Speak Christian!

Rapayet Pushaina thinks he is about 80 years old; he is pretty sure he was not born on 31 December, and he is absolutely certain his name is not Iron Scraper.

But that is the information that appeared on his Colombian national ID card for more than 50 years.

Pushaina, an elder of his clan of Wayúu Native Americans, who live in the deserts of the north-western Guajira peninsula, chafes at the mockery of a name that was given to him by an official of the national registry office who went to his remote village 50 years ago.

"I don't want to be Raspahierro [Iron Scraper], I am Rapayet," he said through his Spanish-speaking granddaughter.

He is one of thousands of Wayúu Indians who were given derisive names, according to Estercilia Simanca, a Wayúu lawyer.

"In some cases there may have been a misunderstanding but in others it was clearly intentional," she said.

Wayúu ID cards show names such as Arrancamuelas (Tooth Puller), Bolsillo (Pocket), Cabezón (Big Head), Chichí (Piss), Coito (Coitus), Gorila (Gorilla), Monja (Nun), Payaso (Clown) and Teléfono (Telephone).

Others are Alka-Seltzer, Land Rover, Marilyn Monroe and Tarzan.

Most neither speak nor read Spanish so were unaware of the mockery. The Wayúu native tongue is an Arawak language.

They do not use the Gregorian calendar either, but rather mark dates with knots on a yarn. Because of this, registry officials opted to give everyone the same birth date: 31 December.

"Since I was little, I thought it was strange that all my family had the same birthday," Simanca said.

She has conducted an investigation into the apparently widespread practice of making up names and birth dates and estimates about 70% of Pushaina's generation were given humiliating names by visiting registry officials, and nearly all were listed as having been born on 31 December.

Pushaina only became aware of his "official" name when he began to attend meetings with NGO and government officials about 10 years ago as a representative of his community.

"At first I thought they were pronouncing my name wrong," he said. Then he realised that what was on his ID card was a twisted joke.

Film-maker Priscilla Padilla has documented the abuses in a documentary called Born on 31 December, which was screened last month in Bogotá.

The Colombian registry office has said it does not know how or why the changes to names and birth dates – the bulk of which happened in the 1960s and 70s – were made, and has promised an investigation.

The director of the office, Carlos Ariel Sanchez, vowed to "correct the names that make people uncomfortable or that are ridiculous".

Simanca said she was encouraged by the official statement but that name changes were too costly for most Wayúu, who live in remote rural areas and can hardly afford travel and legal costs which can add up to more than 200,000 pesos (£67).

"Just like they have ID card drives where they go from village to village registering people, they should send out officials to rectify the names," she said.

Pushaina is now privileged among his clan. With the help of Simanca and Padilla, he was able to reclaim his true name.

He says he is happy with his new card. "Now no one can make fun of me any more."

Language Transformed Humanity

Integrate, Learn The Language

Stroll around Carmarthen market and it quickly becomes clear how important the Welsh language is in this historic town. A young woman is discussing the price of lamb with a butcher in animated Welsh while a teenager in a hoodie is in the bookshop choosing a greetings card in the same language. At the cafe's busy tables there is little evidence of any English at all being spoken.

But language campaigners and many Welsh-speaking residents are warning such vibrancy could be lost if proposals to build thousands of new homes in Carmarthenshire go ahead.

The county council's local development plan makes the case that projected increases in population mean more than 11,000 new homes are needed in this corner of south-west Wales, including 1,200 on the edge of Carmarthen.

The fear among many proud locals is that the majority of the people moving in will not speak Welsh, a change that would pose a "huge threat" to the language.

Town councillor and sheriff Alun Lenny said the language was a fundamental part of Carmarthen life. "Thousands of people live their lives through the medium of Welsh," he said. "It's part of our being. People use Welsh when they shop, when they worship, when they socialise. Much of civic life is carried out in Welsh. It's not a superficial, quirky element."

Lenny says the plans could increase the size of the town, which has about 15,000 residents, by a fifth. "Since the 60s, there has been a constant battle to maintain the language as part of the fabric of present life and society," he said. "These plans threaten to throw all that out of kilter if many hundreds of people who don't speak Welsh – and don't wish to – suddenly move in."

Carmarthen has a wonderfully rich history. It claims to be the oldest town in Wales and the birthplace of Merlin (Myrddin in Welsh), the legendary Welsh prophet and wizard. The Romans and Normans built fortifications here and the Black Book of Carmarthen, a collection of poetry, is one of the earliest surviving manuscripts written solely in Welsh. Just over 50% of the county's population speak Welsh.

In the 1980s there was an influx of people looking to break away from English and Welsh cities, but they tended to be younger people with families who, if anything, gave the language a boost because they put children into the local schools, where they learnt Welsh.

The fear is that the next wave of new arrivals will be older people, retiring to Carmarthenshire, attracted by the relatively low property prices and the proximity of lovely countryside and beaches. But, it is felt, many of them will not bother to learn the language.

Sioned Elin, the Carmarthenshire chair of the Welsh language campaign group Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg, called for the south-west Wales development to be scrapped, claiming no thorough assessments had been made on the impact of housing developments on the language. "Such assessments would have almost certainly shown a huge threat," she said.

Cymdeithas yr Iaith Gymraeg says what is happening in Carmarthenshire is just one example of a "national crisis". Similar protests against developments are taking place in other areas, including Denbighshire in north-east Wales, where councillors have approved proposals for thousands of new homes. The fear there is that they will be grabbed by commuters from Cheshire and Liverpool.

The Plaid Cymru MEP Jill Evans has raised her concerns with the European Parliament about the Denbighshire plans and is backing the launch of a national movement – calling itself Waking the Dragon – against such developments.

Over the summer, the Welsh assembly government has consulted over new proposals to specify how the language issue should be factored into the local planning process. It accepts the impact of "demographic change" ought to be taken into account. The results of the consultation are being analysed and assembly members are expected to examine them in the autumn.

In its development plan, Carmarthenshire insists that any proposals will have to take the language issue into account. Developers, for example, will have to submit a "linguistic impact assessment or statement" as part of planning applications.

If problems are anticipated, "mitigation measures" such as making sure a number of homes are affordable to local people or providing "support for the language within the community" should be established.

But the plan says that it has to identify new sites for housing and businesses for the good of Carmarthenshire.

Clive Scourfield, the county council's executive board member for regeneration, accepted it was inevitable that many people arriving in the area would not speak Welsh. He urged communities to encourage newcomers to learn the language.

Back in Carmarthen market, Llio Silyn, who runs the Welsh bookshop, said she was worried that young people would not be able to afford the new homes and be squeezed out. "We haven't got anything against people from Cardiff or from England, but the worry is that they will come and push our young people out."

Silyn, who appeared in Hedd Wyn, an Oscar-nominated Welsh language film, said Welsh was vital to the area and its people: "It's a big part of who we are and our place in the world."

Language that refuses to die

• Welsh is a Celtic language, closely related to Cornish and Breton. The Welsh spoken today is directly descended from the language of the sixth century.

• The passing of the 1536 and 1542 Acts of Union made English the language of law and administration of government. Although the Welsh language was not banned, it lost its status and centuries of steady linguistic decline followed.

• Until the mid-19th century, the majority of the Welsh population could speak Welsh – more than 80%.

• The 2001 census showed that 20.8% of the population was able to speak Welsh (582,400 people), an increase compared to the 1991 census (18.7%).

• Welsh-speaking heartlands include Carmarthenshire in the south-west, Gwynedd, Anglesey, Conwy, Denbighshire in the north and Ceredigion in the west.

• The number of communities where more than 70% of the population was able to speak Welsh dropped to 54 according to the 2001 census, compared with 92 in 1991. It is argued that a high density of speakers is required for Welsh to be an everyday language of the community.

• Migration has had a profound effect on traditional heartlands, with many Welsh-speaking young people moving to urban areas to work, coupled with the arrival of people unable to speak Welsh.

Sources: Welsh Language Board; Welsh Assembly Government

The Berbers

IN MOROCCO their language has been made official. In Algeria they lead protests against President Abdelaziz Bouteflika’s regime. In Tunisia they are rediscovering a long-suppressed identity. In Libya they man the rebels’ western front in the mountains south of the capital still held by Muammar Qaddafi. Even in Egypt’s oasis of Siwa, near Libya’s border, Berbers are finding that the revolution has given them a chance to revive their cultural rights.

“There is a Berber renaissance taking place across north Africa,” enthuses Mounir Kejji, a Moroccan Berber campaigner. In his country a new constitution, endorsed in a referendum on July 1st, officially recognises the Berber language for the first time, though parliament will decide what this means in practice; Arab nationalists and many Islamists have long demanded that Arabic be the sole language of administration and state education.

The authoritarian Arab nationalist regimes that dominated the region used to accuse the Berbers of threatening national cohesion. Now, shaken and in some cases overthrown, they have seen Berber activism take on a new lease of life. Even where they are a minority of only a few thousand, as in Egypt and Tunisia, Berbers have been able for the first time to form community associations.

Libya’s rebellion is fiercest in the Nafusa Mountains, a Berber heartland long neglected by the government. Colonel Qaddafi has refused to acknowledge Berber culture for most of his reign, describing it as “colonialism’s poison” intended to divide the country. Only in 2006, apparently after his son Seif al-Islam intervened, did he lift a ban on the use of Berber names.

Berbers make up about 5% of Libya’s 6m-7m people, though some activists put the figure higher. In recent weeks they have set up a radio station. The rebel-controlled Libya TV, based in Qatar, now broadcasts in Tamazight, the Berber tongue, for two hours a day. In June, says Mr Kejji, a delegation of Libyan Berbers affiliated to the rebels’ Transitional National Council put a linguistic query to their Moroccan counterparts: how should they write “army”and “national security” in Tamazight, so that Libyan uniforms could have a badge in their own language alongside Arabic?

A written script for the various Berber dialects was created only in the 20th century. Algeria’s Kabyles, a Berber people said to number 4m, have usually preferred the Latin alphabet, whereas a Tuareg alphabet, called Tifinagh, is now officially used in Morocco and has been adopted by Libyan Berbers who were banned from using it under the colonel. (The Tuareg are nomadic Berber pastoralists living mainly in southern Algeria, eastern Mali and western Niger.)

The Berber revival has rekindled enthusiasm for pan-Berber solidarity. “There’s an awareness among Berbers across north Africa of that element of their identity which they share,” says Hugh Roberts, an expert on the Maghreb. But each country in the region, he says, has its own particularities. The dream of creating a community of 20m-plus people (estimates of the total vary widely), stretching from Egypt’s western desert to the Atlantic, would be stymied by the multiplicity of Berber dialects and by the variety of political circumstances. “A single Berber identity exists only virtually—on the internet and among diaspora intellectuals,” says Mr Roberts.

Babel or Babble?

WHERE do languages come from? That is a question as old as human beings’ ability to pose it. But it has two sorts of answer. The first is evolutionary: when and where human banter was first heard. The second is ontological: how an individual human acquires the power of speech and understanding. This week, by a neat coincidence, has seen the publication of papers addressing both of these conundrums.

Quentin Atkinson, of the University of Auckland, in New Zealand, has been looking at the evolutionary issue, trying to locate the birthplace of the first language. Michael Dunn, of the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics in the Netherlands, has been examining ontology. Fittingly, they have published their results in the two greatest rivals of scientific journalism. Dr Atkinson’s paper appears in Science, Dr Dunn’s in Nature.

Travellers’ tales

The obvious place to look for the evolutionary origin of language is the cradle of humanity, Africa. And, to cut a long story short, it is to Africa that Dr Atkinson does trace things. In doing so, he knocks on the head any lingering suggestion that language originated more than once.

One of the lines of evidence which show humanity’s African origins is that the farther you get from that continent, the less diverse, genetically speaking, people are. Being descended from small groups of relatively recent migrants, they are more inbred than their African forebears.

Dr Atkinson wondered whether the same might be true of languages. To find out, he looked not at genes but at phonemes. These are the smallest sounds which differentiate meaning (like the “th” in thin; replace it with “f” or “s” and the result is a different word). It has been known for a while that the less widely spoken a language is, the fewer the phonemes it has. So, as groups of people ventured ever farther from their African homeland, their phonemic repertoires should have dwindled, just as their genetic ones did.

To check whether this is the case, Dr Atkinson took 504 languages and plotted the number of phonemes in each (corrected for recent population growth, when significant) against the distance between the place where the language is spoken and 2,500 putative points of origin, scattered across the world. The relationship that emerges suggests the actual point of origin is in central or southern Africa (see chart), and that all modern languages do, indeed, have a common root.

That fits nicely with the idea that being able to speak and be spoken to is a specific adaptation—a virtual organ, if you like—that is humanity’s killer app in the struggle for biological dominance. Once it arose, Homo sapiens really could go forth and multiply and fill the Earth.

The details of this virtual organ are the subject of Dr Dunn’s paper. Confusingly, though, for this neat story of human imperialism, his result challenges the leading hypothesis about the nature of the language organ itself.

Grammar or just rhetoric?

The originator of that hypothesis is Noam Chomsky, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Dr Chomsky argues that the human brain comes equipped with a hard-wired universal grammar—a language instinct, in the elegant phrase of his one-time colleague Steven Pinker. This would explain why children learn to speak almost effortlessly.

The problem with the idea of a language instinct is that languages differ not just in their vocabularies, which are learned, but in their grammatical rules, which are the sort of thing that might be expected to be instinctive. Dr Chomsky’s response is that this diversity, like the diversity of vocabulary, is superficial. In his opinion grammar is a collection of modules, each containing assorted features. Switching on a module activates all these features at a stroke. You cannot pick and choose within a module.

For instance, languages in which verbs precede objects will always have relative clauses after nouns; a language cannot have one but not the other. A lot of similar examples were collected by Joseph Greenberg, a linguist based at Stanford, who died in 2001. And, though Greenberg himself attributed his findings to general constraints on human thought rather than to language-specific switches in the brain, his findings also agree with the Chomskyan view of the world. Truly testing that view, though, is hard. The human brain cannot easily handle the connections that need to be made to do so. Dr Dunn therefore offered the task to a computer. And what he found surprised him.

Place your bets

To find out which linguistic features travel together, and might thus be parts of Chomskyan modules, means drawing up a reliable linguistic family tree. That is tricky. Unlike biologists, linguists do not have fossils to guide them through the past (apart from a few thousand years of records from the few tongues spoken by literate societies). Also, languages can crossbreed in a way that species do not. English, for example, is famously a muddle of German, Norse and medieval French. As a result, linguists often disagree about which tongues belong to a particular family.

To leap this hurdle, Dr Dunn began by collecting basic vocabulary terms—words for body parts, kinship, simple verbs and the like—for four large language families that all linguists agree are real. These are Indo-European, Bantu, Austronesian (from South-East Asia and the Pacific) and Uto-Aztecan (the native vernaculars of the Americas). These four groups account for more than a third of the 7,000 or so tongues spoken around the world today.

For each family, Dr Dunn and his team identified sets of cognates. These are etymologically related words that pop up in different languages. One set, for example, contains words like “night”, “Nacht” and “nuit”. Another includes “milk” and “Milch”, but not “lait”. The result is a multidimensional Venn diagram that records the overlaps between languages.

Which is fine for the present, but not much use for the past. To substitute for fossils, and thus reconstruct the ancient branches of the tree as well as the modern-day leaves, Dr Dunn used mathematically informed guesswork. The maths in question is called the Markov chain Monte Carlo (MCMC) method. As its name suggests, this spins the software equivalent of a roulette wheel to generate a random tree, then examines how snugly the branches of that tree fit the modern foliage. It then spins the wheel again, to tweak the first tree ever so slightly, at random. If the new tree is a better fit for the leaves, it is taken as the starting point for the next spin. If not, the process takes a step back to the previous best fit. The wheel whirrs millions of times until such random tweaking has no discernible effect on the outcome.

When Dr Dunn fed the languages he had chosen into the MCMC casino, the result was several hundred equally probable family trees. Next, he threw eight grammatical features, all related to word order, into the mix, and ran the game again.

The results were unexpected. Not one correlation persisted across all language families, and only two were found in more than one family. It looks, then, as if the correlations between grammatical features noticed by previous researchers are actually fossilised coincidences passed down the generations as part of linguistic culture. Nurture, in other words, rather than nature. If Dr Dunn is correct, that leaves Dr Chomsky’s ideas in tatters, and raises questions about the very existence of a language organ. You may be sure, though, that the Chomskyan heavy artillery will be making its first ranging shots in reply, even as you read this article. Watch this space for further developments.

Maps Of The Day

Does Belgium Exist?

PITY the books of Leuven, a seat of learning since 1425. The Dutch humanist Erasmus taught at the university; Mercator, the Flemish cartographer who projected the globe, learnt maths there. But besides intellectual ferment, Leuven has known much cultural vandalism. Some manuscripts were carted to Paris when French revolutionaries closed the university. The library was set ablaze by the Germans in the first world war. It was rebuilt with international (mainly American) help, and burnt again in the second world war.

In 1968, though, it was the Belgians themselves who cleft the book collection during their language wars. To Flemish students’ cries of Walen Buiten (“Walloons Out”), the French-speaking bit of the university was ejected. The library’s 1.6m books were divided, often by the crude expedient of keeping odd-numbered tomes in Leuven and sending even-numbered ones to the new campus of Louvain-la-Neuve, in French-speaking Wallonia.

The 1968 partition divided the Catholic church (both universities are Catholic) and brought down the government. Belgium’s conservative Catholic party split into Francophone and Flemish halves, followed by the liberals and the socialists. Belgian politics became tribal, with each party championing its own linguistic agenda. Over the years these rows have turned Belgium into a near-ungovernable federation, with powers devolved downwards. The Belgian state has become a hollowed-out shell, with a little-loved flag and a forlorn sovereign, Albert II, who could yet end up as the last king of the Belgians—indeed, the last Belgian.

Related topics

• Brussels
• Culture and lifestyle
• French language
• Language and linguistics
• Flanders

Chronic bickering since the election in June 2010 has left a caretaker government in office for 230 days and counting, a European record. Belgium is on course to beat Iraq’s 289 days without a government. Yet the country has so many layers of administration that daily life goes on. Belgian ministers made a decent fist of their country’s six-month rotating presidency of the European Union in the second half of 2010. Eurocrats in Brussels are only faintly aware of living in a paralysed country. And, despite a few recent wobbles, the bond markets seem largely unconcerned about Belgium’s giant public debt of close to 100% of GDP. It was only on January 23rd that Belgian students organised protest rallies to urge their country’s politicians to get a move on.

The world gives little thought to Belgium. Yet it may soon have to pay more attention. As the crisis drags on, a break-up of Belgium looks less unthinkable than it was. The effects would be felt far beyond the fantasy world of Tintin and Magritte’s bowler-hatted men falling from the sky.

Paradoxically the slow dissolution of Belgium, the most pro-European of countries, goes hand in hand with the (uneven) deeper integration of the EU. Belgium is facing its worst troubles just as the EU confronts the gravest challenge to the euro. One way of looking at Belgium’s divide is as a counterpart to the EU’s split between a Germanic, frugal north and a subsidy-dependent Latin south. Financial markets stand ready to dump Belgian bonds at any hint of formal partition, because of uncertainty over who would repay the country’s debts. But, for the moment, the euro gives all parties the luxury of intransigence. Without it, the stalemate might have triggered a run on the Belgian franc.

Today’s blockage is unlike previous ones in that an avowedly separatist party, the New Flemish Alliance (N-VA), has for the first time become dominant in Flanders. Led by Bart de Wever, a charismatic bruiser, the N-VA’s appeal stems precisely from popular exasperation with the messy, unsatisfying compromises of the older political groups. It wants a decisive shift of powers to Flanders, and makes little secret of its wish to see Belgium “evaporate” within the EU. Danny Pieters, the N-VA president of the Belgian Senate, says he sees no need for a Flemish army: one day Belgian forces will be part of a European one. For the N-VA, Europe is the acid that will help to dissolve Belgium.

Strangely, perhaps, this same erosion of sovereignty is seen as an antidote to violent nationalism. European integration overcame the historic enmity between France and Germany. Ireland’s entry into the EU helped to end the worst of Northern Ireland’s sectarian war. In the Balkans, the EU offers the balm of membership to heal the trauma of the Yugoslav wars. But is this not all romantic nonsense when Belgium, a founder of the EU as well as the host to its capital, struggles to hold together? No, says Mark Leonard, director of the European Council on Foreign Relations, a think-tank. By “taking the gun out of politics”, the EU has contradictory effects. It makes it easier to draw violent groups into politics; but it also allows peaceful nationalists to act up, and voters to support them, because there is no danger of bloodshed.

Put the carving knife away

This does not mean that Belgium can dissect itself without anybody worrying. Spain and Italy would not be the only places to fret about the precedent of rich regions pulling away from poorer ones. Scottish nationalists speak of independence within Europe. Many ex-communist countries have big national minorities: think of Hungarians in Slovakia. Redraw Belgium and break the mystique of European tolerance—and one creates doubts across much of the EU’s eastern swathe.

Changing national borders only rarely resolves nationalist and ethnic disputes. Where communities overlap, tolerance, minority rights, autonomy and cross-border co-operation are better democratic tools. Take Brussels. If Flanders breaks away from Belgium, could Brussels, officially bilingual but overwhelmingly Francophone, leave Flanders? Indeed, this conundrum offers the best hope that, in the end, Flemings and Walloons will live together somehow. Splitting a city is harder than breaking up a university—luckily for Belgium, and perhaps for Europe.

Trapped in the Anglosphere

Saul Steinberg's 1976 New Yorker magazine cover of the world as viewed from New York City still adorns many walls in many homes in many countries. With the Manhattan streets drawn in close detail, the Hudson river in the middle distance and China on the far horizon, Steinberg's illustration brilliantly captures Big Apple narcissism. It deserves its much-imitated iconic status.

But how would a similar map of the world refracted through the mindset of London's metropolitan elite look in 2010? The City in the foreground, obviously. Perhaps Kensington eliding into the Cotswolds or the Welsh Marches in the near middle-distance. A strip of ocean with America looming large behind it. And, er, that's it.

There would be no place for Scotland or Ireland in this map. No surprise there, perhaps. More strikingly – and more surprisingly if compared with the kind of mental map that might have been drawn 20 years ago – there would be no place for continental Europe either. Not France, not Italy even. Certainly not Germany or Scandinavia. As for Russia, forget it. All out of mind. All out of sight.

It is hard to recall a time when the national, not just the London, mind was less informed about or engaged with Europe than it is today. Europe may still be this country's major export market. Millions may still take holidays there. Our football teams may still battle for the glamour of being "in Europe". In the larger sense, though, being in Europe has never impinged less.

This is not primarily a question of the rise and fall or marginalisation of the European Union. Clearly the union's diminished role helps to make Europe a harder sell. If the EU were more dynamic and effective – if it got its act together on common energy policy or with a shared global strategy for European universities, or even, however improbably, on defence or economic policy – then the current sense of Eurolassitude might be lessened.

But the national mental disengagement with Europe is not primarily political. It has grown independently of any events in Brussels. What we are experiencing is, above all, a cultural change. And it is being driven by our use of – and the commercial priorities of – all forms of new media.

The online information age, which should, in theory, have been expected to facilitate greater mental and cultural pluralism and thus, among other things, greater familiarity with European languages and cultures, has, in practice, had the reverse effect. The power of the English language, at once our global gift and our great curse, discourages us from engaging with those – the 93% of the world who speak some other first language than English and the 75% who have no English of any kind – outside the all-conquering online Anglosphere.

In the 20th century, political, cultural and intellectual Europe was a reality. Sometimes a threat, often an opportunity, but always a presence. That's not true now. In the 21st century, to a degree we seem slow to recognise, let alone think about, our minds have never been more narrowly oriented towards the English-speaking world, above all the US. For us, global vision is increasingly also tunnel vision.

This struck me most recently over the death in a plane crash last week of the former US senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska. Even a decade ago, the death of a former US senator, and especially one from a place like Alaska, which, as the cold and exhausted crow flies, is the best part of 5,000 miles from where most of us are sitting, would barely have registered in the British media. These days, though, anything that is a big story in the US media seamlessly becomes a big story in the wider Anglosphere too. The result is that most people in this country can name more Alaskan politicians than they can name Dutch ones.

And now it is not just America. Tomorrow there is a general election in Australia. An interesting event, of course. One of the few centre-left governments of the modern era, and now with a woman leader, battling to withstand a rightwing challenge led by a climate change sceptic. But it is getting far more coverage in Britain than any Australian election in my memory. Why? Not because it is more important, but simply because they speak English.

Don't get this wrong. It is good that people in Britain are being informed about the politics of Alaska and are getting engaged in the politics of Queensland. It's just that I want them to be interested in the politics of the Pas de Calais and to be informed about those of Lower Saxony, too. But these bits are simply not happening. Mental fog in the Channel; continent cut off.

This autumn we will be bombarded with news about the US midterm elections. Fair enough. These are significant elections in the world's most powerful country. But if we are to be intelligent and rounded beings we also need to be well informed about and engaged with elections in places much nearer to home, and especially those that arguably have more to tell us about the temper of the times in our part of the world – like those in Sweden next month – above all.

But that is not going to happen as long as we are voluntarily imprisoned in the Anglosphere. Yesterday, once again, the latest generation got fewer A-levels in French, German, Russian and Spanish than the generation before. Next week, there will be fewer GCSEs in modern languages too. The trend is inexorable. We are cutting ourselves off from the world. Another New Yorker cartoon, this time by Robert Mankoff, comes irresistibly to mind. A woman is talking to a man at a cocktail party. She asks: "One question: if this is the information age, how come nobody knows anything?"

The answer is simple. They are speaking to us from outside the Anglosphere but we no longer understand them. The internet – on which we all spend so much of our time, as Ofcom reported this week – is in danger of becoming Britain's staycation of the mind.

Endangered Languages

Stephen Pax Leonard will soon swap the lawns, libraries and high tables of Cambridge University for three months of darkness, temperatures as low as -40C and hunting seals for food with a spear.

But the academic researcher, who leaves Britain this weekend, has a mission: to take the last chance to document the language and traditions of an entire culture.

"I'm extremely excited but, yes, also apprehensive," Leonard said as he made the final preparations for what is, by anyone's standards, the trip of a lifetime.

Leonard, an anthropological linguist, is to spend a year living with the Inughuit people of north-west Greenland, a tiny community whose members manage to live a similar hunting and gathering life to their ancestors. They speak a language – the dialect is called Inuktun – that has never fully been written down, and they pass down their stories and traditions orally.

"Climate change means they have around 10 or 15 years left," said Leonard. "Then they'll have to move south and in all probability move in to modern flats." If that happens, an entire language and culture is likely to disappear.

There is no Inughuit written literature but a very strong and "distinctive, intangible cultural heritage", according to Leonard. "If their language dies, their heritage and identity will die with it. The aim of this project is to record and describe it and then give it back to the communities themselves in a form that future generations can use and understands."

The Inughuits thought they were the world's only inhabitants until an expedition led by the Scottish explorer John Ross came across them in 1818.

Unlike other Inuit communities they were not significantly influenced by the arrival of Christianity in Greenland – so they retain elements of a much older, shamanic culture – and their life is not very different now to how it always has been. Many of the men spend weeks away from home hunting seals, narwhal, walruses, whales and other mammals. And while they have tents, they still build igloos when conditions get really bad.

Their language is regarded as something of a linguistic "fossil" and one of the oldest and most "pure" Inuit dialects.

Leonard was yesterday saying goodbye to family and friends in Eastbourne. On Sunday he flies to Copenhagen – "it's the only place you can buy a Greenlandic-Danish dictionary" – and then it's off to Greenland, taking two internal flights to get to the main Inughuit settlement in Qaanaaq on the north-west coast of Greenland, north of Baffin Bay.

There, Leonard expects to hone his linguistic skills and build contacts for seven or eight months before moving to the most traditional Inughuit outpost in Siorapaluk, the most northern permanently inhabited settlement in the world, where about 70 Inughuit live. It will he here that Leonard hopes to hear the storytelling that lies at the heart of the culture.

Leonard's interest in the Inughuits began 10 years ago when he read Marie Herbert's book The Snow People, an account of life with the Inughuits, but it is only recently that he learned how imminent the threat is to their way of life and their culture.

"I just hadn't realised how endangered the community was and this whole culture could simply die, disappear. Normally languages die out because it is parents deciding they don't want their children to speak it."

Leonard, who is 36, will have to adapt to many things, not least the extreme temperatures. Although the average temperature is-25C, it can plummet to -40 or soar to zero in the summer. Then there is the arctic darkness, with the sun expected to go down on 24 October and not rise again until 8 March. It is this time of year that elders talk and pass on their stories and poetry.

Nevertheless, Leonard admitted: "I don't really know how I'm going to deal with it, to be honest."

There appears to be a certain inevitability to the Inughuits being soon forced from their ancient homeland to southern Greenland, making Leonard's mission all the more pressing. Climate change is already leading to a noticeable reduction in seal numbers and the ice will soon become so thin that it will be impossible to use dog sleds.

Leonard intends to record the Inughuits and, rather than writing a grammar or dictionary, produce an "ethnography of speaking" to show how their language and culture are interconnected. The recordings will be digitised and archived and returned to the community in their own language.

"These communities, which could be just years from fragmentation, want their cultural plight to be known to the rest of the world," he said.

Although the climate change catastrophe facing the Arctic is well documented and the Inughuits are visited frequently, Leonard hopes his visit will be more meaningful than others.

"One thing I have been told is that they are tired of journalists popping in and reporting how awful it is that the icebergs are melting and then that's it, so they are keen that someone comes and lives with them and reports back."

Mind your language

A language dies every 14 days, and half the languages spoken today are expected to vanish by 2100. Languages on the endangered list include:

• The secret language of the Kallawaya, who live in the Bolivian Andes, is more 400 years old and is spoken by fewer than a hundred people. In daily life, the Kallawaya use Spanish or Aymara, but when discussing the medicinal plants central to their role as healers, the men speak their own private language.

• Aboriginal Australia holds some of the world's most endangered languages including Amurdag, which was believed to be extinct until a few years ago when linguists came across speaker Charlie Mangulda living in the Northern Territory.

• Mednyj Aleut is spoken by a handful of people in Eastern Siberia. Unlike most languages it has two parents, a combination of largely Aleut vocabulary and Russian verb endings.

• Siletz Dee-ni is spoken on the Siletz reservation in Oregon. When the reservation was created in 1855 it held speakers of many different languages. In order to communicate with each other residents adopted a pidgin version of Chinook, in the process nearly wiping out their indigenous languages.

Holly Bentley

The Real World Speaks

The Real Europe Speaks

Bo Language: Last Speaker Dies

Multilingualism as a Separatist Crime

Legal Proceedings against Politicians in Diyarbakir

Multilingualism as a Separatist Crime

Public prosecutors in Turkey are bringing an increasing number of politically motivated court cases against Kurdish local politicians in south-east Anatolia who are standing up for the recognition of the cultural and social rights of the Kurds. The charge is always the same, namely the dissemination of separatist propaganda. Ömer Erzeren has the details

There is currently a shortage of organ donations in Turkey. Numerous organisations and the Ministry of Health are running campaigns to counteract this situation. The major of the municipality of Sur in the Kurdish city of Diyarbakir, Abdullah Demirbaş, wanted to do his bit for the campaign and instructed the city administration to print posters in Turkish and Kurdish encouraging organ donations.

However, instead of sending words of gratitude or recognition, the government sent investigators from the Ministry of the Interior. They came because they considered the printing of posters in Kurdish by the city administration to be an illegal activity.

Denying Turkey's multilingual diversity

These investigations were followed by even more investigations because Demirbaş also used the language spoken by the citizens who elected him for other services offered by the city administration. A study commissioned by the municipality concluded that 72 per cent of the population speaks Kurdish and 24 per cent Turkish. It was also discovered that the mother tongues of the remaining population are Armenian, Assyrian Neo-Aramaic, and Arabic.

The mayor defended the multilingual services provided by the municipality in a speech to the European Social Forum. This address was also held against him. Eventually the Ministry of the Interior initiated proceedings to remove him from office. He was then charged by the Supreme Court of Administration and removed from office, as were the members of the council that approved Demirbaş' decisions.

The judges ruled that the multilingual services offered by the city administration were unconstitutional. Demirbaş now plans to bring the matter to the European Court of Human Rights.

"We just want to offer our citizens a better service by addressing them in their language," said Demirbaş, whose official car has been confiscated by the police, "after all, announcements on Turkish Airlines flights are made in Turkish and in English!"

Demirbaş is not only fighting to reverse his deposition, he is also fighting criminal proceedings that have been brought against him for allegedly disseminating "propaganda for a terrorist organization". On the first day of the hearing, he defended himself with the words: "Standing up for a Turkey with multiple identities, cultures, and languages is not separatism!"

Not an isolated case

Demirbaş has not, however, been singled out for this treatment; many other local politicians who are members of the Democratic Society Party (DTP) have also had similar experiences.

There are currently a dozen proceedings pending against the Lord Mayor of Diyarbakir, Osman Baydemir. In one such proceeding he is charged with having made available a municipal ambulance for the funeral of a deceased combatant of the illegal Kurdistan Workers Party (PKK).

Baydemir received 58 per cent of the vote in the last municipal election. Ever since DTP members have been elected mayors in a number of Kurdish cities, local politicians have been put under pressure.

Many of the reform laws that have been passed in recent years have not been implemented in Kurdish regions and a war of attrition is being fought against anyone who tries to exercise these new rights.

Denouncing the DTP as the "fifth column" of the PKK

The general consensus would seem to be that the DTP is the "fifth column" of the PKK. It is completely excluded from the political decision-making process at national level.

The reason for this is that in order to enter parliament, a party must receive at least 10 per cent of the vote. The DTP received over 6 per cent of the vote in the last parliamentary election.

However, despite the marginalization of the DTP mayors and despite the court cases and the intimidation, the region's governors, who represent the central government in Ankara, have reached a kind of understanding and cooperation with the mayors.

The mayors have been in office for years and know and understand the concerns and needs of the citizens. They often act as mediators. When young PKK supporters flexed their muscles in Diyarbakir in March of last year, the governor and the security forces called on the mayor to intervene in order to avoid an escalation of the situation.

Despite the fact that the PKK undoubtedly has a strong influence on the party, the DTP certainly does not take orders from the PKK guerrillas. DTP politicians who are critical of the PKK have gained people's trust as local politicians.

Just how much support there is for the DTP in the Kurdish regions became evident last week at the funeral of Orhan Dogan, a former member of the national parliament, in the city of Cizre. Over 100,000 people came to the city to pay their last respects.

Together with Leyla Zana and other Kurdish MPs, Dogan's immunity was lifted. In 1994 he was sentenced to 15 years in prison for engaging in "separatist activities". He spent over ten years behind bars. Following his release, Dogan, who has always distanced himself from the PKK, has been active in the DTP.

Because of the 10-per cent hurdle, the DTP has decided not to run as a party in the parliamentary election that is due to be held in Turkey on 22 July. Instead, 42 of its members will run as "independents" in the various constituencies.

The reason being that independent candidates are not subject to the ten-percent hurdle. The DTP estimates that at least 20 independents will enter the next parliament. They could then re-join the party and form a parliamentary party.

Hi Mate! Dear Sir/Madam...

The complex etiquette of du and Sie in Germany

Reuters

With all du respect

“AT 2.12 our work was finished. At 2.15 we called each other Horst and Guido. This is the beginning of a great friendship.” That is how Guido Westerwelle, the Free Democratic leader in Germany’s coalition government, broke the news that he and Horst Seehofer of the Christian Social Union would henceforth address each other by the familiar du rather than the formal Sie. Since Mr Seehofer had called Mr Westerwelle a crybaby just weeks earlier, it was a touching reconciliation. But how much warmth does the intimate du convey?

It used to be so simple. Relatives, friends, children and dogs were du; everyone else was Sie. The offer of du, usually by an older interlocutor, was not made lightly. But this formula has become scrambled during the past 40 years. Germany is not America, where everyone is on first-name terms except in the doctor’s surgery. The rules are now confusing, so that instead of guarding the borders between friendship and acquaintance, Sie and du often now smuggle coded messages across them.

It started with 1968ers who impudently called their professors du. Later generations of students reverted to Sie. But with each other, indeed with everyone of student age, du predominates. Bouncers at Berlin’s clubs are gesiezt but bartenders are geduzt. Shoppers at upmarket KaDeWe are Sie but in shops packed with young Germans even those not so youthful may be called du. Annett Louisan, a pop singer, laments the passing of Sie: “This distance adds a little more/to something that would be a bore/‘What can I do for Sie?’/stimulates wild fantasy.”

In less erotically charged settings Sie holds sway. Banks, law firms and ministries remain bastions of Sie, though egalitarian companies like Sweden’s IKEA have converted to du. It is easier to sack a Sie than a du. Sometimes du can even be dangerous: try it on a policeman and you may end up paying a fine for insulting an officer.

Politics has its own rules. In the Social Democratic Party (SPD) it would be an insult to siezen a “comrade”. Communists in East Germany were du to each other, which gives it a sinister ring to some Ossis. In conservative circles and across party lines du is not yet automatic. Angela Merkel, the Christian Democratic chancellor, never said du to Frank-Walter Steinmeier, her SPD foreign minister, though she apparently already does so to his successor, Mr Westerwelle.

In Mr Seehofer’s case, as the older man, he almost certainly made the first move with Mr Westerwelle. But that has not stopped him repeatedly sniping at the new foreign minister. In this case du seems less a profession of friendship than a screen for hostility.

Ireland Speaking

Joke Of The Day

"We took the old man to Australia for his 75th birthday.
We were in this nice restaurant in Sydney. Suddenly he shouts: 'I hate aborigines!'
We said: 'Dad, you can't say that here.' But he wouldn't shut up. '
I can't stand aborigines!' '
Dad, you just can't say that in a restaurant. And in any case, it's pronounced aubergines.' "

English & Welsh- All British?

Woman thrown out of shop for speaking Welsh

They have put up with countless jokes about leeks and have suffered Anne Robinson's constant description of them as irritating. But now it seems the Welsh have something to be truly angry about.

Simply speaking in their native tongue, it seems, can get them into trouble. Rosemary Dean claims that she was kicked out of a gift shop on the Isle of Wight for speaking in Welsh. The shopowner, she says, was offended by the language.

Dean was celebrating her 60th birthday with her sister in Shanklin when she stopped by Grange Gifts to buy a present for her granddaughter. She claimed yesterday that she was was talking in her native tongue to her sister, discussing what to buy, when the owner asked her to speak in English.

The argument that followed led to Dean and her sister being asked to leave the store. But she was determined not to leave it at that, and has reported the incident to the Welsh equality and human rights commission.

She explained: "It was unbelievable. We were just talking in Welsh about the goods in the shop and the woman behind the counter shouted at us to stop.

"There was no warning, she just launched into us. She got really angry and admitted she was discriminating against the Welsh.

"I was not even talking to her and if I was I would have spoken English – it would have been rude otherwise."

Sue Pratley, the shopowner, said: "I made a comment to them that I wished they would speak English but she took issue with that. I do not want to go into detail about what happened. I did not ban them from the shop but I did ask them to leave."

Morale: Can you imagine someone being thrown out of a shop say in the Welsh-speaker area of Snowdonia in North Wales because someone speaks English, with her sister, in the shop? Fascist nonsense they would say, wouldn´t they? same here. (Note of C.T.)

The Caucasus

An overview of languages of the Caucasus

Johanna Nichols
Department of Slavic Languages and Literatures
University of California, Berkeley

The Great Caucasus mountain range extends from the Black Sea to the Caspian. To the north of it is the western portion of the Eurasian steppe; to the south, the hill country of northern Mesopotamia. Both the steppe and northern Mesopotamia have been centers of economic and political power since approximately the Neolithic, and both have long been avenues through which peoples and languages have moved between Asia and Europe. The Caucasus itself has been a major conduit through which the Neolithic revolution, agriculture and stockbreeding, and subsequent technological innovations have spread from Mesopotamia to eastern Europe. The Caucasus is a biological refuge zone in which species found nowhere else are native, and it is known for its ecological and biological diversity. It has also been known since ancient times for its linguistic diversity, and it can be called a linguistic refuge zone in the sense that three entire separate language families are indigenous to the Caucasus and have no kin elsewhere. Survey of languages

The indigenous language families of the Caucasus are:

Kartvelian or South Caucasian, a family about 4500 years old comprising Georgian and its three sister languages. It probably dispersed in the vicinity of central to eastern Georgia, in the foothills or southern plains. Georgian has a written history going back to the creation of a special alphabet after Georgia became Christianized in the fourth century; the same alphabet is still used. Most Georgians and other Kartvelians are Christians, but some of those in the south are Muslim.

Northwest Caucasian or Abkhaz-Adyghe (or Abkhaz-Circassian), a family of uncertain age (evidently older than the Romance or Slavic families and younger than Indo-European, which is about 6000 years old) with three or four daughter languages. The structural type of this family is exotic in Eurasia. It may have dispersed near the Black Sea coast. Speakers of Northwest Caucasian languages are mostly Muslims. There are sizable diasporic communities in Turkey and elsewhere in the Near East, descendants of emigrants from the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century; they retain the languages to varying extents.

Northeast Caucasian or Nakh-Daghestanian, a much-diversified family about 6000 years of age, with some 30 daughter languages spoken in the central and eastern Caucasus. It probably dispersed in the southeastern foothills of the Caucasus, near the Caspian Sea and in present-day Azerbaijan. Islam spread into Azerbaijan early and from there to the northern Caucasus, reaching the Chechen and Ingush in the 17th-18th centuries. Though most speakers of Northeast Caucasian languages are Muslims, the Udi (who now inhabit three villages in Azerbaijan and Georgia and are remnants of a larger pre-Georgian population) are monophysite Christians. There are sizable Chechen-Ingush diasporic communities in Turkey and Jordan, descendants of emigrants and deportees from the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the 19th century; they retain the language, generally quite well.

Languages not indigenous to the Caucasus but long resident there include:

Ossetic, a member of the northeastern branch of the Iranian subfamily of Indo-European. A descendant of the Alanic division of Sarmatian, which was part of the Scythian state of the Iron Age steppe, it straddles the Caucasus across the central pass and must have entered during the first millennium BCE.

Karachay-Balkar, two closely related dialects of northwestern Turkic. Now spoken in the western central highlands of the northern slope, they must have come into the Caucasus after the spread of Kipchak Turkic to the western steppe in the early middle ages.

Kumyk, another Turkic language of the northeastern lowlands which also entered the area in the early middle ages. The Kumyk people may well descend from the Khazars, Turkic speakers whose empire extended from the Volga to the Daghestan foothills, but the Kumyk language itself goes back to the Kipchak Turkic that began spreading into the North Caucasian steppe in the middle ages.

Azerbaijani (Azeri), a Southwest Turkic language that spread from Central Asia to formerly Iranian-speaking Azerbaijan in about the ninth century. Azerbaijan has been culturally important since the time of the ancient Persian empire, and Islam spread here early. Thelanguage has been written since the 14th century, originally in the Arabic script.

Tat, a southwestern Iranian language spoken in Azerbaijan and along the Caspian littoral. It is a survivor of the Iranian-speaking population that was dominant in Azerbaijan before the spread of Turkic, and is spoken now by Jewish, Muslim, and Christian enclaves.

Talysh, a northwestern Iranian language spoken in Azerbaijan and also a survivor of a pre-Turkic language.

Armenian, an independent branch of Indo-European. The Armenian language spread into the former kingdom of Urartu in the seventh century BCE. Armenia converted to Christianity in 300 AD, and an Armenian alphabet was created not long thereafter, originally as a vehicle for disseminating Christianity. The oldest surviving documents in classical Armenian date to the ninth and tenth centuries. The language has been written more or less continuously since then, and the original alphabet has been retained.

The ancient Urartean language and its still earlier ancestor Hurrian, attested in cuneiform inscriptions. The range of Urartean was approximately the territory of medieval Armenia.

Structural types of languages

The indigenous languages of the Caucasus are known for their complex consonant systems (including ejectives and pharyngeals), complex morphology, and ergativity (identical case or other coding on subjects of intransitive verbs and direct objects of transitives; distinct coding on subjects of transitives). However, the structural differences between these families are considerable. The following examples give some sense of the structural complexity and diversity among the indigenous families. An Ossetic example is also given for comparison. In three millennia of residence in the Caucasus, Ossetic has acquired loan vocabulary, an ejective consonant series, and aspects of central and western Caucasian vowel centralization from its neighbors but shows no trace of pharyngeals, pharyngealization, or ergativity.

In the following examples, all three indigenous languages have ergative constructions but use very different morphology: Georgian signals its syntactic relations by a combination of cases and verbal agreement, chiefly prefixal; Chechen mostly by cases; and Abkhaz entirely by elaborate verbal prefixation. Abkhaz also inflects its postpositions and possessed nouns, while Georgian and Chechen use a genitive case for possession.

Abbreviations: ERGative case, DATive case, Plural, NOMinative case, PERFective, REFLexive pronoun, ADESSive case, TRANSitive; 3sg = third person singular, 3pl = third person plural. - marks morpheme boundary; = marks boundary following a proclitic. In Chehen, /aa/, /ie/, etc. = long vowels and diphthongs.

Language contact, bilingualism, and verticality

Traditionally in the Caucasus there was no single lingua franca. Rather, there was considerable bilingualism and multilingualism between adjacent communities. In recent times, up to the Russian conquest of the Caucasus in the mid-19th century, the standing pattern of bilingualism was vertical: in highland villages many people knew the language(s) of lower villages, but not vice versa. This was because markets and winter pasture were to be found in the lowlands, while the highlands afforded few economic advantages. The male population of highland villages was largely transhumant and spent perhaps half of its working life in the lowlands. Naturally, under these conditions, lowlands languages tended to gradually spread uphill, reducing highlands languages to islands and eventually replacing them entirely. At present and for all known history and known prehistory, languages with large numbers of speakers have both lowland and highland ranges and a generally elongate vertical distribution; these are economically advantageous and/or culturally prestigious languages that have spread uphill. Languages with small numbers of speakers, including several one-village languages, are mostly found in the highlands. This pattern apparently predominated during the Little Ice Age (late middle ages to mid-19th century), a period of global cooling in which highland farms and pastures were economically precarious and the lowlands more prosperous. Prior to that, there is evidence that highland communities were larger and more prosperous and their languages spread downhill, and that highland communities formed and maintained lowland colonies. Chechen-Ingush isoglosses, and the discontinuous distribution of language families like Chechen-Ingush, Avar, and Lak all point in this direction. Overall, then, geography and size of speech community are correlated, and this is explained by verticality, economy, and climate change.

© 1998 by Johanna Nichols

One State, Two Countries (At Least)

The Language Revolution

"As many languages as he has, as many friends, as many arts and trades, so many times is he a man".
Emerson

I just finished reading a book byDavid Crystal, a Welsh who writes in English.

It´s small, the cover is horrible, black with a ridiculous picture on the front. But it´s very good. The only pity is that it was published in 2004 so all the internet chapter, although I agree with him and it´s really interesting, I am sure some statistics are already old.

Some interesting/shocking/nice bits I have learned reading this book:

* In 1999, UNESCO had already created 21 Feb as International Mother Language Day - a date which commemorated the deaths on that date in 1952 of five students defending the recognition of Bangla as a state language of former Pakistan (now Bangladesh).

* In 2003 there were 191 members in the UN - nearly four times as many as there were fifty years ago.

* A language becomes a world language for one reason only - the power of the people who speak it.

* Spanish is in fact the world´s fastest-growing mother-tongue at present.

* Three out of four English speakers are now non-native.

* Some 4-5 million people spoke English late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth I. This had grown to a quarter of the world´s population, some 1.5 billion, late in the reign of Queen Elizabeth II.

* Bilingualism, multilingualism, is the normal human condition. Well over half of the people in the world, perhaps two-thirds, are bilingual.

* It usually takes a generation for loan words to become integrated, though the internet seems to be speeding up this time-frame.

* A language dies when the last person who speaks it dies. Or, some people say, it dies when the second-last person who speaks it dies, for then the last person has nobody to talk to.

* Spoken language leaves no archeology. When a language dies which has never been documented, it is as if it has never been.

* What is happening today is extraordinary, judged by the standards of the past: half the world´s languages dying out within a century is language extinction on a massive and unprecedented scale.

* 96 per cent of the of the world´s languages are spoken by just 4 per cent of the people (!!)

* Internet offers a home to all languages. Spend an hour hunting for languages on the World Wide Web and you will find hundreds.

* The internet is the ideal medium for minority langauges.

* Children are born not just with a LAD (Language Acquisition Device), as Chomsky argued, but with a MAD (Multilingual Acquisition Device).

* A minority language needs every friend it can get, regardless of the kind or level of language the speakers display.

The book finishes with a Decalogue about the main preocupations which should be characterizing the linguistic mindset of the new milennium:

I. Concern for endangered languages.
II. Concern for minority languages.
III. Concern for all accents and dialects within a language.
IV. Greater concern for the expressive range of a language.
V. We need to become more multilingual.
VI. We need to accept change in language as a normal process.
VII. Concern for those who are having difficulties learning their mother-tongue.
VIII. Concern for those who have lost their ability to use a mother-tongue in which they were once proficient.
IX. We need to bring the study of language and literature closer together.
X. Finally, we need to appreciate, truly appreciate, the value of language in human development and society. Languages should be thought of as national treasures, and treated accordingly.

"The problem with the French is that they don´t have even a word for entrepreneur".
George W. Bush