In advance of Mother Language Day, about a thousand Iranians who grew up speaking a minority language took to Twitter to express their sense of loss and frustration at the marginalization of their mother tongue.
The #Manofarsi (Me and Farsi) hashtag soon went viral, with speakers of minority languages across Iran, from Azeri to Arabic, uniting in their discontent at the structural discrimination they experience in their home country for being born into a language other than Persian.
Sevil Suleymani, a Turkish-Azerbaijani civil rights activist and co-founder of the End of Monolingualism campaign, told IranWire that “the campaign aimed to spread awareness of the systemic relegation of non-native Persian speakers espoused by the Islamic Republic.” She herself grew up in Parsabad in Ardebil province, northwestern Iran, where not one of her 35-strong cohort in the first grade spoke Persian at home.
“Our first grade teacher was a young woman from Tabriz,” she recalled, “who had come to Parsabad immediately after finishing vocational school. She had come to do what she’d been instructed to do there: to teach us Persian. She thought we could all speak fluent Persian already, and the reality was the opposite. In the early days, when she was brandishing her cane, she called out my name and I wet myself with fear, because I did not know any Persian.”
Behrouz Bouchani, a well-known Kurdish writer currently teaching in exile at the University of Sydney, wrote of the campaign on Twitter: “#Manofarsi is one of our most important events in the field of public culture. In the last few hours, hundreds of excruciating stories of the degradation, insulting and racist treatment of Gilaks, Turks, Arabs, and other minorities have been recorded via this hashtag. If you want to know where the real Iran is, follow it.”
Pro-government media outlets have discounted the movement as an attempt by “Persian-language broadcasters in Britain and the United States” to “sow the seeds of discord in a society that is still co-existing despite deep political, ideological, and economic fissures.”
The theme of last month’s International Mother Language Day, “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities,” raised the potential of technology to advance multilingual education and support the development of quality teaching and learning for all.
According to a statement released by UNESCO, “Technology has the potential to address some of the greatest challenges in education today. It can accelerate efforts towards ensuring equitable and inclusive lifelong learning opportunities for all if it is guided by the core principles of inclusion and equity. Multilingual education based on mother tongue is a key component of inclusion in education.
“During COVID-19 school closures, many countries around the world employed technology-based solutions to maintain continuity of learning. But many learners lacked the necessary equipment, internet access, accessible materials, adapted content, and human support that would have allowed them to follow distance learning. Moreover, distance teaching and learning tools, programs and content are not always able to reflect language diversity.”
Audrey Azoulay, Director-General of UNESCO, on the occasion of International Mother Language Day released the following statement: “When he expresses his desire to reacquaint himself with his language, Hamet, the boy created by the writer Diadié Dembélé, is expressing a universal and fundamental need.
Indeed, every language has a certain rhythm, a certain way of approaching things, of thinking about them. Learning or forgetting a language is thus not merely about acquiring or losing a means of communication. It is about seeing an entire world either appear or fade away.
From the very first day of school, many schoolchildren have the ambivalent experience of discovering one language – and the world of ideas which comes with it – and forgetting another one: the language they have known since infancy. Worldwide, four out of ten students do not have access to education in the language they speak or understand best; as a result, the foundation for their learning is more fragile. This distancing from the mother tongue affects us all, for linguistic diversity is a common good. And the protection of linguistic diversity is a duty.
Technology can provide new tools for protecting linguistic diversity. Such tools, for example, facilitating their spread and analysis, allow us to record and preserve languages which sometimes exist only in oral form. Put simply, they make local dialects a shared heritage. However, because the Internet poses a risk of linguistic uniformization, we must also be aware that technological progress will serve plurilingualism only as long as we make the effort to ensure that it does. The designing of digital tools in several languages, the supporting of media development, and the supporting of access to connectivity: all this needs to be done so that people can discover different languages without giving up their respective mother tongues.
The International Decade of Indigenous Languages, which began this year, should, by channeling the efforts of researchers, broadcasters, and speakers, give new momentum to the protection of these invaluable repositories of know-how and worldviews. As the lead agency for Decade-related work, UNESCO is fully committed to this cause.
On this international day, I thus call on everyone able to do so to defend linguistic and cultural diversity, which makes up the universal grammar of our shared humanity.”
France’s official authority on the vocabulary and grammar of its language has targeted a new threat: “les Californisms.”
That’s the name the Académie Française (or in English, the French Academy) has come up with to describe the many tech-related loanwords from English that have entered the French language. In a 30-page report that the academy recently published online, six members of the academy identified and denounced the use of several widespread English-derived loanwords, including, but not limited to, Californisms.
“Many anglicisms are used in place of existing French words or expressions, inevitably leading to the gradual erasure of the French equivalents,” the report reads. Californisms that the academy has shunned include words that are particularly prominent on the internet, such as cookies, hashtag, and millennials. Additionally, the report notes that the use of many English loanwords has been accelerated by the COVID-19 pandemic. The report shows particular disdain toward the French government’s active use of many of these terms in official government communications.
There are also claims that many words’ use is not “justified by any necessity” as there are already existing French-language equivalents. Examples of these words include mix, post, and network. The academy sees the use of such words as a sign of the French language’s “degradation,” which it argues is avoidable.
Still, linguistic experts generally regard language change—whether that means borrowing new words from other languages or gradual shifts in certain phonological features—as natural and inevitable.
The Académie Française has served as the official authority on the French language for centuries—it was created in 1635, with the explicit goal of “(fixing) the French language, giving it rules, rendering it pure and comprehensible by all.” It’s notorious for taking a conservative stance on language shift.
For example, in 2017, it claimed that the French language was in “mortal danger,” due to the growing use of non–standard, gender-inclusive language in certain written contexts. AW
Though automatic translation engines like Google Translate are far from perfect, they have become useful tools to help individuals communicate, particularly for high-demand language pairs like English and Spanish. However, machine translation for signed languages like American Sign Language (ASL) lags far behind spoken and written languages.
That could be changing soon, though—the COVID-19 pandemic has spurred the development of artificial intelligence-based technologies that can translate sign languages into written language. Most recently, an engineering student at the Vellore Institute of Technology in Tamil Nadu, India, went viral on social media for her efforts to develop an AI model that can translate basic ASL phrases into English with high accuracy rates. In a now-viral LinkedIn post, Priyanjali Gupta shared the model, receiving more than 60,000 reactions on the platform. Gupta’s AI model made headlines on Feb. 15 for its ability to identify simple ASL phrases with accuracy rates hovering around 90% or higher. While it doesn’t work as an all-purpose machine translation model (it can only identify six different phrases right now), Gupta’s model serves as a testament to the increased interest in developing automatic translation for signed languages. She plans to work on expanding the model to improve its ability to identify additional signs.
“The data set is manually made with a computer webcam and given annotations. The model, for now, is trained on single frames,” Gupta told Interesting Engineering. “To detect videos, the model has to be trained on multiple frames, for which I’m likely to use LSTM. I’m currently researching on it… I’m just an amateur student but I’m learning. And I believe, sooner or later, our open-source community, which is much more experienced than me, will find a solution.”
Unlike written languages, machine translation for signed languages requires a given model to be capable of identifying specific gestures—that is, the placement, shape, and movement of an individual’s hands—with high precision.
This means developers must have knowledge about computer vision in addition to their knowledge about machine translation and sign language. As a result, it’s more difficult than developing machine translation for written languages, which generally have a standardized set of already-digitized characters. AW
Lightspeed, a provider of powerful instructional audio solutions, has released research showing that instructional audio solutions benefit all student groups and educators beyond the COVID-19 pandemic. With mask mandates and social distancing in place around the nation, instructional audio solutions play a critical role—projecting educators’ voices and ensuring every student can hear and understand what’s being asked of them. Though necessary to prevent the spread of the COVID-19 virus, face masks muffle sound—increasing the difficulty for educators to relay information and for students to hear and understand their teachers. However, decades of research, including the Mainstream Amplification Resource Room Study conducted and certified by the US Department of Education, note that a variety of student groups benefit from instructional audio, including students with learning loss, students in the back of classrooms, students with learning differences, and multilingual learners. At Simi Valley Unified School District in California, educators using instructional audio solutions reported ease of speaking and greater vocal endurance—as well as decreased fatigue and greater voice clarity. Some of the district’s more soft-spoken educators reported an increase in energy because they were no longer straining their voices to be heard. https://www.lightspeed-tek.com/
During last month’s Second International Conference on Portuguese and Spanish Languages (CILPE) in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, leading Ibero-American language experts came together to create an action plan to strengthen Spanish and Portuguese in the areas of science, technology, and culture.
Among the conclusions of this conference was the conclusion that thanks to artificial intelligence (AI), in the future, the quality of scientific publications will prevail over the language in which they are originally published.
At the closing of the meeting, the director of the Real Academia Española (REA), Santiago Muñoz Machado, highlighted the need to preserve the Spanish language, especially during this digital revolution and the development of AI. “Unity gives strength to our language and enables us to look to a bright future, like we saw with expansion of the language during the 20th century. These technical developments pose challenges that have a lot in common with hurdles overcome by the REA in the past,” he said.
Given the concern about the changes in the language that may arise with the arrival of AI and “speaking machines,” the director of the REA cited the Spanish Language and AI project, which consists of agreements signed between Spain and the major global technology industries so that the devices not only speak Spanish but also do it correctly. “We have to fulfill this function, as it is part of the regulatory role that the institution has exercised since its creation,” he said.
The director of the Organización de Estados Iberoamericanos (OEI) in Brazil, Raphael Callou, emphasized that CILPE does not end with the conference but that it will be a continuous process, with actions and results that can be analyzed next year at the next conference, in Paraguay. The host of the next CILPE, the secretary of language policies of Paraguay, Ladislaa Alcaraz, greeted everyone in Guarani, the widely spoken Indigenous language of her country.
The OEI’s director of bilingualism, Ana Paula Laborinho, who is also director of the OEI in Portugal, highlighted the importance of promoting multilingualism. “I would like to leave this conference not as general director of bilingualism but as general director of multilingualism, that is what we are, that makes us richer and more plural,” she commented. The last day of the meeting focused on the space currently occupied by the Portuguese and Spanish languages in culture and science. According to data presented, the number of researchers and relevant studies in Portuguese and Spanish is increasing. However, the problem, according to the presenters, is the lack of visibility of these studies due to the hegemony of English in the main scientific media.
“We need to build a production architecture so that our science in Portuguese and Spanish has visibility,” said Gilvan Müller, from the Federal University of Santa Catarina, Brazil, pointing to measures such as the creation of a network with databases that index publications in both languages and the digital promotion of these studies to create this new scenario for science in both languages.
The participants also analyzed the space of the two languages in the technological scenario. “The role of ethics has been important in inducing responsible artificial intelligence,” commented Helder Coelho, from the University of Lisbon, Portugal, addressing inclusive access to the benefits of language technology.
California has outlined several goals for its education system, which are rapidly approaching over the course of the next decade. Among these are plans to develop a universal preschool program by 2025, as well as the Global California 2030 plan, which aims to foster the development of 1,600 dual-language immersion programs within the state by 2030. That’s where Assembly Bill 1701 comes in. Introduced earlier this year by State Assembly Member Jose Medina (D-Riverside), AB 1701 would establish the California State University Jump Start Grant Program. The program would invest millions of dollars toward developing bilingual teacher education programs, in order to keep up with the educational demands of the next eight years.
“The need for credentialed teachers with a bilingual authorization has increased,” the bill reads. Yet the number of credentialed teachers who are authorized to teach in dual-language immersion programs has actually declined over the past two decades or so. At its peak in the late 1990s, there were roughly 1,800 teachers with bilingual authorization—during the 2015–16 school year, there were just 1,488. According to a report by EdSource, the state would need to double the number of teachers in dual-language education programs to meet the goals outlined in Global California 2030 in a timely fashion.
The number of students enrolled in dual-language immersion programs has also declined—according to the bill, 30% of English language learners were enrolled in such programs. Now, AB 1701 says only 5% are enrolled in dual-language education.
A little more than half of the 80 teacher preparation programs in the state’s higher education system offer bilingual authorizations—under AB 1701, the state would appropriate a sum of $5 million annually toward the development of these programs. Specifically, this money would be allocated to allow programs within the CSU system to better recruit full-time and part-time faculty on tenure tracks to improve the quality and consistency of bilingual teacher preparation programs. “We now have a central site where all heritage language programs can be documented, located, and shared. It is not a competition, it is the largest collaboration project so far.”
Ultimately, the Portal reframes language education as a vital component of social justice and equity. “Our political system, our justice system, our health care system, our communities cannot function properly If we cannot communicate with each other,” says Richard Brecht, director of the Portal project and co-director of the American Councils Research Center. “What the Working Group is trying to prove with this website is that we can meet the needs of all Americans, whether they are born here or abroad, whether they grew up in rural towns, big cities, or on Native lands. Everyone can and should have access to quality language education, and the new Portal will offer concrete examples of how to make that happen.” www.americaslanguages.org
To help connect educational innovations with the learners who want and need them most, the America’s Languages Working Group is launching a first-of-its-kind online resource on March 14. The America’s Languages Portal: Model Programs and Practices Advancing Access and Equity in US Language Education (www.americaslanguages.org) is a registry of programs that can be emulated and adapted by on-the-ground efforts across the country to introduce students from diverse populations to effective language instruction. The portal collects advances in pre-K–12, college and university, and community-based language education, specifically the advances that improve access for more of the nation’s neglected learners and languages.
The idea is to prove that it is possible, even feasible, to provide the language and intercultural skills the country needs to address critical social justice issues at home as well as those directed at a more collaborative, interdependent, and just world. In so doing, it will illustrate the aspirations and achievements of the language profession: broader and more equitable access, accountability in programming and instruction, and a more diverse portfolio of language offerings.
In particular, the portal focuses on programs that aspire to full and equal access for Black communities and people of color; economically disadvantaged learners in rural and inner-city communities; Latinx populations, including English learners; and Native American, heritage, immigrant, and refugee communities.
The America’s Languages Working Group was first convened by the American Academy of Arts and Sciences to help support the recommendation of its 2017 report, America’s Languages: Investing in Language Education in the 21st Century. The working group now comprises leaders and stakeholders across the language enterprise—from government, industry, education, NGOs, and Native American and heritage, immigrant, and refugee communities—all of whom volunteer their time to strengthen language education.
Construction of the website began in 2019, with leadership from the American Councils for International Education, one of the organizations represented in its membership. Earlier this year, the Center for Open Educational Resources and Language Learning (COERLL) and the Texas Language Center at the University of Texas at Austin assumed day-to-day operations of the site—all with funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
“Our hope is that the site will inspire a groundswell of more accessible and more effective programming across the country, when teachers and funders see what’s possible,” says John Tessitore, chair of the working group.
The portal includes extended descriptions of exemplary programs, collected through an open and continuing selection process. Any program may apply that feels it meets the criteria defining increased access. The process of selecting programs is the responsibility of a cadre of America’s Languages Fellows—distinguished teachers, administrators, and researchers—who must approve the model programs of every size and any location.
Educators at every level will be able to visit the site for contacts, inspiration, and successful models for their own work, as may policymakers and funders interested in advancing access to language education in the US.
The portal’s emphasis on Native American language and heritage language programs, often overlooked in academic settings, is among its most innovative features.
“The portal is a new way to highlight the vibrancy and breadth of Native American language revitalization efforts,” says Leslie Harper, president of the National Coalition of Native American Language Schools and Programs. “There are hundreds of distinct Native American languages across the US, each unique in context and approach to language sustenance. We hope the portal provides an opportunity to elevate the visibility and determination of Native American language schools and community programs, and generates new connections.”
“This site provides the most comprehensive landscape of heritage languages in higher ed, K–12, and community-based institutions, the three main pillars of America’s language programs,” says Tommy Lu of the Coalition of Community-Based Heritage Language Schools. “We now have a central site where all heritage language programs can be documented, located, and shared. It is not a competition, it is the largest collaboration project so far.”
Ultimately, the portal reframes language education as a vital component of social justice and equity.
“Our political system, our justice system, our health care system, our communities cannot function properly if we cannot communicate with each other,” says Richard Brecht, director of the portal project and co-director of the American Councils Research Center. “What the working group is trying to prove with this website is that we can meet the needs of all Americans, whether they are born here or abroad, whether they grew up in rural towns, big cities, or on Native lands. Everyone can and should have access to quality language education, and the new portal will offer concrete examples of how to make that happen.” www.americaslanguages.org
English does not have grammatical gender—nouns are not classified as “masculine” or “feminine” as they are in other European languages. But we do have words that denote gender, like man or girl. There is no grammatical agreement for gender for adjectives in English, but there is the weight of precedent. The frequency with which we encounter any given pairing influences the way we ourselves use a given adjective. Take our use of the adjective handsome, for instance.
We typically use handsome to refer to an attractive man and beautiful to refer to an attractive woman. But these uses aren’t governed by grammar, they are governed by convention. The fact is, handsome woman was formerly much more commonly used than it is today; a corpus of English text before 1700 shows that handsome woman was used ten times more frequently than beautiful man. A similar search for the same two-word pairs in a corpus of text published in the past twelve years shows a remarkable flip, with beautiful man occurring nearly 20 times more frequently than handsome woman.
Even though their current use is more or less parallel in meaning, handsome and beautiful have very different histories. These histories are observable in the spelling of these words: Beautiful means “full of beauty,” coming from the French word beauté. Handsome originally meant “well-suited to the hands” of a tool or weapon, then jumped from referring to the thing wielded to the person doing the wielding to mean “good with the hands” or “dexterous.” It then came to mean “clever” or “fitting.” This idea of appropriateness or suitability led handsome to mean “elegant, well-proportioned,” and finally to a rough synonym of beautiful.
This history of handsome shows that the word always had essentially pragmatic roots in English, rather than the purely esthetic meanings of beautiful through time. Maybe this deep background of the word’s use has contributed to the evolution of handsome as a near-synonym of beautiful, but one with different connotations.
Shakespeare used handsome of a woman, and its other uses in literature are many, from Jane Austen to Mark Twain. In the 20th century, we find a slight change in meaning: still used to connote attractiveness, yes, but of a homey, comfortable, and unromantic kind. In journalistic writing, we see handsome used to describe a woman in TIME magazine into the 1980s, most often as “handsome wife.” So handsome is settling into an identity after more than 400 years of usage. It means something slightly different when used of a man or of a woman, showing that parallel adjectives are not perfectly logical or equal. As a term for a slightly older, slightly serious woman, it forms an interesting pair with the use of our term for a slightly younger, slightly unserious man: pretty boy.
Follow Peter Sokolowski, editor-at-large for Merriam-Webster, on Twitter @PeterSokolowski.
As the Russian army proceeds with its invasion of Ukraine, our natural inclination to defend the weaker, younger, more democratic nation against its aggressive, giant, authoritarian neighbor is suppressed by the fear that any such action could result in the Armageddon of nuclear war. However, that doesn’t mean that we are powerless in the face of such aggression; we still have economic tools, like sanctions, and probably more productive—even when dealing with an authoritarian regime—is our ability to stimulate public unrest through effective communication. As we’ve seen in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, conflicts in the 21st century are not likely to be won by brute military force, but by winning the hearts and minds of people.
President Putin may have delusionally expected his armies to be welcomed by the Ukrainian masses, but it now must be clear, even to him, that they will fight tooth and nail against any occupation, making the war ultimately unwinnable. At the same time, it’s emerging that sentiment in Russia is firmly against the invasion, especially among the growing, younger middle classes, who are well traveled, speak English (and often another foreign language), and may offer the only way out of this situation without enormous casualties.
The breakup of the Soviet Union was largely due to its leader Mikhail Gorbachev’s policy of glasnost, which can be roughly translated as political openness, and which should be resurrected now to help ensure that the Russian people are fully aware of their Ukrainian cousins’ resistance to the military onslaught and understand that for the people of Russia, the attack will bring no benefits. In this way, internal support for regime change can grow to the point where it cannot be resisted.
Our best strategy at the moment is to encourage all communication in the hope of better understanding. Last year, Putin clamped down on Russian media, closing down more than ten media outlets and charging dozens of journalists critical of the government with “acting as foreign agents,” but there was little international outcry. Some independent media organizations still exist in Russia (see World, p. 14), but there have been calls for international media giants, like Meta and Google, to block misinformation from Russian state-run sources. And there could be a backlash if the platforms are blocked. “It’s the most important place for public debate about what’s going on,” Andrei Soldatov, a Russian journalist and censorship expert, recently told the New York Times. “Nobody would take it as a good sign if Facebook blocked access for Russian citizens.” At the same time, the European Union is blocking Russian state broadcasters, like RT.
The last thing we should be doing is isolating the Russian people, yet we have California Democrat Rep. Eric Swalwell calling for “kicking every Russian student out of the United States.” In 2021, there were about 5,000 Russian students at universities or colleges of further education, as well as many more in high schools and other private schools. Many may be the offspring of powerful oligarchs aligned to Putin, but their experience in the US may be crucial in halting future Russian aggression.The Russian people shouldn’t be punished for the actions of their government. Relationships between them and the rest of the world need to be nurtured through mutual education and the sharing of cultures, so that the very concept of going to war over territorial disputes becomes obsolete.
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