August, 2013

German and English

Tweet German-speaking friends are visiting us. Their vocabularies, cultural knowledge, and structural command of English are impressive, and we speak together fluently. This afternoon we worked on the little bit of accent that remains in my friend’s English speech.  It involves voicing the “g” of “German” or of “joy,” and getting used to pronouncing “th.” […]

Paper Literacy vs. Digital Communication

Tweet My aunt keeps everything. Her house had children’s toys and underwear from 120 years ago. I sold her car yesterday, and had to rummage through all the storage spaces to be sure I had gotten everything. I found this rumpled artifact. It instructs the driver to put this in the front or back window […]

Rapping in Sami

Tweet Sami is a language spoken by about 20,000 people around the Arctic Circle.  Santa Claus would bark out his orders to his reindeer in Sami. Such languages are fast disappearing, and only local energy and devotion can keep them alive, supported by enlightened language policies. Why it is in our interest to keep these […]

Problems with multilingualism

Tweet Karina is from Prague and spoke Czech in her family growing up. She attended high school in Frankfurt and speaks accent-free German. She now lives in Vienna and she and her husband are raising their children bilingual – Czech and German.  She spent her junior high school year in Maine and speaks almost perfect […]