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Trump plans executive order to make English the US’s official language

The order would also rescind a federal mandate issued that agencies and other recipients of federal funding are required to provide language assistance to non-English speakers

The US has never had a national language at the federal level in its almost 250-year history. Given the nation’s long history of taking in immigrants from around the world, hundreds of languages are spoken in homes and businesses across the US and Spanish is especially prevalent.

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What does this new study say?

In the new study, [geneticists] analyzed a trove of ancient skeletons from across Ukraine and southern Russia. Based on [DNA] data, the scientists argue that the Indo-European language started with the Yamnaya’s hunter-gatherer ancestors, known as the Caucasus-Lower Volga people, or CLV. The CLV people lived about 7,000 years ago in a region stretching from the Volga River in the north to the Caucasus Mountains in the south.

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Want to write an immortal message? Make it multilingual

[T]here are certain habits, values and decisions that may not exactly guarantee literary immortality – but at least, improve its chances.

The message should be multilingual, so there is a better chance for at least one of the languages to still be spoken in the distant future, says Philippa Steele, senior research associate in classics at the University of Cambridge, and an expert on the ancient scripts of Crete, Cyprus and Greece.

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Scientists who study human speech have spent decades debating how much of our ability is innate and how much is learned. The research adds to the evidence that human speech relies — at least in part — on biological "building blocks" that are present from birth.

That would explain why we are able to cry from birth, and why even our earliest cries are coordinated with breathing and contain the rhythm of adult speech.

The presence of cells that act as a sort of metronome for human speech would explain why people say about three to six syllables per second, no matter what language you're speaking. 

https://www.npr.org/sections/health-shots/2022/01/07/1071238203/crying-baby-mice-human-speech-brain-circuit

Research article in Neuron: “A novel reticular node in the brainstem synchronizes neonatal mouse crying with breathing” 

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Yilin Ye, a student from Anji, in the eastern province of Zhejiang, China, is spending time abroad at the University of Zaragoza in Spain.

Ye, 25, said she first started learning Spanish after having heard about its "excellent reputation." She said she feels she takes on a slightly different persona when she speaks Spanish.  

“When I'm speaking English, I'm probably a bit more open, and when I speak Spanish, I'm very 'wow.'" 

From donning Latino-inspired jewelry, like big hoops and gold cross necklaces, to dancing along to Latin rhythms and remixes, young people in China are embracing a culture that is bold, loud and a bit different from their own. 

"If you are the type that studies [a language] really hard, then you're definitely open-minded, lively and vivacious. You like coming into contact with new things," [Spanish teacher Lulu] Yang said. "Everything I know, every work opportunity or love story I've had, is thanks to my Spanish."

Read full article from NBCnews.com

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After years of painstaking work, Dr. Laughlin published The Great Tzotzil Dictionary of San Lorenzo Zinacantán, with 30,000 entries.

Indigenous languages in the region — there are many — had been under siege since the Spanish conquest, and Dr. Laughlin’s dictionary helped spur a revival of interest in them. The dictionary, published by the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, where Dr. Laughlin was curator of Mesoamerican ethnology, was not simply a compilation of which Tzotzil word equals which English word. It was a deep dive into word origins, how the language had mutated and more. 

Read the full article: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/06/24/science/robert-laughlin-preserver-of-a-mayan-language-dies-at-85.html 

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29 minutes long. Available online until late April 2020. The host will dissect and analyse language, foreign cultures and everything in between that gets misunderstood, with sometimes hilarious consequences. With insights from linguistics expert Dr Laura Bailey.

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Campbell's monkey, of West Africa, make[s] sounds rendered as "hok," for an eagle alarm, and "krak," for a leopard alarm. To each, they add an "-oo" suffix to turn those utterances into generalized aerial alarms and land alarms. 

[W]hen the Old World monkeys speak, they seem to use a part of the brain known as the frontal operculum. Human language is heavily associated with Broca's area, a part of the brain that seems to support more complex operations.

Humans' ability to harness Broca's area for language may specifically have enabled them to recombine language elements as other primates cannot—by enabling us to link more than two items together in speech.

"It seems like a huge leap," Miyagawa says. "But it may have been a tiny [physiological] change that turned into this huge leap."

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One area that's growing is medical interpretation. Carolina Fernandez is a team manager at Pure Language Services Inc. in Lexington [Kentucky]. And she wants everyone to know she's hiring.

"We are always looking for interpreters," she said. "Particularly we're looking for French, Swahili and Nepali."

Many of her company's clients are clinics and other medical centers. 

Seventy percent of the requests they get are for Spanish services, but they also work in Arabic, Mandarin, Ukrainian, Russian and Swahili.

read the full U.S. News and World Report article, “Growing International Community Ups Demand for Interpreters”

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Places that accept foreign words with a live-and-let-live attitude are the exceptions. Centuries ago, English, which seems undogmatic, itself experienced the “inkhorn controversy”, in which some intellectuals freely coined words from Greek and Latin, such as “educate” and “ostracise”. 

Purists fought back, coining terms like “witcraft” to replace borrowings like “reason”. Their attitude was exemplified by Sir John Cheke, who in 1557 wrote: “I am of the opinion that our tung should be written cleane and pure, vnmixt and vnmangled with borowing of other tunges.”

Most of the inkhornisms survived. These days, English has become so robust that it is no longer the polluted but the polluter. 

Read the full article from September 5, 2019 at TheEconomist.com.

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Now, the largest-ever study of ancient human DNA suggests that the answer may lie with a mass migration of Bronze Age herders who went westward to Europe and east to Asia. 

The role of population movements over the past 10,000 years was key to understanding linguistic changes and the transition from hunter-gatherer activities to farming.

A 2015 paper indicated that Indo-European languages – including Hindi-Urdu, Farsi, Russian, English, French, Gaelic and more than 400 others – arrived in Europe via the Eurasian Steppes.

In a new study just published in the journal Science, researchers detected genetic similarities suggesting that present-day speakers of Indo-Iranian and Balto-Slavic descend from a subgroup of steppe herders who moved west toward Europe 5,000 years ago, then spread back east to Central and South Asia in the following 1,500 years. 

September 5, 2019. Read the full article by Issam AHMED, AFP.

Image shows approximate present-day distribution of the Indo-European branches within their homelands of Europe and Asia. [Credit: Indo-European branches map.png: Hayden120 Georgia (orthographic–projection).svg: Giorgi Balakhadze, Flappiefh]

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Excerpt from a new article published in the September 4th edition of Science Advances:

"Surprisingly, we find robust evidence that some languages are spoken faster than others (for example, Japanese and Spanish speakers produce about 50 percent more syllables per second than Vietnamese and Thai speakers). 

Also, some languages 'pack' more information per syllable due to their phonology and grammar (for example, English has about 11 times more types of syllable than are possible in Japanese)," explains co‐author Dan Dediu. 

"However, more importantly, there is a trade‐off between the two such that 'information‐light' languages are spoken faster than the 'information‐dense' ones, balancing out at a rate of about 39 bits/second in all languages in our sample. Crazy, isn't it?" asks Dr. François Pellegrino, lead author of the study and expert in linguistic complexity. 

Read the full article by CRNS on phys.org > Read an additional article on the topic at theatlantic.com >

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Since last year, the tribe's youngest fluent Passamaquoddy speaker, Dwayne Tomah, has spent hours transcribing and interpreting each cylinder. He notes words and stories — even how the language has morphed over nearly 130 years. The work is then reviewed by a panel of other fluent Passamaquoddy speakers. Some pieces have been added to a curated digital website kept by the tribe.

After efforts to eradicate Native American culture and language, Tomah says this project is critical for passing Passamaquoddy culture to future generations.

"And I think that's really what the goal is, really, is to influence the children," he says. "Because they are really the key to passing this language on. And for them to continue it. So I think it needs to stem from them." 

Caption: Dwayne Tomah listens to and transcribes an old Passamaquoddy story from a digital copy of a wax cylinder recording. Tomah and others in the Passamaquoddy tribe are translating and interpreting the 129-year-old wax cylinder recordings, which have been digitally restored.                                 

Read the full article by Robbie Feinberg and Erin Slomski-Pritz 

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Excerpt: 

According to linguist Rutsely Simarra Obeso, more than 70 African languages were once spoken in Cartagena, which was a gateway to the slave trade.

Black men and women from different ethnic groups who had escaped slavery and settled in San Basilio de Palenque, Colombia, created Palenquero, a creole language, to communicate with each other.  

"With the language began an exercise of resistance," she says. "When you don't allow your language to disappear, future generations are going to have information about the elements that define your cultural identity, your ethnic identity."  

Read the full article by Victoria Stunt at www.bbc.com/news/world-latin-america-49471598.

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“We must act boldly and quickly on language preservation,” Chief Hoskin said. “If we fail to act now, Cherokees generations from now will be unimpressed by our health facilities. They will be unmoved by the size of our casinos. They will be bewildered as to why, in 2019, the great Cherokee Nation failed to do what was necessary to save our language. We cannot fail, we must not fail, and we will not fail.”

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The study compared two groups: 1. Single-language speakers from a county in Pennsylvania that is mostly rural and white, with few opportunities to overhear foreign languages  2. Single-language speakers from Southern California, where 44 percent of the population lives in a non-English-speaking home and there are many opportunities to overhear foreign languages

The study examined how single-language speakers responded neurally and behaviorally when presented with a new foreign language, in this case Finnish.

There was a marked difference between the Pennsylvania and Southern California subjects—evidenced by a brain wave known as anterior late positivity that appears after half a second—that's similarly seen in bilinguals.

Read the full article by Pat Harriman, University of California, Irvine,  at https://medicalxpress.com/news/2019-08-diverse-linguistic-environment-boosts-brain.html