Vanishing Alaskan languages

Some American languages are endangered-- not English, but the languages of indigenous people of Alaska are threatened.

Krauss suggests the erosion of Native languages could be due to television, which is mostly English and ubiquitous in villages nowadays, and "the likely lethal effect of the 'No Child Left Behind' (federal school mandate), requiring proof of proficiency in English but not Native language."

But he also says that Yup'ik and Inupiaq are being retained at rates much higher than the Aleut and Indian languages. Yup'ik is particularly strong, he writes, accounting for "fully 93 percent of those who speak an Alaskan Native language."

English as a (sloppy) second language

The Economist writes about the book "The Last Lingua Franca" which postures that English will decline in importance.

English is expanding as a lingua-franca but not as a mother tongue. More than 1 billion people speak English worldwide but only about 330m of them as a first language, and this population is not spreading. The future of English is in the hands of countries outside the core Anglophone group. Will they always learn English?

Mr Ostler suggests that two new factors—modern nationalism and technology—will check the spread of English. The pragmatism of the Achaemenids and Mughals is striking because no confident modern nation would today make a foreign language official. Several of Britain’s ex-colonies once did so but only because English was a neutral language among competing native tongues. English has been rejected in other ex-colonies, such as Sri Lanka and Tanzania, where Anglophone elites gave way to Sinhala- and Swahili-speaking nationalists. In 1990 the Netherlands considered but rejected on nationalist grounds making English the sole language of university education.

English will fade as a lingua-franca, Mr Ostler argues, but not because some other language will take its place. No pretender is pan-regional enough, and only Africa’s linguistic situation may be sufficiently fluid to have its future choices influenced by outsiders. Rather, English will have no successor because none will be needed. Technology, Mr Ostler believes, will fill the need.

This argument relies on huge advances in computer translation and speech recognition. Mr Ostler acknowledges that so far such software is a disappointment even after 50 years of intense research, and an explosion in the power of computers. But half a century, though aeons in computer time, is an instant in the sweep of language history. Mr Ostler is surely right about the nationalist limits to the spread of English as a mother-tongue. If he is right about the technology too, future generations will come to see English as something like calligraphy or Latin: prestigious and traditional, but increasingly dispensable.

Making business English-only, in Korea

Some businesses in Korea have an English-only mandate.

The company plans to adopt English as the sole official language for all its employees in 2012, according to Kim Sung-dae, director of the OCI public relations office.

"The reason behind this is because exports already account for 80 to 90 percent" of sales, Kim told Yonhap.

The move, of course, comes with huge costs for the companies, not just in terms of money but also in time and energy as communications between their employees are often hampered by their poor English skills.

They, however, say it is a price they are willing to pay.

"We are still in the very early stages of the plan and there must be significant amounts of stress placed on our employees," said the official from Korea East-West Power Co.

"The point is to encourage our employees to continue learning until speaking English becomes natural or sort of a habit."

Voting with your tongue

Trilingual voting materials are now the law in Alameda County, Calif.

“The right to vote is the foundation of our democracy, and language barriers should never keep citizens from accessing that right,” Thomas E. Perez, assistant attorney general for the Justice Department's Civil Rights Division, said in a statement. The “agreement ensures that Alameda County’s Spanish- and Chinese-speaking citizens will be able to cast an effective ballot and successfully participate in the electoral process. I congratulate Alameda County for their earnest cooperation in resolving this matter.”

Piling on different tongues

A study from the University of Haifa shows that bilinguals have an easier time learning a third language.

This team of scholars also noted that the fact that the Russian speakers had better Hebrew skills than the Hebrew speakers themselves indicates that acquiring a mother tongue and preserving that language in a bilingual environment does not come at the expense of learning a second language -- Hebrew in this case. In fact, the opposite is true: fluency and skills in one language assist in the language acquisition of a second language, and possessing skills in two languages can boost the learning process of a third language.

"Gaining command of a number of languages improves proficiency in native languages," Prof. Abu-Rabia explained. "This is because languages reinforce one another, and provide tools to strengthen phonologic, morphologic and syntactic skills. These skills provide the necessary basis for learning to read.

Some just call it El Lay

LA Times looks back at the ways to pronounce the name of the city. In a campaign speech, Texas Gov. Rick Perry is the latest to fumble it. But there's a long line.

Mispronouncing L.A. is an old tradition.

"There is no other city in the world whose inhabitants so miserably and shamelessly, and with so many varieties of foolishness, miscall the name of the town they live in," author Charles Lummis wrote in 1914.

As early as 1880 the Chamber of Commerce issued this reminder to visitors (and residents):

The Lady would remind you, please

Her name is not Lost AN-jie-lees."

But what is the lady's name? It depends, of course, on whether one is talking about a Spanish or Anglicized pronunciation

In the early 1900s, The Times advocated the Spanish version, carrying a box by its editorial page masthead that proclaimed the way to say Los Angeles was Loce AHNG-hayl-ais.

English speakers who found that difficult could only be thankful that the city had shortened its original name, which some scholars believe was El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de los Angeles de Porciuncula.

The Times' campaign aside, the United States Board on Geographic Names decreed in 1934 that the name should be Anglicized to Loss AN-ju-less.

Radio station's niche is its "voice from nowhere"

The language of the Native American Blackfoot tribe has made a small radio station in Montana a regional force.

In the Blackfeet language, the station is Ksistsikam ayikinaan. That translates to "voice from nowhere," but you can call it Thunder Radio.

At 30-watts, the community radio station doesn't reach too far beyond Browning, but its impact is growing.

"What I've heard is, it's our own," station manager Lona Burns said. "The Blackfeet people have our own accent so I guess they enjoy that it sounds like them."

The DJs are preachers, teachers, students and others but have one important thing in common.

"Every single one has a positive outlook on life," Burns said. "Their programs transform into positive energy for the listeners."

Another bit of pre-Columbian America to disappear

Very few remnants of the tribal past exist. The Guardian (UK) documents the evaporation of another one: There are only 2 fluent speakers of a Mexican indigenous language and they're not speaking to each other.

The language of Ayapaneco has been spoken in the land now known as Mexico for centuries. It has survived the Spanish conquest, seen off wars, revolutions, famines and floods. But now, like so many other indigenous languages, it's at risk of extinction.

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.

"They don't have a lot in common," says Daniel Suslak, a linguistic anthropologist from Indiana University, who is involved with a project to produce a dictionary of Ayapaneco.

The paper links to UNESCO's list of endangered and extinct languages