Admittedly, learning a foreign language is not easy. There is a myth that intelligent people better while learning the language. Indeed, the ability of language learning is influenced by daily habits formed through discipline and self-awareness.

By Jane O’Brien BBC News, Washington

Listening in: foetuses in the last ten weeks of pregnancy can process human speech

Babies are born with the ability to recognise familiar sounds and language patterns, according to new research. A glimpse into the fast-moving minds of infants.

Mastering a foreign language can be a frustrating experience and one that gets harder as we age. The younger you start, the easier it seems to be.

Now researchers in the US and Sweden have found evidence that we start learning language before we’re even born.

The study discovered that in the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, foetuses are listening to their mothers communicate. And when they are born, they can show what they’ve heard.

Continue reading →

Eurasiatic languages from Portugal to Siberia form ‘superfamily’ with root in southern Europe 15,000 years ago, scientists claim

The words for bark in at least four of the languages studied were found to have a common root. Photograph: Alamy

Languages spoken by billions of people across Europe and Asia are descended from an ancient tongue uttered in southern Europe at the end of the last ice age, according to research.

The claim, by scientists in Britain, points to a common origin for vocabularies as varied as English and Urdu, Japanese and Itelmen, a language spoken along the north-eastern edge of Russia.

The ancestral language, spoken at least 15,000 years ago, gave rise to seven more that formed an ancient Eurasiatic “superfamily”, the researchers say. These in turn split into languages now spoken all over Eurasia, from Portugal to Siberia.

“Everybody in Eurasia can trace their linguistic ancestry back to a group, or groups, of people living around 15,000 years ago, probably in southern Europe, as the ice sheets were retreating,” said Mark Pagel, an evolutionary biologist at Reading University.

Continue reading →

Could the U.S. become bilingual? (shutterstock)

Luis Clemens in his well-crafted, and truly thought-provoking post in CodeSwitch (April 28, 2013), hits us hard with the question: “Will Spanish survive as a language widely spoken by Latinos in the United States?” My answer is “no”, as I have stated often in several of my writings… but I have a plausible and arguable scheme to make it survive.

Luis Clemens’ arguments can be found in my earlier post at VOXXI, “Boston Globe’s Jeff Jacoby’s misguided fears of Spanish,” where I discuss Gabriel Gomez’s run for the US senate, speaking “lousy” Spanish, as Mr. Clemens calls inadequate knowledge of the language. In his article Luis Clemens charges against actor Vin Diesel.

He is right: by third generation, Spanish, or any other language, becomes so diluted it ends up boiling down to “gracias”, “mi gente” and other similar expressions. He also points out that “Certainly, there are thousands and thousands of Latino parents who are working hard to ensure the language of Cervantes thrives in the United States.” In my article “Keeping the Hispanic Heritage”, VOXXI, July 25, 2012, I explained about the University of California, Riverside, and Dr. James Parr’s efforts to bring Hispanics to Madrid to improve their Spanish Language and learn about their roots. No small feat. But the effort is there.

Continue reading →

To paraphrase John Donne: No language is an island, entire of itself. And the death of a language diminishes all of us because languages are part of mankind.

In more ways than one, languages are intertwined and not one escapes the influence of other tongues. Dominant languages, world languages, borrow heavily from less favored ones, less favored economically or politically, of course, which in turn pilfer terminology from their big brothers. This has been going on since the dawn of our species but now the interrelationships are more numerous and faster. For good or for bad, we have now a small world, a truly smaller world.

It has been said that a more powerful and developed culture imposes its language on the underdogs. Not so.

Spanish and English belong to two different language branches. The former is a Romance language that evolved from Latin, like French, Portuguese, Italian, for example. The latter is Germanic and arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England. It is, of course, related to Dutch and German. These facts are well known.

Continue reading →

The Thai and Cambodian governments are locked in a contentious legal case over disputed border territory, but at the social level, the shared cultural space of the two neighbours is evident and inevitable. As an example, we talk to a Thai woman who teaches Khmer to Thais and a Cambodian man who taught himself Thai from childhood _ and they believe there will be no winners or losers, no matter how the court rules.

Sompen Krutanon speaks Khmer as fluently as she does Thai. Born in the Northeast and once a resident of Phnom Penh, she returned to Bangkok two years ago and is now teaching Khmer language courses at Chandrakasem Rajabhat University and privately. In the process she’s become a small bridge that can perhaps narrow the perceived difference between the two nations.

Continue reading →

Antonio de Nebrija. (inversolucionesmalaga.com)

English language borrowings from Spanish began earlier than people might think, probably as soon as Spain became a vast Empire and its weight in the world awed European nations. Perhaps it all started in 1492 with the discovery of America and Antonio de Nebrija’s Spanish Grammar (Gramática castellana), the first in a vulgar language.

Dr. John Simpson, Editor-in-Chief of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the most influential lexicographer in English, favored me with a prologue for my “The New Dictionary of Current Sayings and Proverbs, English and Spanish” where he says: “My introduction to Spanish proverbs occurred when I was working on the letter A for the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs. The earliest piece of evidence I had for the proverb. It takes all sorts to make a world come from Thomas Shelton’s seventeenth-century English translation of Don Quixote: ‘In the world there must be of all sorts.’ I think the information has stuck with me all these years because I wasn’t expecting the first reference to an English proverb to come from a Spanish source. I’m not sure why I wasn’t expecting this: After all, English (at least since the Norman Conquest) shares much of its … heritage with the countries of continental Europe.”

Continue reading →

In a recent news story, a first-base umpire threatened to eject players and a coach from a baseball game for speaking Spanish. His demand was not in response to any complaint being registered, rather, the English-speaking official’s objection ultimately was rooted in his own personal inability to understand what was being said.

The umpire’s protest underlies a common misconception about being bilingual. Many who speak only one language assume that a bilingual’s language use is the result of a conscious choice. Consequently, it’s often presumed that if a Spanish-English bilingual uses Spanish in the presence of someone who speaks only English, they must have intentionally chosen to do so in an effort to conceal something from the English speaker. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Continue reading →