wisdom of crowds to do what machines can't. It's known as crowd-sourcing, and researchers think it could help them get closer to something they've been pursuing for decades: the perfect translation machine.
"There are aspects to the translation problem that are undeniably, unavoidably human," says Philip Resnik, who teaches linguistics at the University of Maryland. Resnik says computer translators like Babelfish and Google Translate work best when they have lots of translation data to learn from. And we only have that data for a handful of languages, like French and Chinese.
"There's an awful lot more than six languages in the world," Resnik says. "And an awful lot of people in the world who have a need for something that provides more reliability than you're going to get from Google Translate."

Read/Listen to the rest of this story by Joel Rose at NPR

Writing Provides Clues Into Alzheimer's Disease

Produced by Radiolab's Soren Wheeler, and NPR's Jessica Goldstein and Maggie Starb. Written by Jad AbumradRobert Krulwich and . NPR's Morning Edition June 1, 2010.

If you've ever kept a journal, you've probably worried about someone coming across it and getting an uninvited peek into your personal life. But the daily traces we leave behind in our writings – more and more in today's world of emails, blogs and Facebook pages – may reveal much more than whom you had a crush on in middle school or that embarrassing dream you had last week. It turns out that what we write, and how we write, may hold clues about our future selves.

 

Ian Lancashire, an English professor at the University of Toronto, has spent much of his career trying to see past the words on the page and into the psyche of the author. He makes concordances of different texts; basically, an alphabetical list of all the words and the contexts in which they appear in a text. This is a tradition that dates back to medieval monks, who would make concordances of the Bible in the hopes of seeing the mind of God.
Lancashire has somewhat more modest goals. He studies the works of authors such as Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton. (Among other things, he discovered that Milton never used the word "because" in any of his works. Why? Who knows.) But in the mid '90s, Lancashire decided he wanted to focus on a more modern — and less "literary" — author. So he turned to one of the most published authors in the world: Agatha Christie.

Sleuthing The Sleuth
Lancashire took 16 of her novels, written over more than 50 years, and fed the text into a computer program. The computer then spit out data about the vocabulary of the works, such as the frequency of different words and the number of different words used in each text.

When Lancashire looked at the results for Christie's 73rd novel, written when she was 81 years old, he saw something strange. Her use of words like "thing," "anything," "something," "nothing" – terms that Lancashire classifies as "indefinite words" – spiked. At the same time, number of different words she used dropped by 20 percent. "That is astounding," says Lancashire, "that is one-fifth of her vocabulary lost."

Lancashire waited two years before publishing the results of his study, during which time he checked his results with statisticians and linguists and pathologists. "I did not want to say what was said in the end," says Lancashire, "that yes, the data supported a view that she had developed Alzheimer's."

Should we believe it? Based on just looking at a book she wrote? Christie was never formally diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease. But she often complained of an inability to concentrate in her later years, and friends reported that she would have fits of anger and wouldn't make sense in conversations.

A Different Kind Of Textual Analysis
Signs of dementia in an author's work are not unprecedented. Peter Garrard, a cognitive scientist at University College London, found similar changes in the last book by British author Iris Murdoch. Shortly after publishing the book, Murdoch was diagnosed with Alzheimer's.

And Christie's 73rd book, Ian Lancashire says, seems to hold more explicit signs of trouble. It is universally dismissed by critics as being full of errors and poorly plotted. Not only that, the title of the book is Elephants Can Remember, and the central character is a female novelist who is struggling with memory loss as she tries to help Hercule Poirot solve a crime that occurred in the past.

When Lancashire read the book, he felt that Christie was actually sensing what was happening to her. "I realized," he says, "I was seeing the author in the text in a way that no one had seen the author in the text before." The idea that she would keep writing, even as this was happening to her, Lancashire says, "struck me as heroic."

The Lives Of 'Nuns'
We can never know for sure if Christie actually had Alzheimer's. But a separate study out of the University of Minnesota lends support to the idea that there might be signs in our writing of Alzheimer's disease. And those signs might be there very early on.

The so-called "Nun Study" was started by David Snowdon at the University of Minnesota in 1990 (although the study participants are not officially nuns, they're sisters). Snowdon wanted to look at aging over time, and decided to focus on sisters because they all had fairly similar histories and backgrounds. Most of them joined the School Sisters of Notre Dame congregation when they were 18, and all had abstained from smoking or drinking. So Snowdon signed up 678 sisters, all over the age of 75, from the order. All of the sisters agreed to donate a small part of their brains to the study after they died.


Researchers would visit once a year to administer memory tests, and it was during one of these visits that Snowdon made a fortuitous discovery: He was told of a collection of biographies that the sisters were required to write upon entering the order, in many cases more than 50 years before the study started. "It was a major, major find," says Serguei Pakhomov, a current researcher with the study.

Writerly Sisters
Snowdon and his team evaluated the essays based on grammatical complexity and idea density – the average number of discrete ideas contained in every 10 written words.

Here's an example of a sentence packed with ideas, from the one of the sister's diaries:
"It was about a half hour before midnight between February 28 and 29 of the leap year 1912 when I began to live, and to die, as the third child of my mother, whose maiden name is Hilda Hoffman, and my father, Otto Schmidt..."


And here's an example of less idea-rich sentence:
"I was born in Eau Claire, Wisconsin on May 24, 1913, and was baptized in St. James Church..."

Snowdon discovered that sisters who scored poorly on these two measures — like the second example — were much more likely to develop dementia. Sisters within the lower third of the sample with respect to idea density, for example, were 60 times more likely to develop Alzheimer's than a sister in the upper third. In fact, using the essays, the researchers could predict with 92 percent accuracy whether the brain of a particular sister, investigated after their death, would contain the plaques and lesions in the brain that are associated with Alzheimer's Disease.
Kelvin Lim, the current director of the "Nun Study," cautions that their finding is merely an association and doesn't mean that simple writing causes dementia later in life. And while other studies suggest that the initial stages of Alzheimer's may appear very early, it is still unclear whether writing could be used as a reliable early warning sign.

Teaching Better English: Materials for Teaching English in Japan

Review
Are you going to teach English in Japan this year? If so, then this is the book for you! A new book is available for people teaching or planning to teach English in Japan in 2010! It's called Teaching Better English: Materials for Teaching English in Japan. Just as the description promises, the book is chock-full of communicative lesson plans and activities for beginning and intermediate students of English as a second or foreign language. All are based on best practices and proven theories of how languages are learned. Most of the lessons and activities need very few supplies beyond a copy machine or a blackboard, so they are great for teachers working with limited resources. All are very practical, easy to use, and appeal to a wide variety of language learning styles. At just over 100 pages and just under US$20, Teaching Better English is easily purchased and packed into a suitcase for those headed to Japan through the Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program this year, or for anyone else planning to teach English in the land of the rising sun.

Where to Find It
Teaching Better English: Materials for Teaching English in Japan is available around the world. Some of the sellers are listed below, but a Google search will reveal even more.

Barnes & Noble

Amazon in the U.S.A.

Amazon Canada

Amazon UK

Amazon Japan (JP)

Editorial Description
Learning a second language can be a difficult process, but it can also be very enjoyable and highly rewarding. Teaching Better English: Materials for Teaching English in Japan is full of communicative lessons and activities that are built upon a foundation of practical experience, reliable theories, and best practices of how languages can be learned and taught. This valuable resource helps EFL and ESL teachers to guide students through learning the alphabet and English sounds, grammar patterns, conversation, self-expression, and culture.

About the Author
C. Rude lectures on educational linguistics at the University of the Pacific. Her research interests include motivation and interaction in multilingual classrooms, school communities, and teacher education. As a former Japan Exchange and Teaching (JET) Program participant, she taught English as a foreign language to elementary school, junior high school, and adult learners in Ushibuka City, Kumamoto Prefecture, in Japan's beautiful Amakusa Islands. More information may be found at www.cicelyrude.com.

Songbird DNA Mapping May Offer Clues to Human Speech

From NPR's Morning Edition

The genetic code of a small, noisy songbird is providing scientists with clues to the nature of human speech.
The genome of the male zebra finch devotes a lot of genetic code to hearing and singing songs, according to an analysis in the journal Nature. Much of that code controls brain circuits that are similar to the circuits people use for vocal learning.
"There are striking parallels," says David Clayton, from the Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.
The similarities mean research on zebra finches could help explain a wide range of human speech and communication disorders, from stuttering to autism, Clayton says.
Zebra finches are the second bird to have their genome sequenced. The first was the chicken.
But you can't learn much about human speech from a chicken, Clayton says, because "the clucks that they make are not learned."
The Zebra Finch Learns A Sophisticated Song
A young male zebra finch, on the other hand, learns to sing much the way a child learns to talk, Clayton says.

Listen To The Songs Of The Zebra Finch

• Add to Playlist

 

"The rudimentary steps are very similar," he says. Young male zebra finches produce something called a subsong, "which has been likened to the babbling of a human infant."
By listening to an older male, usually its father, Clayton says, the zebra finch eventually learns to produce a precise and sophisticated song that it will use for the rest of its life.
Intrigued by the similarities between these birds and humans, researchers have been combing the zebra finch genome looking for genes that seem to play a role in learning songs.
And they have found more than 800 so far, says Wes Warren, assistant director of the Genome Center at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis.
Unusual Genes In Zebra Finches
When it comes to the zebra finch, Warren says, "We talk about the whole genome being engaged in the vocal learning process."
The analysis of the zebra finch genome also showed that during the period when a young male finch is learning its signature song, large numbers of genes in the brain get switched on or off.
"The sophistication, the speed and the complexity is just amazing to me," Warren says. And even though birds diverged from human ancestors more than 300 million years ago, both species seem to rely on many of the same genes for vocal communication, he says.
In zebra finches, many of the genes are an unusual type whose main job seems to be switching other genes on and off.
Scientists think this type of gene may be one of the things that make vocal learning possible in a limited number of species, including bats, whales, elephants, birds and people.
The research also could help find genetic explanations for disorders that affect speech or communication, scientists say.
A Model For Human Speech Control
"It provides us with a model to dissect what we learn from human genetics about speech control," says Story Landis, who directs the National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke, which helped pay for the research on the zebra finch genome.
One human problem that could be explained by the finch research is stuttering, Landis says.
Neurologists know that a gene mutation causes stuttering in some Pakistani families, but they don't know how that gene could be affecting areas of the brain involved in speech.
That could change if the human gene mutation were put into a zebra finch, Landis says. "You could see if it caused the bird equivalent of stuttering," she says, and look for changes in the brain that would account for the problem.

Elements of Style: Grammar Meets Basketball With Cornell in the Sweet 16

This article is from Morning Edition on National Public Radio:

As the NCAA men's basketball tournament resumes tonight with the Sweet Sixteen, the Kentucky Wildcats — a top seed full of players who will be starters in the NBA — will face an opponent with some players who have set their sights instead on MBAs.
Still, basketball buffs say the Cornell Big Red is a really good team, with a legitimate chance of pulling an upset.
Cornell alumni include Drs. Atkins (of the diet), Heimlich (of the maneuver) and C. Everett Koop (of the beard). Among their men and women of letters is professor William Strunk, who wrote The Elements of Style, the quintessential guide to usage and grammar.
Strangely, the guide also provides some insight into the basketball team. As heard in the audiobook version, Strunk advised writers to take it hard to the hoop:

The habitual use of the active voice makes for forceful writing.

Cornell is a team that plays in the active voice. Past Ivy League champions, notably Princeton, slowed the game down and waited for a defensive breakdown as an opportunity to make a move. But Cornell's coach, Steve Donahue, knows that's not the key to his team's style of basketball.
"For us to win this game, we need to be the team making plays," Donahue says. "We've got to be the aggressor."
To succeed at this method, Cornell needs talented athletes, not just role players who don't make mistakes. Take 6-foot-7 shooter Ryan Wittman. Opposing teams used the same word for him that Strunk used for misplaced commas:

Such punctuation is indefensible.

Wittman's game and enthusiasm are hard to contain.
"Our passion buckets are gonna be filled to the brim tomorrow," he said at a recent news conference.
Passion buckets? It's actually an insider's phrase known to listeners of Dan Patrick's syndicated radio show. Confounding the media with statements of veiled origin has become a specialty of this Cornell team. Last week, point guard Louis Dale seemed to provide perspective beyond his years.
"We got eight seniors on this team and we want to take this ride as long as we can, because after this it's nothing but babies and memories, so we want to just keep going," Dale said.
Dale didn't acknowledge at the time that "babies and memories" was borrowed from the book and movie Friday Night Lights.
By the way, Strunk says:

Proverbial expressions and familiar phrases of literary origin require no quotation marks.

Last week, the team was denied an actual basketball by the NCAA before its precisely allotted practice time. So the players conducted a phantom layup line and mimed as best they could. That was goofiness, says senior Jon Jacques. But babies and memories? That part is real.
"It was definitely a funny quote, which is why we selected it, but it's true," Jacques said. "Ten years from now we're gonna be having kids and having reunions and stuff. It's gonna be only memories."
The memories are not simply of getting this far in the tournament, Jacques said. They go back to the beginning of the season, when the entire team — sans freshmen — found a big house to live in off campus. Not surprisingly, the team has exhibited the cohesion of a well-formed paragraph.

The writer must therefore, so far as possible, bring together the words, and groups of words, that are related in thought.

Cornell thinks together, plays together and therefore the story that teammates are writing flows like free verse. It is Kentucky's job to provide an alternative narrative. Many think the Wildcats will just be too fast, athletic and aggressive for the Big Red.
But as Strunk wrote:

It is permissible to make an emphatic word or expression serve the purpose of a sentence.

Upset would be such a word.

The audio version of the story is available on NPR's website.

Free ASL Lesson Plans

This is my current list of sites that offer free lesson plans and materials for teaching (or teaching in) American Sign Language, or ASL. I don't personally endorse any of these websites. Please leave a comment at the end of this post if you have a personal favorite to add to the list or if you think a link should be removed from the list.

Lesson Tutor: Free printable lessons and worksheets K-12

Free lesson plan series, printable worksheets, teaching tips and more. Specializing in American sign languageASL) and Signed English (SE). K - 12.

world languages: lesson plans and teaching resources

Find Great free stuff for teachers, students, and homeschoolers ... Colors and American Sign Language A lesson plan for preschool or kindergarten.

American Sign Language Worksheets

American Sign Language, commonly referred to as ASL or Ameslan, is a system of ... If you can't find a freelesson plan printable worksheet that fits your...

Lessons - ASL - American Sign Language

Start (under development, feel free to use what is available). ASL Linguistics .... Indexing on the non-dominant hand is in lesson 2 in one of the stories.

Foreign language learning for kids - Gaelic, Spanish, Polish, and ASL

American Sign Language translation. Learn how to count backwards in ... to receive free teaching resources including lesson plan ideas, printables and more.

ASL Pro

ASLPro.com was created to be a free resource for the classroom teacher. Teachers can create accounts and personalize a quiz for their students' use, then take them into a lab and let them practice seeing models other than their own teacher. Because our signs are designed to be used in student quizzes, Non-Manual Signals are purposefully omitted.

History of the English Word: Shampoo

Among the words to have come into English from India is the word shampoo. Many of you might have guessed that the word shampoo has a French background (perhaps from Champoux). Nope. Actually, Champoux turns out to be a French surname, and has nothing to do with washing your hair. Shampoo, from the Hindi word champo, was first recorded (1762) as a verb meaning to give a head massage. A century later the word referred to washing hair, and a few years later, it referred to the soap with which one shampooed.

Naturally, a question comes to mind: If English didn't have a word for a product used for washing hair until basically the mid-1800s, does that mean that perhaps the English-speaking peoples did not have the thing itself?
Short answer: yes.
Longer answer: People used to use ordinary lye-based soap to wash their hair in times of old. That meant that they had to deal with soapy residues, especially in places with hard water. It's no wonder that the new shampoo compounds that came in during the 1930s were welcomed as exciting progress indeed!

An that, folks, is the history of the word (and a bit of the product) shampoo.

Federal Education Grants Propel Real Reform!

The excerpt below describes a new U.S. federal education grant called Race to the Top. It's a bit like the failed No Child Left Behind, except with funding! Read on.

 

From an article by Greg Toppo, USA TODAY

 

It's relatively small by Washington standards, but the Obama administration's $4.35 billion carrot for schools is already leading states to adopt a handful of key reforms. Tucked into the $110 billion federal stimulus slated for education, a comparatively tiny grant known as the Race to the Top requires that states that want the money must commit to closing historic achievement gaps and getting more kids into college – but they also must show that they're attending to a few nitty-gritty details that President Obama and Education Secretary Arne Duncan believe are important, including:

•Tying teacher and principal pay – and school assignments – to student test scores.

•Adopting internationally benchmarked academic standards.

•Turning around their lowest-performing schools.

•Building long-term student tracking systems.

•Loosening legal caps on the number of charter schools that states allow each year.

Obama's message to American children is to stay in school and get an education,"You can't drop out of school and into a good job."

 

Read the rest of this article in USA Today.

Schoolhouse Rock Interactive DVDs!

As a language teacher, I love the classic grammar edition of Schoolhouse Rock. Produced in the 1970s and owned by Disney, this 2007 DVD of all of the old grammar songs, including Conjunction Junction (what's your function?) is the best of the best. I use it when teaching English, as well as when teaching new teachers how to teach English. These are fun and educational music videos for people of all ages who are learning English as either a first or second language, and the Language Village recommends them highly! Just click the link below to read more about the grammar edition of Schoolhouse Rock and to order the interactive DVD from Amazon.

"Unfriend" is Oxford Dictionary's Word of the Year 2009

'Unfriend' Chosen as Oxford Dictionary's 2009 Word of the Year

Ian Paul, PC World

Nov 17, 2009 5:07 am

Proving that social networking is a huge cultural force, the New Oxford American Dictionary has chosen 'unfriend' as its 2009 Word of the Year (WOTY). To unfriend means to remove someone from your friend list on a social network like Facebook or MySpace. The new word is an excellent choice as the 2009 WOTY because of its "currency and potential longevity," according to Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford's US dictionary program.
Many lexicographers nominate their own WOTY every year. Words are usually chosen based on their popularity in everyday usage and cultural importance over the previous twelve months. Oxford's dubious honor puts unfriend in the same ranks as previous WOTY honorees like hypermiling, locavore and the Al Gore-inspired carbon neutral.
Techno challengers

Unfriend was chosen from a total of twenty-four contenders for 2009. Other technology-related words in the running for Word of the Year included:
hashtag: a # [hash] sign added to a word or phrase that enables Twitter users to search for tweets (postings on the Twitter site) that contain similarly tagged items and view thematic sets
intexticated: distracted because texting on a cellphone while driving a vehicle
netbook: a small, very portable laptop computer with limited memory
paywall: a way of blocking access to a part of a website which is only available to paying subscribers
sexting: the sending of sexually explicit texts and pictures by cellphone
Words were also considered from the lexicons of economics (freemium), politics and current affairs (teabagger), environment (brown state) as well as novelty words like 'deleb' and 'tramp stamp.'
'Un-' Not Just for Adjectives Anymore

Besides being a popular phrase--not to mention close rival to 'defriend'--the 2009 WOTY employs an unconventional use of the 'un-' prefix.   Unfriend is different, because most 'un-' prefix words are typically adjectives, while unfriend takes on a verb form, according to Lindberg. There are examples of other 'un-' verbs, such as unpack and uncap, but unfriend takes it one step further by employing an abnormal "verb sense" of the word 'friend.'
Unfriend, according to Lindberg, has "real lex-appeal." [Insert eye roll here].
If you're an avid unfriender, don't forget that soon you'll be able to drop friends using your PlayStation 3. Sony announced on Monday, that Facebook integration would be coming with firmware version 3.10, the soon-to-be-released update for the PS3.

DVD Review: Classic Peanuts Holiday Videos

Are you looking for a couple of fabulous videos to show to English language learners and to native speakers of English for Halloween and Christmas? There are plenty available, but few withstand the test of time better than the all-time classic Peanuts holiday shows! Use these to introduce your learners of English as a Foreign Language (EFL) to both new vocabulary words, parts of speech, intonation, and American holiday celebrations. Show these videos to classes of mixed English as a Second Language (ESL) and native speakers of English classes in the United States or elsewhere. Show these classic made for TV specials at parties and social gatherings when you want your guests to feel nostalgic. Whether you are a teacher or not, whether you have ESL/EFL students in your class or not, these are two of the most timeless and versatile shows available. Those of us here in the Language Village highly recommends adding them to your collection! The videos are in English and are each about 25 minutes long--a perfect length for using in class. Click the link below for a low Amazon price. 6% of each sale made through this website benefits the Language Village, and helps to keep this site free to the public. Thanks for your support!



Contact the Language Village editors at citizensofplanetearth@gmail.com, attention Language Village Editors if you need free and easy activity ideas to use with these holiday videos!

ASL Comedy Night Kicks Off Language Campaign

Over 400 people lined up at Portland State University last Friday while waiting to attend the American Sign Language Comedy Night. When guests went inside, it was to find a standing-room-only scene. The event kicked off a campaign run by Portland State’s American Sign Language (ASL) Club and ASPSU that aims to relocate ASL studies from the speech and hearing sciences department to the foreign languages department.

American Sign Language is not the same language as [American] English, so the deaf community wants ASL recognized as a language in the same way that Spanish is recognized as a foreign language, said Steven “PV” Jantz, co-president of the ASL Club and member of the ASPSU student senate.

Currently, students can receive foreign language credit for studying ASL at many universities, but students of the deaf community and their supporters feel that there is a much deeper issue, Jantz said. “As of right now, deaf culture is not viewed as a multicultural group,” he said. “It is also not treated as an actual community. I’m not saying that it is intentional and I don’t believe it is, but the fact of the matter remains, it is oppression.”

Through the collaboration of ASPSU and the ASL Club, the night doubled as the kickoff for the ASPSU food cupboard for hungry students. “At the comedy night, we pulled in over 1,000 pounds of food for Tsunami victims in the American islands of Samoa and the free food cupboard for students,” said ASPSU President Jonathon Sanford.

Autism Strikes 1 in 100 Children, According to Parent Survey

(From NPR Health)  How many kids have autism or related disorders? Ask parents, as federal researchers did recently, and you come up an estimate of about 1 in 100, a figure quite a bit higher than the 1-in-150 estimate from just a few years back. What do parents know? Well, the results from the telephone survey, published in the academic journal Pediatrics, are in line with some unpublished work by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention.

The prevalence of autism spectrum disorders, comprising autism, Asperger disorder and other less specific diagnoses may be on the rise. The Pediatrics study's estimate of the raw data boiled down to 1 in 91 kids between 3 and 17 years old and 1 in 110 when adjusted for survey technicalities like cellphone vs. land-line use.
Some specifics: odds of autism spectrum disorder were four times greater for boys than girls. Non-Hispanic black and multiracial children had lower odds of ASD than non-Hispanic white kids. On the bright side, nearly 40% of children ever diagnosed with ASD didn't have trouble with it anymore, though it's not clear what that means exactly.

Overall, it's settled whether the apparent increase in ASD is a result of more diagnosis and reporting of problems or reflects a genuine rise in the disorders. "The concern here is that buried in these numbers is a true increase," Tom Insel, director of the National Institute of Mental Health, said Friday, according to USA Today. "We're not sure how big it is."

Walking English

(The Language Village)  David Crystal, author of my all-time favorite Cambridge Encyclopedia of Language, has written yet another book. This one is called Walking English: A Journey in Search of Language. Whether near his home in Wales or abroad, linguist David Crystal always travels with an insatiable curiosity about the English language. For his book, Walking English, he hit the road in search of new linguistic experiences.

Click to Listen to an Interview With David Crystal on NPR (30 Minutes)

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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