Group items tagged

This article talks about how an Objiwe women built robots in order for the Native American children in her community (and others) to learn their indigenous culture and languages. It is so interesting to program a robot to speak a language to prevent indigenous languages from going endangered/extinct.

Beginning with Gangnam Style, followed by the success of K-pop groups such as BTS, interest in Korean popular culture has skyrocketed in the past decade. One way this has manifested is through a steep rise in individuals learning the Korean language. According to a study conducted by the Modern Language Association, U.S. college student enrollment in Korean language classes has risen 78% from 2009 to 2016, reaching 15,000, while total enrollment in language classes has plateaued in recent years. The only other widely learned language with significant growth in the span was American Sign Language, which increased enrollments by 37%. Despite this trend, East Asian Studies departments have struggled to accommodate the increasing demand for Korean classes. This is because Korean language classes have been historically limited and under-resourced due to the fact that language programs in East Asian Studies have traditionally focused on Mandarin and Japanese. Experts say that K-pop is the main reason for this trend, coupled with the success of several Korean TV shows and films such as Parasite and Squid Game. The current growing trend of interest in the Korean language and culture has also been an opportunity for South Korea to engage Americans in a variety of other sectors relating to the country including business, politics, economics, and history.

This article talks about how sarcasm is implemented across cultures and generations, but the nuances of sarcasm used changes with who it is used with and where. Most commonly participants of the study stated that they used sarcasm with friends and to "be funny".

This article, about the use of cultural references, made me think about the ways that language can be used to include or exclude people, also about the social dynamics that inform communication.

Dozens of countries, representing a wide range of languages, vie for the Eurovision song contest every year, but English has been by far the most dominant tongue, with 26 victories. So this year, Spain, which has not won since 1969, decided: If you can't beat them, join them. Spain's Eurovision entry will be sung entirely in English. This has sparked debate between people who embrace English as the language that will relate to more people and those who want Spain's entry to represent Spanish language and culture.

The Beijing dialect is disappearing, with a decreasing number of people speaking it, said Wan Jianzhong, a scholar at Beijing Normal University and municipal CPPCC member. "With an increasing number of migrants, the city is becoming less Beijing-like. Original residents are relocated and fewer people speak the dialect and live the old lifestyle," he said. Wan believes that to bring back Beijingers' memories and sentimental attachments to their old life and culture, the dialect should be promoted. The number of migrants reached 7.04 million by 2010, 35.9 percent of the city's population, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics. "Beijingers are being non-localized by migrants. They talk to people who speak different dialects and forget to use their own," said Wan. While Putonghua should be advocated among the greater public, local dialects should not be sacrificed, he noted.

Emojis, the smileys in Japanese electronic messages and web pages, earned their way into digital culture royalty just a few years back, when various developers created apps for mobile users to download that allowed them the option to add little picture messages into text conversations. When Apple introduced iOS 6, it allowed iPhone users to directly integrate emojis into their keyboard through the OS settings. Now, they're everywhere in pop culture.

This site is a link for the online edition of all languages that are in danger of becoming extinct or are extinct from 1950. It provides us with a rating of how much a language is endangered. Link to the online guide: http://www.unesco.org/culture/en/endangeredlanguages/atlas

Do the languages we speak shape the way we think? Do they merely express thoughts, or do the structures in languages (without our knowledge or consent) shape the very thoughts we wish to express? Take "Humpty Dumpty sat on a..."

ABSTRACT: The present investigation examined the impact of bicultural identity, bilingualism, and social context on the psychological adjustment of multicultural individuals.......We concluded that, in the process of managing multiple cultural environments and group loyalties, bilingual competence, and perceiving one's two cultural identities as integrated are important antecedents of beneficial psychological outcomes.

An article which describes the background and ideas behind Mark Pagel's book, "Wired for Culture" and how language is intertwined in our society and cultural background.

"The researchers first looked at hot spots-locations with an exceptionally high number of unique species that also has a loss of habitat of 70 percent or more. ... In these 35 hotspots-spread throughout the world's continents with the exception of Antarctica-the researchers found 3,202 languages-nearly half of all languages spoken on Earth. ... It's unclear why areas of endangered species concentration and endangered languages coexist. ... The study is a starting point to explore the relationship between biological and linguistic-cultural diversity."

Bicultural people may unconsciously change their personality when they switch languages, according to a US study on bilingual Hispanic women. It found that women who were actively involved in both English and Spanish speaking cultures interpreted the same events differently, depending on which language they speaking during that particular event.

Maltz and Borker argue that "American men and women come from different sociolinguistic subcultures, having learned to do different things with words in a conversation, so that when they attempt to carry on conversations with one another, even if both parties are attempting to treat one another as equals, cultural miscommunication results." Their article also provides a literature review of various studies examining male-female miscommunication. Here's the synopsis of the differences discovered in female vs. male conversation. Women generally 1. Display a greater tendency to ask questions. 2. Tend to facilitate and elicit interaction more. 3. Make greater use of positive minimal responses, e.g. "mm...I see", and insert them mid-conversation. 4. More likely to adopt a "silent protest" response to interruption 5. Greater tendency to use the pronouns "you" and "we", explicitly acknowledging the presence of the other. In contrast, men are 1. More likely to interrupt 2. More likely to challenge or dispute their partners' utterances 3. more likely to ignore the comments of the other speaker, that is, to offer no response or acknowledgment at all, or respond reluctantly 4. Utilize more mechanisms for controlling the topic of conversation 5. more likely to make direct declarations.

suggests that different languages have different rhythms, and that those rhythms are also reflected in the music of that culture

Perhaps this has to do with the babies crying study also? "...not only are human neonates capable of producing different cry melodies, but they prefer to produce those melody patterns that are typical for the ambient language they have heard during their foetal life."

"Every 14 days a language dies. By 2100, more than half of the more than 7,000 languages spoken on Earth ... may disappear." National Geographic wants to help by "identifying language hotspots ... and documenting the languages and cultures within them."

"A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal community that subsists on farming and hunting." Also has sound samples.

rather funny take on American metaphors from a Hungarian linguist

Check out the visualization: http://www.forbes.com/2010/12/21/speechome-interactive-visualization-language-acquisition.html "This interactive visualization provides a look into the most complete record of a single child's speech development ever created... But parentese is not universal. It varies between different parents and cultures, and in some cases has been reported to be absent altogether. What effect, then, does it have on child development? Answering this question could help guide better ways to help children that have difficulty learning language." With links to the actual studies at the bottom of the page.

"No other book, or indeed any piece of culture, seems to have influenced the English language as much as the King James Bible. Its turns of phrase have permeated the everyday language of English speakers, whether or not they've ever opened a copy."