From Chile to Scotland, the prevalence and popularity of pre-school language programmes are booming as the professional, cultural and educational benefits brought about by the ability to speak another language are becoming more apparent. Coupled with research work carried out by academic and European institutions into multilingualism and its effects, these pioneering schemes are taking the world by storm.

In Chile it is English language classes which are on offer, whilst in Scotland the language du jour is French. On 15 February, the Santiago Times reported on the increased demand of language classes for pre-school children. As a result, many bilingual kindergartens for children between the ages of three and four have sprung up across the country. Such is the demand that long waiting lists are commonplace and the Instituto Norteamericano (ICHN) – one of the forerunners in the field of bilingual education for children – has had to open a January summer school to cope with the high number of applicants. Parents hope that learning English at this early age will boost their child’s chances of entering one of the many bilingual primary schools.

Over in Europe meanwhile, Piccolingo has received similar acclaim. This European Commission incentive is aimed at ‘raising parents’ awareness of the benefits of early language learning and providing practical information and support.’ Parents have been embracing the scheme wholeheartedly and one particular success story has been making national headlines in the UK. Piccolingo launched an international Facebook competition in December 2009 whereby parents submitted their innovative ideas for teaching foreign languages to young children. The winner was Lingobaby, a company founded by Fiona Moffat – a modern languages teacher in Scotland. Wanting to introduce her son to foreign languages at an early age and faced with a distinct lack of appropriate services, she set up Lingobaby which offers children from birth to 5 years old the opportunity to experience foreign languages. The rest is history: the first Children’s Language Centre in Scotland was launched in 2008 offering free play sessions with bilingual toys, games, songs, stories and sensory activities through the medium of French. There is also lingo homeplay which offers multilingual toys, CDs and musical instruments in French German, Italian, Spanish and Polish languages. (The link between language and music was also highlighted in an article published by the Independent on Sunday, when it was reported that playing a musical instrument could ‘help youngsters better process speech in noisy classrooms and more accurately interpret the nuances of language that are conveyed by subtle changes in the human voice.’)

For governmental schemes, a bilingual education scheme in Spain is underway and is supported by the Spanish Ministry of Education, regional governments and the British Council. Around 700 state schools are involved and a curriculum in English and Spanish is provided to children aged between 3 and 16. Lessons take place in English and Spanish on alternate days and the programme has proved to be immensely popular nationwide since its inception with both stakeholders and participants alike.

For academic institutions, research into childhood multilingualism also abound. One example is the University of London, Birkbeck, who are holding a conference in March 2010 entitled ‘Bringing up bilingual and multilingual children.’ The Department of Applied Linguistics and Communication are to host the event which will cover such themes as the best way for children to learn languages with the least amount of stress; early years learning and language development; and multilingual schooling. Experts in the fields of bilingual education, sociolinguistics, psycholinguistics and speech and language therapies will be in attendance, along with parents and grandparents who have experience of raising children multilingually.

Early learning linguistic schemes are proving popular worldwide and with all the exciting developments in multilingualism, it would appear that foreign language teaching to children is certainly doing its part to break down global language barriers.

Sources: BBC; www.teachingenglish.org; www.bbk.ac.uk

There are more than 3,000 languages currently included in UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Endangered Languages, which cites mainly external forces as the main culprits for a language’s demise: military, economic, religious, cultural and educational subjugation. Add to this the spread of globalisation and it would seem that time is running out for many world languages. Linguists have long been battling to preserve and revitalize these vanishing languages and are using new technologies and media to safeguard the cultural identity and knowledge contained therein.

Two such organisations involved in this task are Survival International (an organization supporting tribal peoples worldwide) and VOGA (Vanishing Voices of the Great Andamanese). Both recently reported on their endeavours to preserve the Bo language and the death of its last known speaker – Boa Sr (its sole native speaker for close to 40 years). The language is thought to have originated in Africa almost 65,000 years ago. But since January 2010, Bo has become a dead language and its loss has not only been felt by linguists – anthropologists are also mourning the death of the last Bo speaker, as her death signifies the loss of a cultural identity and vital historical knowledge. Survival International’s Director stated that “With the death of Boa Sr and the extinction of the Bo language, a unique part of human society is now just a memory. Boa’s loss is a bleak reminder that we must not allow this to happen to the other tribes of the Andaman Islands.’

Following Boa Sr’s death, the BBC ran an in-depth report by K. David Harrison – a ‘scientist exploring the world’s vanishing languages’. He is the author of The Last Speakers: The Quest to Uncover the World’s most Endangered Languages and featured in The Linguists – a documentary charting the journey to document dying languages and which received worldwide acclaim when it premiered at the 2008 Sundance Film Festival. Harrison equates the survival of language with the survival of species which he claims exhibit ‘parallel extinctions.’ He believes that 80% of animal species are unknown to science and 80% of languages are yet to be documented and as such, highlights the important relationship between language and the environment in which we live. This can be seen further with VOGA, who has been involved in publishing a book covering the Ethno-linguistic-ornithological aspects of the birds of Andaman, and UNESCO also recognizes the importance of native languages to medical and geographical fields.

Harrison is also a strong advocate of the role that new technologies play in raising awareness of the plight of endangered languages. Following the screening of The Linguists at various festivals worldwide, it was released on the Babelgum website in 2009: ‘The Internet, used strategically, has enormous capacity to help get the word out, and to help sustain and support small languages.’

International organisations and institutions also share this viewpoint. The European Union is funding a project to protect and preserve languages. The ELDA (European language diversity for all) program has received nearly 3 million Euros in funding and boasts a ‘vitality barometer’ to measure languages which are becoming extinct. It will focus on 14 Finno-Ugric languages such as Meänkieli in Sweden and the language spoken by Estonian migrant workers in Germany.

In January 2010, the Rosetta Stone Endangered Language Program reported on the launch of their Chitimacha language version of Rosetta Stone® software – aimed at ‘reversing the tide of global language extinction’ and the program rights of which have been exclusively released to the Chitimacha Tribe of Louisiana.

In Canada, The UBC Museum of Anthropology has just opened a new gallery which houses the exhibit ‘Border Zones’. It includes a multimedia installation focussing on the Gitxsanimaax language which has an estimated 400 speakers. Artist John Wynne worked with a linguist to gather examples of the language and has created an audio-visual ‘soundscape’ which will ultimately be returned to the community in which the language is spoken. (CBC News).

The individuals and organizations fighting for the survival of these languages will ensure that a multitude of voices will live on for many future generations. In the words of K. David Harrison ‘Linguistic survivors hold the fates of languages in their minds and mouths. Let’s listen while we still can.’

Scandinavians seem to speak English better than some people born in the UK, why do Danish, Norwegian and Swedish people speak many more languages than your average UK national? Here Peter Hansen, The Translation People’s Senior Production specialist and a native Dane, investigates the reasons why…

Most Scandinavian children start learning English in their third year at school, usually around the age of nine, and continue until they leave school at sixteen or seventeen. Those who go onto secondary education and perhaps higher education (university), will learn or use English well into their twenties.

The “global village” has made communication among the world’s countries more important than ever. With rising political, financial and cultural interaction it is imperative that people are able to understand each other, and English has become the language of international communication. The three Scandinavian languages are spoken by a relatively small number of people – fewer than twenty million in Denmark, Norway and Sweden combined – and learning a foreign language is therefore seen as a vital means of staying in touch with the outside world.

The practice of teaching English to children of a relatively young age could be seen as something done out of necessity as “so few speak our language, and so many do not”, but one could also take the view that it is the basis for getting to know and understand the world and its people.

Televised media in Scandinavia is usually aired in the original language in which it was produced, English language films, soap operas, dramas and documentaries proliferate Scandinavian media. It seems almost impossible to avoid English when living in Denmark, Sweden or Norway; as English is heard everywhere it reinforces those classroom lessons and helps perfect Scandinavian’s grasp of English. In contrast if you were to tune into a mainstream foreign language film in the UK, more often than not you would discover an English voiceover which further limits the UK’s access to foreign languages.

However, even though we have established that Scandinavians are highly proficient English speakers, fluency is only really ever achieved by immersing yourself in the language and living in a country where English is the predominant language. However, this is not always practical or desirable for a lot of people.

The Translation People are aware that a number of companies target their Scandinavian customers in English. From all the facts above, this seems like a sensible option, however even those people who are completely fluent in a second language can miss linguistic nuances and could even be offended if they misunderstand certain text. Here at The Translation People we would always recommend translating your written document into the language of your target option, to ensure that nothing gets lost in linguistic misunderstanding.

In the September-October issue of the ITI bulletin Susan Bassnett explored the forgotten languages of her childhood. In today’s multicultural society it is not uncommon to find people who spent the first 3-4 years of their lives speaking one language, only to be moved to a completely different country and forced to learn a new language from scratch at school age. This raises an interesting question, is the language(s) that we learn during our childhood, our “first” language, ever really forgotten? Is learning a language not just like riding a bike, we may think we have forgotten how to, but with a little encouragement and practice it comes flooding back to us? Various moments, people, places, smells and tastes trigger memories in our mind. When it comes to language the situation is very similar, if you don’t use a language you may think you have forgotten how to speak it, however, spending time surrounded by the language can trigger memories of words or grammatical structures you used to know.

We know of a couple of people who have had interesting experiences with their “forgotten first language”. A young girl who had spoken English up to the age of five was whisked away to Spain by her mother. Some 10 years later having gone through the majority of her educational career speaking Spanish, which she quickly picked up at the age of five, she was forced to return to the UK to complete her GCSEs and A Levels. Although her mother was English too, she had been spoken to only in Spanish and therefore set about relearning her first language on arrival in the UK. Learning a language takes years, however this girl managed to successfully pick English up in six months regaining almost total fluency. There may be exceptional linguists amongst us, who have magnificent memories and are able to pick up a language in six months, but for the majority of people it takes years to become fluent in a foreign language. Perhaps this person in question was one of those exceptional linguists, or perhaps moving back to the UK triggered memories of a language which she was once fluent in and had since forgotten.

Secondly, we know of a 25 year old man whose first language is English and who moved to Japan to work, to learn Japanese and to immerse himself in the culture and language of this very different country. Whilst he has never really ever forgotten how to speak English, having had 25 year’s of the language ingrained on his mind, he now returns to the UK for holidays and to catch up with friends and finds that his English is not as fluent as it once was, he finds some English words difficult to remember and substitutes them with the Japanese equivalent. A number of The Translation People’s Account Managers, having spent a year abroad as part of their degree, have had similar experiences. This last example seems to indicate that the language in which you are immersed is always at the forefront of your mind. Although time allows you to forget a language, example one suggests that in a relatively short period of time you regain fluency in this forgotten language.

This subject matter is fascinating and could be the topic for a 20,000 word research paper, but from our very short discussion it appears that everything we learn from a young age sticks with us throughout our lives; by regularly using all the languages we speak we can ensure that they don’t ever become forgotten.