New kiwi dialect devised for film

School of Linguistics and International Languages staff have devised an other-worldly sounding dialect for a film that explores an imaginary time in New Zealand’s future. Actors Matthew Sunderland and Aaron Jackson will speak the dialect after receiving coaching by New Zealand-born Dr Paviour-Smith, with advice from Dr Petrucci. “Not being a natural-born New Zealander myself, we decided that Martin be the one to manipulate the dialect to what a New Zealander might sound like in the future,” Dr Petrucci says. "When we devised the dialect we envisaged certain changes in the consonants and vowels along with some interesting new words. Matthew and Aaron will be speaking in English but in variety distinct from what we are used to.”

Click here to read the rest of the article, and you can also listen to some phrases in the new Kiwi language as well.

Ayapaneco language at risk of dying

Anthropologists are racing to compile a dictionary of the centuries-old Ayapaneco tongue, spoken in Mexico. There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company.

The dictionary is part of a race against time to revitalise the language before it is definitively too late. "When I was a boy everybody spoke it," Segovia told the Guardian by phone. "It's disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me." This compiled dictionary is due out later this year.

The rest of the report can be read here, and a full list of the endangered languages of the world can be viewed here; this long list includes languages that are vulnerable, those that are definitely endangered, those critically endangered, & those which are extinct.

Report: Swedish language under threat in Finland

The Council of Europe thinks Swedish as an official language in Finland is under threat, according to Finnish broadcasting association YLE. In an upcoming report on minority languages the Council of Europe states that Swedish as an official language in Finland is under threat due to officials’ poor Swedish skills and deficiencies in the mandatory Swedish tuition in schools.

Kimmo Sasi of the Finnish Constitutional Law Committee is not surprised by the Council’s findings. He thinks that the matter must be taken seriously. “We will look into it and try to come up with solutions for the ministry of education on how to deal with these issues,” Sasi told Yle.

The Finnish language laws from 2003 specify that the official languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish. Both languages have the same legal status and authorities in bilingual municipalities must offer their services in either language. The Council has on many occasions pointed to the difficulty in using the Swedish language in Finland, despite the right to be served in Swedish is stipulated in the Finnish constitution. Recently the Finnish parliamentary ombudsman ruled that there should be clearer guidelines at health centres as to what information and medical records should be made available in the patient’s mother tongue. Although the medical records will be allowed to remain kept in Finnish, it must be possible for a Swedish-speaking patient to get access to a Swedish translation. This followed a demand from the Swedish Assembly in Finland (Folktinget) in 2009 that all medical records of Swedish speakers should be kept in Swedish.

Swedish is a compulsory subject in Finnish schools today, a fact that has been criticised from many sides over the years.
More recently the right wing party True Finns (Sannfinländarna) have been demanding the abolishment of obligatory Swedish in Finnish schools. The Council of Europe is now recommending that Finland improves the level of Swedish classes in school and ensures services in Swedish for Swedish-speakers. According to Sasi, the Constitutional Committee will do what they can to give the matter the deserved attention. “It might not lead to any definite measures but at least it will increase the pressure to do something about it,” Sasi told YLE.

Finland was a part of Sweden until 1809 when the area was lost to Russia. The country has been an independent nation since 1917.

The report can be viewed online here

Translating the Bible into exotic & rare languages

Fritz Goerling sits at his desk in a neighbourhood of Munich, Germany, making clicking and smacking sounds with his mouth.
'We have hardly any letters in our alphabet for such sounds,' said Goerling, a specialist in translating the Bible into exotic languages.

The sounds he makes are common in the language of the Jula, a small African ethnic group, but they didn't exist in written form until Goerling developed them. The project took 25 years starting when Goerling, with the help of a few Jula from Ivory Coast, learned the language. Matching symbols were borrowed from the international phonetic alphabet and taught to local people in the ethnic group. The reason for all the effort is to ensure that the Jula have a written copy of the Bible.

Demand for versions of Christianity's essential book in native languages spoken in all parts of the world is increasing, particularly in Africa. We want to reach people in their native tongue because it is the language of their heart,' said Goerling, 67. Many Jula know the Arabian script, but it lacks vowels for many spoken words. Thus, there was no word for an integral word like temple, for example.

However, translating something from one language into any other language is not a simple task - nuances from both the word-meaning level & the syntactic level need to be dealt with, and this can be more challenging in some languages than others, depending on the language you are translating from, into the language you are translating into.

Translation can easily be turned into nonsense - what makes sense in one language, syntactically, may make absolutely no sense in another language. This is also true phonologically - in the spoken language of the Jula there is the word 'ba,' which has three different meanings depending on the emphasis used to express it. In a low voice (or low tone), the word means mother. When the word is spoken in a middle-range (mid-tone) it means river, and when it is spoken in a a higher voice (high tone) it means goat. A mixup (however unintentional) can be quite insulting.

Click here to read in full the article.

The Hebrew hotline: Keeping an ancient language modern

Modern Hebrew, which can now be heard everywhere on the streets of Israel, has continued to evolve since it was reintroduced as a living language. Eliezer Ben Yehuda is the man many credit with reviving the Hebrew language more than 100 years ago. Ben Yehuda's son, Itamar Ben Avi, was the first native Hebrew speaker. He had a thoroughly miserable childhood - home-schooled, locked up by his parents, and not allowed to play outside with other children so that he would not be exposed to any other languages. Itamar was three-and-a-half when he spoke his first Hebrew word.

Part of the difficulty in bringing an old language back to life was that, well, life had changed. The words that existed in the Bible often described rather grand ideas like love, war, and peace. But that was no help when trying to get shopping done - there were no words back then for ice cream or jelly, or underwear. So Ben Yehuda and his friends simply made them up, using old Hebrew roots to hint at the new words' meaning. And that process is still happening today.

The modern Hebrew language is growing all the time with around 20 new words being officially added each year. Approving these new words can be a lengthy process. A committee has to consider them, and it can take several years to reach a decision. And even after all that - there is no guarantee that the public will accept the words. Language is a sensitive issue in Israel. It is even discussed in the Knesset.

In 2005, Israel's then prime minister Ariel Sharon chastised Israelis for using the Arab-English hybrid expression "yala bay" to say farewell to each other (you hear it everywhere in Israel). Instead, Sharon argued, they should be using what he referred to as "the most beautiful word", shalom.

You can read the whole article here

Language Diversity Index tracks global loss of mother tongues

For the past several years, we have been hearing anecdotal reports about endangered languages – how we’re losing languages by the day, how we may lose 50-90 percent of languages before the end of the century. But nobody had any reliable quantitative data to corroborate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua, an international NGO devoted to sustaining the biocultural diversity of life through research, education, policy, and on-the-ground work.

”But now a new Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quantitatively, for the first time, what’s really happening with the world’s languages,” Maffi adds. “The ILD shows in quantitatively rigorous ways what the trends have been over the past 30 years in the numbers of mother-tongue speakers of the world’s languages–and the news is not good: an overall decline of more than 20 percent in that period alone.”

Click here to continue reading the rest of the report & interview on the LDI.

Languages Of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples - A Uniquely Australian Heritage

This article by Kazuko Obata and Jason Lee, from the Australian Institue of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), details and describes Australian Aboriginal languages and their features, such as the origin of and relationships between Australian Indigenous languages; creoles; early & recent work in Indigenous language study; the current state of Aboriginal languages & endangerment; and language documentation and preservation.

You can find this informative report here