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Language is a part of culture, but culture is a complex totality containing many different features, and the boundaries between cultural features are not clear-cut, nor do they all coincide. Physical barriers such as oceans, high mountains, and wide rivers constitute impediments to human intercourse and to culture contacts, though modern technology in the fields of travel and communications makes such geographical factors of less and less account.
More potent for much of the 20th century were political restrictions on the movement of people and of ideas, such as divided western Europe from formerly communist eastern Europe; the frontiers between these two political blocs represented much more of a cultural dividing line than any other European frontiers.
The distribution of the various components of cultures differs, and the distribution of languages may differ from that of nonlinguistic cultural features. This results from the varying ease and rapidity with which changes may be acquired or enforced and from the historical circumstances responsible for these changes. From the end of World War II until , for example, the division between East and West Germany represented a major political and cultural split in an area of relative linguistic unity. It is significant that differences of vocabulary and usage were noticeable on each side of that division, overlying earlier differences attributed to regional dialects.
Language, no less than other aspects of human behaviour , is subject to purposive interference. When people with different languages need to communicate, various expedients are open to them, the most obvious being second-language learning and teaching. This takes time, effort, and organization, and, when more than two languages are involved, the time and effort are that much greater.
Other expedients may also be applied. Ad hoc pidgins for the restricted purposes of trade and administration are mentioned above. Tacit or deliberate agreements have been reached whereby one language is chosen for international purposes when users of several different languages are involved. In the Roman Empire, broadly, the western half used Latin as a lingua franca , and the eastern half used Greek. In western Europe during the Middle Ages, Latin continued as the international language of educated people, and Latin was the second language taught in schools.
Later the cultural, diplomatic, and military reputation of France made French the language of European diplomacy. This use of French as the language of international relations persisted until the 20th century. At important conferences among representatives of different nations, it is usually agreed which languages shall be officially recognized for registering the decisions reached, and the provisions of treaties are interpreted in the light of texts in a limited number of languages, those of the major participants.
After World War II the dominant use of English in science and technology and in international commerce led to the recognition of that language as the major international language in the world of practical affairs, with more and more countries making English the first foreign language to be taught and thus producing a vast expansion of English-language-teaching programs all over the world. Those whose native language is English do not sufficiently realize the amount of effort, by teacher and learner alike, that is put into the acquisition of a working knowledge of English by educated first speakers of other languages.
As an alternative to the recognition of particular natural languages as international in status, attempts have been made to invent and propagate new and genuinely international languages, devised for the purpose. Of these, Esperanto , invented by the Polish-Russian doctor L. Zamenhof in the 19th century, is the best known. Such languages are generally built up from parts of the vocabulary and grammatical apparatus of the better-known existing languages of the world. The relationship between the written letter and its pronunciation is more systematic than with many existing orthographies English spelling is notoriously unreliable as an indication of pronunciation , and care is taken to avoid the grammatical irregularities to which all natural languages are subject and also to avoid sounds found difficult by many speakers e.
These artificial languages have not made much progress, though an international society of Esperanto speakers does exist. Deliberate interference with the natural course of linguistic changes and the distribution of languages is not confined to the facilitating of international intercourse and cooperation.
Language as a cohesive force for nation-states and for linguistic groups within nation-states has for long been manipulated for political ends. Multilingual states can exist and prosper; Switzerland is a good example. But linguistic rivalry and strife can be disruptive. Language riots have occurred in Belgium between French and Flemish speakers and in parts of India between rival vernacular communities. A language can become or be made a focus of loyalty for a minority community that thinks itself suppressed, persecuted, or subjected to discrimination.
The French language in Canada in the midth century is an example. A language may be a target for attack or suppression if the authorities associate it with what they consider a disaffected or rebellious group or a culturally inferior one. There have been periods when American Indian children were forbidden to speak a language other than English at school and when pupils were not allowed to speak Welsh in British state schools in Wales. Both these prohibitions have been abandoned. After the Spanish Civil War of the s, Basque speakers were discouraged from using their language in public as a consequence of the strong support given by the Basques to the republican forces.
Interestingly, on the other side of the Franco-Spanish frontier, French Basques were positively encouraged to keep their language in use, if only as an object of touristic interest and consequent economic benefit to the area. So far, some of the relatively large-scale effects of culture contacts on languages and on dialects within languages have been surveyed.
A continuous concomitant of contact between two mutually incomprehensible languages and one that does not lead either to suppression or extension of either is translation. As soon as two users of different languages need to converse, translation is necessary, either through a third party or directly. Before the invention and diffusion of writing, translation was instantaneous and oral; persons professionally specializing in such work were called interpreters. In predominantly or wholly literate communities, translation is thought of as the conversion of a written text in one language into a written text in another, though the modern emergence of the simultaneous translator or professional interpreter at international conferences keeps the oral side of translation very much alive.
The tasks of the translator are the same whether the material is oral, manual, or written, but, of course, translation between written texts allows more time for stylistic adjustment and technical expertise. The main problems have been recognized since antiquity and were expressed by St. Semantically, these problems relate to the adjustment of the literal and the literary and to the conflicts that so often occur between an exact translation of each word, as far as this is possible, and the production of a whole sentence or even a whole text that conveys as much of the meaning of the original as can be managed.
These problems and conflicts arise because of factors already noticed in the use and functioning of language: Even between the languages of communities whose cultures are fairly closely allied, there is by no means a one-to-one relation of exact lexical equivalence between the items of their vocabularies. In their lexical meanings, words acquire various overtones and associations that are not shared by the nearest corresponding words in other languages; this may vitiate a literal translation.
In modern times translators of the Bible into the languages of peoples culturally remote from Europe are well aware of the difficulties of finding a lexical equivalent for lamb when the intended readers, even if they have seen sheep and lambs, have no tradition of blood sacrifice for expiation or long-hallowed associations of lambs with lovableness, innocence, and apparent helplessness.
The English word uncle has, for various reasons, a cozy and slightly comic set of associations.
This is because poetry is, in the first instance, carefully contrived to express exactly what the poet wants to say. Second, to achieve this end, poets call forth all the resources of the language in which they are composing, matching the choice of words, the order of words, and grammatical constructions, as well as phonological features peculiar to the language in metre , perhaps supplemented by rhyme , assonance , and alliteration. The available resources differ from language to language; English and German rely on stress-marked metres, but Latin and Greek used quantitative metres, contrasting long and short syllables, while French places approximately equal stress and length on each syllable.
Translators must try to match the stylistic exploitation of the particular resources in the original language with comparable resources from their own.
Because lexical, grammatical, and metrical considerations are all interrelated and interwoven in poetry, a satisfactory literary translation is usually very far from a literal word-for-word rendering. The more poets rely on language form, the more embedded their verses are in that particular language and the harder the texts are to translate adequately.
This is especially true with lyrical poetry in several languages, with its wordplay, complex rhymes, and frequent assonances. Remarkable advances in automatic computer translation were made during the s—the result of progress in computational techniques and a fresh burst of research energy focused on the problem—while the spread of the Internet in subsequent decades transformed approaches to, and the ease of, all forms of translation.
Translation on the whole is, arguably, more art than science. The Italian epigram remains justified: Translation serves to extend the communicative value of a text. Sometimes people want to restrict it. Confidential messages require for their efficacy that they be known to and understood by only the single person or the few persons to whom they are addressed. Such are diplomatic exchanges, operational messages in wartime, and some transmissions of commercial information. Protection of written messages from interception has been practiced for many centuries.
Twentieth-century developments in telegraphy and telephony , and the emergence and growth of the Internet, made protection against unauthorized reception more urgent, whether of texts transmitted as speech or those sent as series of letters of the alphabet. Codes and ciphers cryptography are of much longer standing in the concealment of written messages, though their techniques are being constantly developed. Such gains are, of course, countered by developments in the techniques of decipherment and decoding as distinct from getting hold of the key to the system in use.
An important by-product of such techniques has been the reading and interpretation of inscriptions written in otherwise unknown languages or unknown writing systems for which no translation exists. All physiologically and mentally typical people learn the main structure and basic vocabulary of their native language by the end of childhood. It has been pointed out above that the process of first-language acquisition as a medium of communication is largely achieved from random exposure. There is legitimate controversy, however, over the nature and extent of the positive contribution that the human brain brings, both cognitively and linguistically, to the activity of grammar construction—the activity by which children develop an indefinitely creative competence from the finite data that make up their actual experience of the language.
The importance of social interaction between children and their interlocutors is another significant factor. Creativity is what must be stressed as the product of first-language acquisition. By far the greater number of all the sentences people create during their lifetime are new; that is, they have not occurred before in their personal experience. But individuals find no difficulty at all in understanding at once almost everything they hear or otherwise receive or for the most part in producing sentences to suit the requirements of every situation.
This very ease of creativity in human linguistic competence makes it hard to realize its extent. It is simply part of what is expected in growing up. Different people may be singled out for praise in certain uses of their language, as good public speakers, authors, poets, tellers of tales, and solvers of puzzles, but not just as communicators. The learning of a second and of any subsequently acquired language is quite a separate matter.
Of course, many people never do master significantly more than their own first language. It is only in encountering a second language that one realizes how complex language is and how much effort must be devoted to subsequent acquisition. It has been said that the principal obstacle to learning a language is knowing one already, and common experience suggests that the faculty of grammar construction exhibited in childhood is one that is gradually lost as childhood recedes.
Whereas most people master their native language with unconscious ease, individuals vary in their ability to learn additional languages, just as they vary in other intellectual activities. Situational motivation , however, appears to be by far the strongest influence on the speed and apparent ease of this learning. The greatest difficulty is experienced by those who learn because they are told to or are expected to, without supporting reasons that they can justify. Given a motive other than external compulsion or expectation, the task is achieved much more easily this, of course, is an observation in no way confined to language learning.
In Welsh schools, for instance, it has been found that English children make slower progress in Welsh when their only apparent reason for learning Welsh is that there are Welsh classes. Welsh children, on the other hand, make rapid progress in English, the language of most further education, the newspapers, most television and radio, most of the better-paid jobs, and any job outside Welsh-speaking areas. Similar differences in motivation have accounted for the excellent standard of English, French, and German acquired by educated persons in the Scandinavian countries and in the Netherlands, small countries whose languages, being spoken by relatively few foreigners, are of little use in international communication.
This attainment may be compared with the much poorer showing in second-language acquisition among comparably educated persons in England and the United States, who have for long been able to rely on foreigners accommodating to their ignorance by speaking and understanding English. It is sometimes held that children brought up bilingually in places in which two languages are regularly in use are slower in schoolwork than comparable monolingual children, as a greater amount of mental effort has to be expended in the mastery of two languages.
This has by no means been proved, and indeed there is evidence to the contrary. The question of speed of general learning by bilinguals and monolinguals must be left open. It is quite a separate matter from the job of learning, by teaching at home or in school, to read and write in two languages; this undoubtedly is more of a labour than the acquisition of monolingual literacy.
Two types of bilingualism have been distinguished, according to whether the two languages were acquired from the simultaneous experience of the use of both in the same circumstances and settings or from exposure to each language used in different settings an example of the latter is the experience of English children living in India during the period of British ascendancy there, learning English from their parents and an Indian language from their nurses and family servants.
However acquired, bilingualism leads to mutual interference between the two languages; extensive bilingualism within a community is sometimes held partly responsible for linguistic change. Interference may take place in pronunciation, in grammar, and in the meanings of words. Speaking, signing, and writing are learned skills, but there the resemblance ends. Children learn their first language at the start involuntarily and mostly unconsciously from random exposure, even if no attempts at teaching are made.
Literacy is deliberately taught and consciously and deliberately learned. There is ongoing debate on the best methods and techniques for teaching literacy in various social and linguistic settings. Literacy is learned by a person already possessed of the basic structure and vocabulary of his language. Such facts should be obvious, but the now-accepted standard of near-universal literacy in technologically advanced countries, along with the fact that in second-language learning one usually acquires speech and writing skills at the same time, tends to bring these parts of language learning under one head.
Literacy is manifestly a desirable attainment for all communities, though not necessarily in all languages. It must be borne in mind that there are many distinct languages spoken in the world today by fewer than 1, or or even 50 persons. The capital investment in literacy, including teaching resources, teacher time and training, printing, publications, and so forth, is vast, and it can be economically and socially justified only when applied to languages used and likely to continue to be used by substantial numbers over a wide area.
Literacy is in no way necessary for the maintenance of linguistic structure or vocabulary, though it does enable people to add words from the common written stock in dictionaries to their personal vocabulary very easily. It is worth emphasizing that until relatively recently in human history all languages were spoken or signed by illiterate speakers and that there is no essential difference as regards pronunciation, structure, and complexity of vocabulary between spoken or signed languages that have writing systems used by all or nearly all their speakers and the languages of illiterate communities.
Literacy has many effects on the uses to which language may be put; storage, retrieval, and dissemination of information are greatly facilitated , and some uses of language, such as philosophical system building and the keeping of detailed historical records, would scarcely be possible in a community wholly without writing. In these respects the lexical content of a language is affected, for example, by the creation of sets of technical terms for philosophical writing and debate. Because the permanence of writing overcomes the limitations of memory span imposed on speech or signing, sentences of greater length can easily occur in writing, especially in types of written language that are not normally read aloud and that do not directly represent what would be spoken.
An examination of some kinds of oral literature , however, reveals the ability of the human brain to receive and interpret spoken sentences of considerable grammatical complexity. In relation to pronunciation , writing does not prevent the historical changes that occur in all languages. Part of the apparent irrationality of English spelling , such as is found also in some other orthographies, lies just in the fact that letter sequences have remained constant while the sounds represented by them have changed.
For example, the gh of light once stood for a consonant sound, as it still does in the word as pronounced in some Scots dialects, and the k of knave and knight likewise stood for an initial k sound compare the related German words Knabe and Knecht. A few relatively uncommon words, including some proper names, are reformed phonetically, specifically to bring their pronunciation more in line with their spelling. Spelling pronunciations, as these are called, are a product of general literacy. In London the pronunciation of St. Aristotle expressed the relation thus: But it is not as simple as this would suggest.
Alphabetic writing, in which, broadly, consonant and vowel sounds are indicated by letters in sequence, is the most widespread system in use today, and it is the means by which literacy will be disseminated , but it is not the only system, nor is it the earliest. Writing appears to have been evolved from an extension of picture signs: Other words or word elements not readily represented pictorially could be assigned picture signs already standing for a word of the same or nearly the same pronunciation, perhaps with some additional mark to keep the two signs apart.
European Vernacular Literacy (New Perspectives on Language and Education) eBook: Joshua A. Fishman: bahana-line.com: Kindle Store. Series: New Perspectives on Language and Education; Edited by: Kate Pahl, European Vernacular Literacy A Sociolinguistic and Historical Introduction.
This opens the way for what is called a character script, such as that of Chinese , in which each word is graphically represented by a separate individual symbol or character or by a sequence of two or more such characters. Writing systems of this sort have appeared independently in different parts of the world. Chinese character writing has for many centuries been stylized, but it still bears marks of the pictorial origin of some characters. Chinese characters and the characters of similar writing systems are sometimes called ideograms, as if they directly represented thoughts or ideas.
This is not so. Chinese characters stand for Chinese words or, particularly as in modern Chinese, bits of words logograms ; they are the symbolization of a particular language, not a potentially universal representation of thought. Character writing is laborious to learn and imposes a burden on the memory. Alternatives to it, in addition to alphabetic writing, include scripts that employ separate symbols for the syllable sequences of consonants and vowels in a language, with graphic devices to indicate consonants not followed by a vowel.
The Devanagari script, in which classical Sanskrit and modern Hindi are written, is of this type, and the Mycenaean writing system, a form of Greek writing in use in the 2nd millennium bce and quite independent of the later Greek alphabet, was syllabic in structure. Japanese employs a mixed system, broadly representing the roots of words by Chinese characters kanji and the inflectional endings by syllable signs kana. These syllable signs are an illustration of the way in which a syllabic script can develop from a character script: He thus demonstrated the African language background of Gullah and its connection to other varieties of U.
The legacy of Beryl Bailey, believed to be the first Black woman linguist, is critical to this twentieth-century historical account of Ebonics. She published her work in Jamaican Creole Syntax: A Transformational Approach in However, this line of research was cut short by her untimely death. In Colonial America and after in the United States of America, there was no concern about the denial of education to Africans. Education was not essential to the performance of slave labor; in fact, there were laws making it illegal to teach the enslaved to read and write.
Hence, the relationship between U. Ebonics and the education of U. Board of Education , and the subsequent push for school desegregation and equality of education for African Americans. Further, it was not until the emergence of the Black Freedom Struggle of this era that White scholars began to publish scientific, linguistic studies of the rule-governed system of U. The pedagogical issue in the latter half of the twentieth century and continuing into this second decade of the twenty-first century continues to be how to achieve maximum language and literacy skills for African American students who use U.
Ebonics, in speech and in writing, and in and outside of the classroom—and at the same time, enhance their sociocultural, intellectual self-esteem and community rootedness. This challenge was addressed in the King v. Elementary school children to read in the [standardized English] of the school, the commercial world, the arts, science, and the professions. The parents of the children in the Martin Luther King Jr. Elementary School who brought a federal lawsuit against the Ann Arbor School District were a small group of single female heads of households.
While there were some other Black children at King School, they were middle class, like the White children at King School. The children from the Green Road housing project, being both Black and poor, were thus a minority within a minority at King School. Ebonics—the children were classified as learning disabled and assigned to speech correction classes. Teachers, administrators, counselors, supervisors, and curriculum developers must undergo training to provide them with adequate knowledge about Ebonics and help them overcome the prevailing stereotypes about the language and learning potential of African American students and others who speak Ebonics.
Ebonics reflects the Black experience and conveys Black traditions and socially real truths. Black Languages are crucial to Black identity. Black Language sayings, such as "What goes around comes around," are crucial to Black ways of being in the world. Black Languages, like Black lives, matter. Toward a new perspective in Negro English dialectology. American Speech , 40 3 , — South Atlantic Quarterly , 8, 39— Gullah stories of the Carolina Coast.
Anglia , 7, — The African heritage of American English. The English of the Negro. The American Mercury , 2, — The logic of non-standard English. National Council of Teachers of English. Word from the mother: Language and African Americans. Sociolinguistic factors in the history of American Negro dialects.
Florida FL Reporter , Spring, 2—4. Africanisms in the Gullah dialect. University of Chicago Press. The true language of Black folks. Institute of Black Studies; reissued, , by Robert L. Critical language awareness in the United States: Revisiting issues and revising pedagogies in a resegregated society. Educational Researcher , 34 7 , 24— Barack Obama, language, and race in the U.
Critical language pedagogy in an Advanced Placement English language arts class. Basic writing and African American rhetoric. Approaches to resistance in composition studies pp. Cultivating racial and linguistic diversity in literacy teacher education: Making connections in the contact zones: