Code-switching

Code-switching is a term used by linguists to describe the phenomenon whereby bilinguals have the ability to use elements of both languages when conversing with another bilingual (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code-switching).
There is a whole body of research in the area so I won't even attempt to do more than relay my own anecdotal observations. My two daughters speak Polish as their main language and speak English with me and Dutch at the playschool. One thing is very clear already, they want and need to associate a person with a language so they get very upset if somebody speaks the 'wrong' language. If I speak Polish they are very unhappy and will not respond until I speak English. In the same way everybody they know is linked to a language. The only exceptions to this are other bilingual children with whom they converse alternating between the common languages.
My elder daughter, who is almost four, generally speaks grammatically correct Polish. She does not generally mix Polish with English or Dutch. There are amusing exceptions to this. She sometimes finds a word from English to be particularly cool and she then incorporates this into Polish using the corresponding grammatical forms. An example of this recently was the verb 'to puke'. She definitely knows and uses the Polish word wymiotować and has said things like 'kiedy ja byłam chora wymiotowałam' ('when I was ill I vomited'). However, she obviously liked the word puke and started saying pukac/pukałam instead of wymiotować.
Another reason why Dutch and English are incorporated into her Polish are when the word has a particular cultural context unrelated to Poland. In Holland we have a special type of bus ticket called a strippenkaart. That kind of word is not translated to Polish or indeed English. The same is true of the speelzaal (playschool) and words from that environment. Polish has the word ciasteczko for biscuit but, if she were talking about a biscuit she ate at playschool she would call it a koekje from the Dutch.
Many reports I have read mention a large degree of language mixing in bilingual/trilingual children. We haven't seen this with our children. My younger daughter does use Polish words when speaking English but only because she does not know the English word. After telling her the word a few times she normally switches to the correct English word after that.
With polyglot adults you often notice their need to show that they speak lots of languages. Surprisingly my children and other bilingual children I know do not seem to want to show off their ability. They actually tend to cover it up when they are in a larger group. Once it is clear what the accepted language is they tend to try to speak that. My elder daughter will speak to other Polish children in Dutch once they are in a Dutch environment. The majority language seems to naturally enforce its own social control.

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Speaking without an accent

One of the fascinating features of modern Polish is the lack of variation in accent across regions and social class. If my wife meets somebody from Poland she almost always has to ask where they are from unless they come from the Tatra Mountains area in the south. She cannot make any assumptions about a person based on their accent alone. In fact she says that your educational level is marked only by the words you use and the grammatical mistakes you make. Nobody can deduce too about you based on “Can you pass me the sugar please?”
I was fascinated to hear this so I did a little bit of research. There is a nice summary here about how Polish has evolved http://tinyurl.com/yoe6vj. As it turns out the reason for the standardization in Polish accents is unsurprising. Poland underwent a massive population shift from east to west after the Second World War. The former German city of Breslau was populated by refugees from the east and became Wrocław, Grünberg became Żielona Góra and so on. The result was a mixing of Polish accents. The advent of television and communist centralization policies reinforced this trend.
Not having a distinguishable accent is an almost impossible concept for an English speaker to understand. Every time we speak we are releasing a sonal map which other English speakers will analyze consciously or sub-consciously to make judgements about us. When I speak a trained ear will be able to deduce what my educational level is and will identify every region I have lived in for any length of time. Even when we try to change our accent by adopting a new one certain markers will remain which cannot be masked over.
Most of us are not linguists but almost everybody can identify the regional accents of their home country. Moreover, English also has class accents which seem to have quite distinctive boundaries. For example, the gap between a working class Dublin accent and the upper middle class accent commonly referred to as a D4 accent is enormous. The same is true of the gap between the standard English ‘toff’ accent and any of the strong regional accents.
My own accent has always been a touchy subject. When I meet other Irish people I often find myself on the defensive because my accent is not Irish enough. When I studied in England I was often mocked for my Irish accent while at the same time I was being slagged off for my English accent on holidays back home.
All in all the idea of not having any accent appeals greatly to me. Maybe in my next life I can come back as a Pole.

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Pillow talk á íslensku

One of the highlights of reading my mail every morning is checking out the News from Iceland mails from the Iceland Review. There is always something interesting happening in that small country. Today's news featured a link to this wonderful article in the Daily Life rubric http://tinyurl.com/ysghr6.
Should you find yourself besotted with some Icelandic don or damsel some of the phrases might come in handy.
Picture the scene, it's 4am on a Reykjavik Sunday and our young hero makes his move:

Act 1:
I want to sleep with you – Mig langar ad sofa hjá thér.
Yes, but I won’t do it without protection – Já en, ég geri thad ekki án verju.
It’s my first time ;-) – Thetta er í fyrsta skipti hjá mér ;-)
Kiss me! – Kysstu mig!

Act2:
Easy, tiger! – Rólegur, höfdingi!
Touch me here. – Snertu mig hér.
Don’t stop – Ekki haetta
I can’t get it up—sorry – Ég nae honum ekki upp, thví midur
Don’t worry, I’ll do it myself – Ekki hafa áhyggjur, ég klára sjálf!
It helps to have a sense of humor :-( – Med smá húmor gengur allt betur :-(.

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Spelling Reform

There is an interesting article in The Guardian http://tinyurl.com/2gkj33 about the attempts to unify the orthography of the Portuguese language. These kinds of changes are always controversial, I lived in Germany in 1999 just after the spelling reforms of 1996 were introduced http://tinyurl.com/25zs37. The man on the street was pretty unhappy with the changes I can tell you. We have also had some very contentious spelling reforms in The Netherlands both in 1995 and 2006 (http://tinyurl.com/25hxu9). I don’t join the debates myself because I just spell based on whatever I read in Dutch.
What is interesting is that almost every major language has a governing institute made up representatives of the countries that speak the language that makes the rules. Ironically English does not have any such body. Many English speakers may never have studied any grammar and the spelling conventions are generally based on the major dictionaries like the Webster for American English and the Oxford for British English.
The Irish English I grew up with is a hybrid beast. You can spell –ise words as –ize and use aluminum instead of aluminium but the –our words are not generally spell with –or. English is a language that could do with some spelling reform as the often wholly non-phonetic spelling makes it pointlessly difficult. How would you even go about this without some kind of international governing body?

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In a Third Country

One of the consequences of globalization is that there are growing numbers of couples bringing up their children in a country other than their own. Quite often these couples are themselves of mixed nationality so the host country is a third country in the equation.
This situation presents some very difficult choices for parents. Choosing the right school for your children is always a challenge but making this choice in a third country is more difficult again. There is a major choice that must be made, between an international school education on the one hand or an education through the local system on the other. If you go on any expat forum you will see the same discussions about the pros and cons of both options.
In our case we are choosing quite deliberately for the local option. We live in a family suburb with four primary schools within 200m of our house. All of the kids play on the street in the summer and many of the kids on our street go to the school that our girls will attend. Although the Dutch education system has been accused by the media here of dumbing down in recent years I look at The Netherlands as a whole and I am proud and happy to live in a country that works so well. I believe that my children can go through the Dutch system and do just as well as they might do going through the international school system without the very expensive fees.
Ruth Useem, an American sociologist, coined the phrase ‘Third Culture Kids’ http://tinyurl.com/2gfw2l to describe the children who have lived most of their life outside of their passport country and gone through the international school system. It seems that these children do tend to have many of the attributes you need to succeed in a globalized world. However, I worry that my children would never have a sense of belonging if they followed this route. The Dutch culture may not be our culture but it is not really that different to the Irish or Polish cultures. If our children end up more Dutch and feel a sense of belonging and commitment to the community in which they live then that is something that we are prepared to support.
Perhaps my views are coloured by my own experience of going to boarding school at the age of 12 and moving around for years until I landed in Holland 10 years or so ago. I am a great fan of multiculturalism and travel but I believe that you also need to have a home base to go back to.

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Dialectal Obsession

There was a brilliant article over at the People's Republic of Cork (http://tinyurl.com/ysjfsk) about the current state of the Irish language. How I would have loved to have read the same article in the mainstream Irish media, these guys are telling it like it is and coming up with ideas to tap in to the massive market of dormant Irish speakers.
Back in the day I got an A in the Irish Leaving Certificate and I was an enthusiastic Irish debater so you could say that I was the exact type of person that the Irish language movement should have been converting into a 'real' Irish speaker. However, the Irish language movement was about as sexy as a bowl of porridge. There was no reality in which there were beautiful girls to speak to as Gaeilge in the disco. If you wanted to speak Irish you bought the whole package of traditional music, Aran sweaters, the GAA and quite often republican politics.
That situation has definitely changed but the PRC article points out that there is still some way to go. One thing that I would like to add to mix here is that many Irish speakers are making the whole situation more complex by their obsession with dialects.
The Irish language has a number of dialects including Ulster, Munster and Connacht dialects. At school children learn a standard version of the language called the Caighdeán Oifigiúil. English speaking children learn standard Irish and there begins the problem.
There is a ridiculous idea that your Irish should sound like one of the dialects. People who can barely hold a conversation in Irish go on about speaking in a Munster or Ulster dialect. Let's get this straight, the majority of Irish spoken (mainly in classrooms) is spoken in the standard dialect. However, native and fluent speakers tend to use the dialects. This leads to a situation where people who speak good standard Irish may not even understand a conversation between two fluent Irish speakers even in a context where they should be able to understand what is being said.
How do other languages get around this? It is quite simple. The general media use the standard dialect of the language, regional broadcasters use dialects. Using a translation to the Irish situation that should mean that TG4 (national broadcaster) should generally broadcast only in standard Irish while Radio na Gaeltachta (aimed at the Gaeltacht regions) should broadcast in dialect if they want. The Nuacht (News) on the main Irish channels (RTE 1 & 2) should only be in standard Irish. This would promote the standard dialect and work some way towards helping people bring up Irish speaking children without them having to have a dialect to be classed as a native speaker (a point referred to here (http://tinyurl.com/2tj82j).
When the Flemish language was standardized it was decided to standardize around standard Netherlands Dutch even though nobody in Belgium used that dialect. Nowadays every Fleming can speak their own dialect and standard Dutch. That means that any Dutch speaker can understand the Belgian news but understanding Flemish dialects is a different matter. When Hebrew was revived the Israeli state invented a new standard modern Hebrew and everybody learned to speak this new invented dialect.
For some reason the standardized version of Irish has always been undervalued. That means that the way that the wealth of dormant Irish speakers speaks the language is dismissed as being unequal to speakers of the dialects.
The People's Republic of Cork article gives me hope that a new urban Irish can emerge and that maybe the will is there. Ironically the biggest obstacle to the progress of the Irish language may well be the Irish language enthusiasts themselves with their alienating obsession with and glorification of dialects.

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A Polish Easter

This year, as almost every year since I got married in 2001, I have taken part in the Polish version of the Easter celebrations together with my in-laws who have come from Poland. On the days leading up to Easter Sunday there are extensive preparations made for the Easter breakfast, the house is cleaned from top to toe and I stay as far out of the way as I can.
Easter Sunday starts with a trip to the church. Observant Polish people do not eat before church. I tried this once but nearly fainted from the hunger during the service, never mind the murderous thoughts I had towards the priest when his sermon tipped over the fifteen minute mark. The Polish ladies bring cake to the church and everybody sits together after the service for coffee, eggs and cake.
Finally we come home from church and start the elaborate breakfast starting with the food that was blessed on Easter Saturday, bits of egg, bread, cake and sausage. Thereafter we tuck in to the cold meats, salads and cake. The rest of the day is spent eating and eating again.
So this is the Polish Easter but where is the Irish Easter in all of this? Well, that's the thing, there is no Irish element to our celebrations and there may never be unless we happen to go to Ireland for Easter. My Easter Sunday also used to begin with church. We could eat breakfast if we wanted. My parents were more worried that we would eat too much chocolate before our dinner. We used to get an enormous chocolate egg every year filled with sweets. I loved it. I loved stuffing my face and so did my brothers and sisters. For dinner we usually had a roast, often lamb, sometimes chicken. Easter was a family occasion second only to Christmas.
When you have a mixed marriage one or other of the cultures often needs to make way. In my experience Polish people are extremely proud of their traditions and, even when abroad, they will obsessively preserve them. It makes it hard to argue that the chocolate egg culture I grew up with is equal so I just give way. I don't want my children having all of the Polish fayre and having chocolate eggs and roast lamb on top.
Sometimes I feel that I have nothing Irish to offer my children. If you have children abroad and try to give them an ‘Irish’ upbringing you end up giving your child pretty much the same upbringing as a British child abroad gets. Our children will have no problem getting a Polish cultural upbringing because Poland has a separate language, a rich tradition of literature and visual arts, its own cuisine and very many traditions that make Poland different. I have not even mentioned the Polish Saturday schools in every city in Holland.
When I was a lad there were still Wren Boys, there was still an interest in a united Ireland with the Irish language at its heart and I didn’t have difficulty defining what was different about Ireland. Unfortunately that Ireland seems to be gone and I am sitting in a foreign field wondering how I can pass on something of my country to my children without the tools my wife has available. When I have some answers I will let you know.

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Living French

Of all of the languages I have learnt it is French that has kept a real hold on my heart. Although I regard Italian as the most beautiful sounding language, French runs it a close second. For many years French cinema was my antidote to Hollywood blandness. Sitting in dark empty cinemas watching slow moving films set in Lille or Marseille somehow made the world seem less pointless. France was an idea that I liked.
Over the years I have done more French courses than I can count. I did the DALF (Diplôme Approfondi de Langue Française) in 2006 and that is about as far as you can go in French language learning without living in a French speaking country or doing a degree. So from now on my efforts to maintain and improve my French are all down to me.
As any language addict knows you just cannot learn every language you want to. With languages the maxim 'use it or lose it' is painfully true. What I have tried to do to address this is to build languages into my life as much as I can.
With French I cannot get much practice speaking it but what I always can do is listen to it and read it. I try to read newspapers on the internet when I can; I find www.20minutes.fr to be the most accessible. I also watch French television when I am allowed to but that is not so often as my wife can't understand French.
I have tried to read a few French novels over the years but the problem has always been that I have to reach for the dictionary to understand specific words. That takes away from the whole enjoyment. That is why I was so delighted to hear about Linguality (www.linguality.com). This publisher brings out popular French novels with annotations in English on the facing page. I finished the first book "Chemins de fer" by Benoît Duteurtre last week. It was possible to read it as quickly as an English novel. I try to read a bit in French every day now before the children are awake.
In these small ways I am trying to live a bit of my life in French. Of course you need to do a lot more to be fluent but the main thing I like to know is that I could go to live in a French speaking country and be fluent within six months. In my opinion you can't really get much further than that unless you have direct contact with French through your study, work or family.

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Language Fluency

What is it to speak a language fluently? Are you there when you can understand everything that is said to you and reply with an answer that makes sense to a native speaker? How many mistakes are you allowed? How close must your accent be to that of a native speaker?
Like most things in life the answer depends on who is asking the question. When I ask myself am I fluent in Dutch the answer is a resounding yes but maybe a more critical person would pick faults in my accent, in the way I sometimes get lost in a complex sentence and cannot find the way out or in the fact that I cannot understand dialects that deviate too much from the standard.
But what if I ask myself am I fluent in English? Incontestably I would say, as it is my mother tongue, but I still make mistakes and sometimes I forgot the words for things. We had visitors at Christmas and I could not remember the word bauble, I used ball instead. When I was talking about tinsel I came up with something like ‘that shiny stringy stuff’. Sometimes I have to translate Dutch words back to English just because I use them far more often than their English equivalents.
As I work in an international environment I speak English every day with non-native speakers. One thing that I find difficult to do is to change my English to communicate more effectively with my colleagues. In an international environment you cannot really speak English as such because an educated English speaker will have a vocabulary range far beyond that of an average non-native speaker. One striking example of this is the fact that I never hear non-natives using loan words in English such as Schadenfreude, sang-froid, raison d'être or sine qua non. The same goes for ‘more difficult’ English words, I once used the word mellifluous at work and my colleagues looked at me with bemusement.
In other words, in an international environment English speakers have to be less fluent in their own language. The same rule does not apply if you speak French or Dutch when one of those languages is the lingua franca. Nobody changes how they say things to speak a lowest common denominator, isotonic French or Dutch. An English speaker must understand Dutch or French as they are spoken by a native to take part in the meeting.
To me this means that many non-native English speakers who may think that they speak the language fluently do not. On the contrary English speakers who think they speak another language fluently generally do because there is no artificial bubble environment where French or Spanish are being used as the language of communication by non-natives. You learn French by speaking to and listening to French speakers. With English the same rule just does not apply.

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Response to Meme

I am new to the mores of the blogiverse. I just looked up what a meme actually is on Wikipedia yesterday and, lo and behold, swifty thrifty memed me http://thriftcriminal.org/?p=95. Contrary to the spirit of meming I am not going to pass this on as I just don't have the contacts in blog world to do this as yet. I shall remain on promise to pass on the meme should I have seven meme targets.

Anyway, as per the meme, here are seven random facts about me:

1. I have five siblings and the next generation already numbers eight children with two more on the way in the next few months. The next generation speaks English, Polish, French, Portuguese and Dutch in various combinations, seven of the children are being brought up with at least two languages in the home.
   
   
2. My father’s grandfather had an American passport. His late brother had an Australian passport. He has carried British and Irish passports at various times. The same is true for his six children. His grandchildren travel on French, Polish and Irish passports.
   
   
3. I have a few winners and runners-up medals for underage county football championships won by teams that I was never on. I got one substitute appearance in the last minute of a schools’ final against Cooraclare. I did not score in my brief appearance.
   
   
4. I played as a striker for the sixth team of a Dutch football club for two seasons. We were almost always bottom of our league except for one golden September when we won four games in a row. In one of those games I scored a hat-trick and hit the woodwork two other times. That day was one of the best in my life.
   
   
5. I went to a monastic boarding school which I have bad memories of. The thing that I liked most about the school was the emphasis on debating. I loved debating in the Irish language until the day my teacher told me that I was ‘part of the British propaganda machine in Ireland’. I had merely pointed out that the UK was Ireland’s largest trading partner.
   
   
6. I wrote a love poem for a girl I was obsessed with as a teenager. I sent it from my boarding school and I asked a friend to ask her what she thought of it. She loved the poem but not me. My friend went out with her for a few years after that.
   
   
7. I wrote another love poem for a former girlfriend. She loved the poem and wanted to frame it but first she wanted to burn around the edges of the paper for decorative effect. She burned the poem. There was no copy.

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The Language of Arrogance

In the last few days there have been quite a few articles in the UK media concerning the decision of Cambridge University to drop its foreign language entrance requirement http://tinyurl.com/22z6or. If there is one thing that the British have done very well it is in establishing some of the world's elite universities with Oxford and Cambridge leading the way. Those two ancient universities still have a mystique for me that makes them seem very special so this decision is somewhat shocking. The idea that schoolchildren can decide not to study any foreign languages and still manage to get into a world class university is frankly shocking.
The wider situation as regards language education in the UK was commented upon by Tim Hames in The Times http://tinyurl.com/2zlq75. His commentary gives a very useful insight into the systematic failure to protect foreign language education there.
Moreover, the comments on his commentary also widely reveal the prevailing attitude. We speak English so we are all right. The world must sing to our tune. Our language is the language of arrogance so speak English or get out of our way.
The crux of the matter is that I find it almost impossible to convince monolingual English speakers that they should speak other languages. Many will say that they would love to speak French/Spanish/Dutch or whatever but how many actually make any effort?
It is a Catch 22 situation. You cannot really appreciate what it gives you to speak another language until you can actually do it. The earlier you have that floating through the air feeling of speaking to somebody in their language and making sense the earlier you are hooked. And once you can do it once you can do it again and again and again.
I am from Ireland where 95% learn their first other language from the age of 4. In my anecdotal experience anybody who mastered Irish subsequently did well at French or other languages. If I meet an Irish person who speaks Dutch they can generally speak French and will have some Irish left over if you push them. Anglophone Canadians who can speak French or the many Americans who can speak Spanish also seem to get on better learning third languages.
There is a message there. Being monolingual is like being colour blind only you can cure the disability and the colours just get brighter and more vibrant the more you learn another language.

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Of monkeys and men

I went to a museum in Leiden called Naturalis with my two girls a few weeks ago. It is a very child friendly nature museum with dinosaurs and stuffed animals and whatnot. I generally find musea to be boring as hell but this one was doable only the girls kept running around like mad folk so I couldn’t concentrate even for a second.
Anyway they had one pretty cool exhibition called ‘Like monkey, like man’ (http://tinyurl.com/252xnf) comparing the behaviour of apes and man. I particularly enjoyed a computer terminal where you could choose the features of your ideal partner, some examples of the output are here: (http://zoapenzomensen.naturalis.nl/fun_jeidealepartner.html).
It is fascinating to come up with an image of what you find attractive and even more intriguing to wonder why. Sometimes I can be sitting on a train and even seeing a woman’s face for a split second can give me that ‘wow, she was attractive’ thought. The fact that we register physical features so quickly in our minds and instinctively make a judgement show how our primeval instincts are never far below the surface.
It also indicates that our ideal image is so far imbedded that the barrage of images in the media may not change our ideal so much once it has crystallized somewhere in our mind. I know that my ‘type’ has been programmed since at least my early teenage years. When I was younger one friend could often spot a girl I would like even before I had spotted her.

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Colbie, Colbie, Colbie

I am swooning; the music is melting me. This is 1997 all over again. That year I spent a long hot month in Dallas. The instructor kept playing a CD over and over again. At first I just dismissed it but then I got hooked. That CD was “Tidal” by Fiona Apple and her sounds would stay with me for quite a few years, a little bit of heaven on a disc.

My wife Aga bought it. I picked it up saying:
- “What’s that?”
- “Oh, you know the girl who sings that ‘Bubbly’ song, it’s her CD.”
- “Nah, that’s nowt for me, I’ll give it a miss.”

Still, I am burning the Sugababes CD and the Fergie and the Gwen so I decide to burn this one too. And I’m at work and the Media Player is throwing up her songs like a challenge and I’m soon punch drunk. I throw in the towel.

Colbie, Colbie, Colbie what are you doing to me? I’m getting too old to surf like this on new sounds. When I need an emotional fix I can just reach for a Dave Matthews or Fleetwood Mac and pretend like I’m a teenager sitting in the dark again.
And the wheel turns full circle when I look at her Wikipedia entry http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Colbie_Caillat. Somebody is playing tricks on me. You see her dad produced “Rumours” and “Tusk” by Fleetwood Mac. So perhaps the wonderful music is just her birthright.
Oh ye of little faith. Thank you my love for restoring the faith. Thank you Colbie for supplying the manna.

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A language without a city

Almost anybody growing up in Ireland will have heard the famous Pádraig Pearse quote “Tír gan teanga, tír gan anam.” (English: “A country without a language is a country without a soul”). This quote is bandied about by anybody with two words of Irish as a justification for retaining Irish as a compulsory subject in Irish schools.
It is indeed a powerful sentiment but it is entirely linked to the romantic view of the nation so prevalent at the end of the nineteenth century. There are many countries which have English as their sole language but I would not dismiss them all as being soulless. Equally there are countless countries in the world from Switzerland to India to South Africa which have multiple languages and I don’t necessarily think that they have more soul than the rest. Basically a country has more than just its language with which to express its soul.
Nevertheless, I am somebody who retains a very strong attachment to the old tongue, though my ability to speak it has deteriorated to the point that it would be easier for me to hold a decent conversation in Polish. As I see it, the fundamental issue with Irish and several other minority languages is that they lack an urban area where the language is dominant.
It is a fact of life that the youth will drift from the country to the city as they move on to study or work. Urban areas have more to offer in terms of popular culture and night life. Country areas may be popular once people settle down but many people who leave the country never go back.
For a minority language that trend is devastating. If I am a native Irish speaker and I move to Dublin the chances are I will end up meeting an English speaker to settle down with. Even if the English speaker is supportive of Irish the dynamics of life in Ireland will mean that their children will probably not be raised as Irish speakers. This same trend of gradual decline is seen in other countries even where minority languages are relatively protected by the state such as with the Swedish speaking minority in Finland or the Frisian speakers in the north of the Netherlands.
What all of these weaker languages have in common is the lack of a city. If there is a city where the language was dominant then you can live your whole life essentially through the minority language. You cannot just speak Swedish in Åbo/Turku and you cannot survive with Frisian alone in Leeuwaarden. In those cities you can choose Finnish or Dutch respectively and never have to learn the minority language. In Galway, supposedly the most Irish speaking city in Ireland, I have never heard Irish spoken (I did hear it regularly in Belfast actually but sin scéal eile.).
My thesis is simple. Irish needs an urban area where it is dominant if it is ever to be revived to a sustainable level. I also know that neither the Irish government nor the Irish people have the will necessary to take the steps that would enable this. Therefore I sadly leave you with an updated version of the quote with which I began - “Teanga gan cathair, teanga gan todhchaí.” (English: “A language without a city is a language without a future.”).

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Mindblower

I normally consider myself a literature man, I generally want to feel that my life is better for having read a book. I try to avoid lightweight fiction although I have occasionally read a Patricia Cornwell and even succumbed to reading "The Da Vinci Code". On a recent visit to Amazon I saw a book called "The Game" by Mandasue Heller http://tinyurl.com/25swyj and my instincts told me to avoid it. However, I read the reader reviews and I went ahead and purchased it.
Well, the book duly arrived and do I not regret ordering it. Mandasue Heller sets her books in grimy Manchester, the city my father was born and bred in, and she writes in a real-life style reminiscent of Roddy Doyle or Irvine Welsh. This book is a mindblower, it is not a thriller and but the plot is enthralling.
It is always nice to find a new author work I can devour. I just wonder how many other brilliant writers like this are currently off my radar screen.

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Language Planning

I got a mention in this article in the International Herald Tribune last year(http://tinyurl.com/22rvjr) so I thought that it would be nice to say something about it.
The article is very relevant to my everyday life. Raising your children to speak three languages takes effort. We use the One Parent One Language method mentioned and you really need to be consistent with this.
I know a few families where one or other of the parents does not use their own language consistently and their children have stopped speaking it as a result. In our case we are lucky that neither of us is a native speaker of the community language (Dutch). If one parent speaks the community language it can sometimes give that language an overwhelmingly dominant position. In the Dutch/Polish situation I have observed that sometimes the extended Dutch family can be very negative about the mother speaking Polish to the children. This can create a very uncomfortable position for the Polish mother and forces her into using Dutch in certain circumstances and creates a stigma around speaking Polish for the children.
In our case Polish is fully embedded as the main language during the day at home. My wife has many Polish friends and some have children who also speak Polish. Right now the children call Dutch ‘speelzaal (playschool) language’. The 30% exposure rule is an important yardstick and we speak enough English in the evening and at weekends to be making that target.
At the same time, many studies have shown that English fares much better than other languages when it is in the position of second or third language. The omnipresence of English language popular culture means that even small children in countries like Holland or Sweden regard English as a prestige language. For that reason we are quite happy for English to be weaker for now as the children will invariably get a lot of exposure to English as they get older.
The other very interesting information in the article concerns the increased brain activity that bilinguals demonstrate. In my personal experience I have noticed that bilingual people tend to acquire third and fourth languages far more readily than monolinguals acquire a second language. In many ways my own languages journey started too late. I have made great strides as an adult language learner but I am glad to say that my children will have a much better base to start from should they share my love of languages as time goes on.

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Beautiful German Words

It is quite a pity that German seems to be losing popularity as a school subject in many countries including Holland. It does have difficult grammar but even that is relative because there are many languages which are more complex again. What German has in its favour is a whole host of quite beautiful words.
In German you don’t talk blandly about your 'partner' as in English, you talk about your Lebensgefährter, literally the person with whom you travel through life. Dutch uses compound words as well but German just seems to be full of words like Vergangenheitsverwaltung (the process of coping with the past) that encapsulate a whole concept in a word.
When you look at German loan words in English there are a group of words that have been imported because there is no true English equivalent term. Schadenfreude, doppelgänger, zeitgeist, gemütlich, wunderkind and wanderlust are all words that are used to express a concept or feeling where English lacks an exact term.
The Dutch language shows the same tendency to import German words to describe special concepts. No report of a flair Dutch football player seems to be complete without the mention of his Fingerspitzengefühl (fingertip feeling, a special instinct for being in the right place at the right time). When you want to say that it is socially acceptable to talk about something in Dutch you can use the German term salonfähig. Sometimes the expressions are no longer even widely used in German itself such as with Bühnensucht (the desire to be on stage).
The arguments made for learning German are invariably related to its economic value. It is a pity that less is said about the beauty of this language where you can say so much with single words.

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University Challenge Final

I watched my alma mater, the University of Sheffield, in action last night in the final of University Challenge on the BBC (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/northern_ireland/7275734.stm). The team lost to an Oxford college, Christ Church. The better team won although Sheffield did catch up at one point half way through.
I have a couple of things to note. Firstly, I had to laugh when the lady presenting the prizes started talking about how much knowledge young people have today. This is the elite of the elite, these are not ordinary young people! Secondly, it is more than a little unfair that all of the colleges of both Oxford and Cambridge Universities are allowed to enter teams. Surely one team per university would be fairer. Sheffield had already defeated an Oxford college in the semi-final.
Still, it is a great quiz format and puts in to perspective how much I have forgotten since my university days. I can barely answer a question relating to physics or chemistry and I have a degree in Materials Science..........

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Purposefully evasive

I had an interesting discussion with a Dutch colleague concerning an aspect of informal English that I hadn't given much thought to before. I was telling him about somebody I was talking to last week whom I suspect may be gay. Let me stress that his sexual persuasion is of no concern to me either way but the conversation went like this:

Him - I've been travelling all the time recently, even at weekends as I met someone on holiday.
Me - Why, do you live far apart then?
Him - Yes, they live in Cork actually.

The use of the gender neutral someone in the first sentence is understandable but using the plural they in the second sentence is being purposefully evasive. The thing is, I didn't ask any searching questions to start with so I was amused by the way he used the term. I don't want to know about people's private lives any more, I wasn't exactly fishing for information!

On discussing the employment of the plural pronoun as a singular in order to hide information I gave my colleague other examples of when you might do this. For instance if you were bitching about, say, the one female in your department you might use they to avoid making it obvious who you are talking about.

In Dutch you can use the pronoun that corresponds to 'that' to be evasive in the same way. 'Ik heb een relatie met iemand. Ja, waar woont die dan? Die woont in Cork.' ('I am seeing somebody. Oh yeah, where do they live then? They live in Cork.')

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Adventures in trilingualism

My daughters are two and a half and almost four years of age respectively so our real-life experiment in trilingualism is starting to get very interesting indeed.
My elder daughter Luna speaks Polish very well as this is the language she speaks with my wife. Her English is quite good, probably at a level a bit below that of a monolingual English speaker of the same age as she is reliant on television and myself for most of her input. She goes to a special language-focussed playschool (taalpeuterspeelzaal) four days a week and she will start at a Dutch school in May. Dutch is definitely her weakest language but we do encourage the children to watch Dutch cartoons and I read Dutch books aloud occasionally.
My younger daughter Daisy is also stronger in Polish, as you would expect, and the girls normally speak Polish to each other. Her English is okay and she comes out with some surprisingly long sentences every now and again. However, she often just uses a single word to say what she wants. Her Dutch is just starting as she started to go to the playschool just a few months back.
All studies show that the community or school language always becomes dominant so we know that this it is question of time before Dutch takes a more dominant place. We have already observed that the girls do speak to each other in Dutch occasionally and we were smiling because we know that this is just the start.
My own experience is that speaking multiple languages gives you access to a much broader world. I can only imagine how many interesting options the girls will have should they really become fully functional trilinguals.

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Bilingualism - Why?

There was an interesting article in the Iceland Review, "Bilingualism - Why Not?" (http://tinyurl.com/25zn3k) about the plans of one of the country's universities to offer a business degree entirely through English. The thrust of the article is that education through English can only be enriching and benificial to a country that has such an open economy dependent on international trade.
I have heard this argument before. There is no doubt that speaking better English is an advantage in the business world. However, I would question whether English medium education is the best way to achieve this. The Icelandic language is a unique cultural treasure that should not suffer death by a thousand cuts. You run that risk if you don't make it the only language used in every sphere possible.
In my time in Holland I have observed how a whole lexicon of Dutch terms related to IT have drifted into disuse. I hear English words such as happy or shop being used as though there is no Dutch equivalent when there are perfectly acceptable native words. I had to laugh when a guy working for the archive of a government institute was told that his area was now to be called the 'Document Management Unit'. All of this is supposed to be some kind of progress but at the expense of the Dutch language.
The Irish were one of the the only peoples that chose massively to abandon their native tongue. Within a few generations in the nineteenth century millions of Irish speakers raised their children as English speakers. Who would argue that Ireland is better off for that decision? Is it better to be a minor part of the English speaking world or would it not have been better to live as a unique Irish speaking nation?
Iceland is an example to the rest of the world of how a small country can be great. Language is integral to this uniqueness so I just hope that a creeping bilingualism will not introduce English through the back door.

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Rutger Kopland

Rutger Kopland is one of The Netherlands' most prominent poets and his work alone is a good reason to learn Dutch. He writes about everyday themes and his poetry is very accessible. The poem below is one of his most famous and I have put my own translation of the Dutch text is below.

Weggaan
Weggaan is iets anders
dan het huis uitsluipen
zacht de deur dichttrekken
achter je bestaan en niet
terugkeren. Je blijft
iemand op wie wordt gewacht.

Weggaan kun je beschrijven als
een soort van blijven. Niemand
wacht want je bent er nog.
Niemand neemt afscheid
want je gaat niet weg.

Leaving
Leaving is something different
than stealing from your house
gently closing the door on your existence
and never turning back.
You remain someone
waited upon.

Leaving is rather
a sort of staying.
Nobody waits
because you are still there.
Nobody bids farewell
because you are not going away.

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Favourite Book Titles

It's pretty difficult to specify what makes a book title great. For me there are a number of factors at play. Sometimes a title makes me want to read the book because it is so intriguing. Other times the title becomes more powerful when I have read the book and the background of the title is revealed.

In any case here is a Top 10 of my favourite book titles.

1) Dreams of Sex and Stage Diving - Martin Millar
I saw this book on my sister's bookshelf and the incongruous matching of sex with stage diving blew me away. The book itself is also worth reading and was pretty memorable for me as the lead character, Elfish, is an ultra-liberal fantasy girl.

2) Paris Trance - Geoff Dyer
Surprise, surprise the book is set in Paris. This book is one of those books about young love and a group of friends living it up Bohemian style. The use of trance in the title is very appropriate as it captures the fact that these times in your life have a trance-like quality looking back. Was it really you having that sex? This book is worth reading for the mirror sex scene alone.

3) Independent People by Halldor Laxness
Laxness won a Nobel prize for his oeuvre and this was his master work. The novel is heartbreaking for the stubborness of Bjartur who does everything to remain independent regardless of the suffering this causes. On another level I like to think that the title refers also to the Icelandic people, a proud and independent folk who have never given up their culture.

4) Burning Your Own by Glenn Patterson
This was the debut novel by one of my favourite writers. The novel is set in Belfast in 1969 just as everything is about to explode. The story is told through the eyes of a young Protestant boy trying to understand what is going on around him. The title is so powerful because after reading this you start questioning who 'your own' actually is.

5) Back When We Were Grown Ups by Anne Tyler
This title attracted me to this writer's work and I am delighted that I started to read her work. The contradiction in the title intrigued me and its power was reinforced on reading this book about a woman in search of some new meaning in her life.

6) The Woman Who Walked into Doors by Roddy Doyle
The title of this book is literal and the book itself is dark and shocking. In my opinion the book is his best and its title is a reminder of how dark life can be.

7) Miss Smilla's Feeling for Snow by Peter Hoeg
I loved the title both before and after reading the book. Smilla was an amazing character and the fact that her understanding of the marks in the snow drives her to solve the crime makes the title perfect.

8) The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
In this case I wondered straight away what a 'kite runner' was and finding out was a delight. In Dutch they translated this as the "The Kite Flyer (De Vliegeraar)" which I thought far less interesting.

9) Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
This book needs no introduction, the title is a reminder of the Dystopian vision of the world that Huxley described, a powerful warning right now more than ever.

10) The Hottest State by Ethan Hawke
I read this book in a pub in Tallinn and I guess that some people may have been surprised at the guy crying in his beer. The title refers to a poem the main character wrote at the age of 7 and I found that it fit the novel very well when I found out towards the end where it came from.

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