Sociolinguistics
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 […]
Evolving First Names
Tweet Here are the first names of the 18 students in my fall class at Montclair State University: Carolyn, Melina, Pamela, Miguel, Nardeen, Kanequa, Julieth, Leslie, Alaysia, Carla, Milena (two Melinas!), Russell, Charles, Iyana, Kejdi, Aya, Klavdiya, Usman. I suspect that finding out the naming rituals in all of the cultures involved would require a couple of weeks of study; the “Charles,” for example, is a Charles IV. Investigating the meanings of […]
Definitions
Tweet This morning I had a discussion with my five-year-old granddaughter about believing in things. She believes in Jack Frost, the Tooth Fairy, Santa Claus, and Rapunzel. I explained why no human could have 14-foot-long hair like Rapunzel, not even the Sikhs who never cut their hair. As for Santa Claus, I told her I […]
The meaning of words
Tweet David Brooks writes a column in the New York Times today about a Google database of books published since 1500 which can be used to tot up word usage. He notes that words such as virtue, decency, conscience, honesty, patience, compassion, bravery, fortitude, faith, wisdom, and evil have been used with declining frequency since 1930. He further […]
Naming baby
Tweet My friend Pamela Satran has a delightful blog called Nameberry which is a treasure trove about peoples’ first names, in American culture. As illustrated below, it would be of limited use elsewhere. When my children were born, their father didn’t want any of the usual names and, since he was Australian, went searching in an […]
The modern “you”
Tweet Most of the argument is about the singular “they,” but the singular “you” also has an interesting genesis, and this article in The Economist tells the story, or at least part of the story. The article concludes that social change has brought about this language change, though it does not draw any conclusions about why social […]
The language of guns
Tweet We should watch our gun language. The New York Times has an article today, “In Gun Debate, Even Language Is Loaded,” documenting the pervasive gun references in our language. I speak six languages, and in thinking about each, I believe the article is correct — we have far more expressions, verbs, and nouns which […]
Food as a cultural marker
Tweet My friend Lillian is a Chinese-American chef who has been living in China for the past few years. She has seen more of the country than most native Chinese as she has traveled from restaurant to restaurant, market to market, farm to farm, tea plantation to tea plantation. She is planning to write a […]
More on the beginning of language
Tweet At the end of the 19th century, a Xam/San man (we call them “Bushmen”) in South Africa looked at a figure in a prehistoric rock painting and said “That’s a shaman!” (This account taken from The Mind in the Cave, by David Lewis-Williams, published by Thames & Hudson in 2002.) Nobody knows for certain […]