That’s the linguistic reality at the Kumbh Mela Hindi festival in northern India. Millions of devotees travel from all over India for a ritual dip in the Ganges. Most travel in groups, and can easily get separated. Some have mobile phones. Many don’t– and even those do can’t keep them charged. Many aren’t used to travel; for some, it’s the first time they have left their home state. Lots of people get lost.

That’s where the Kumbh Mela Lost and Found camp comes in. From 1946 to 2012, camp staff say they have reunited 1,064,748 adults and 19,717 children with their traveling parties. How do they do it, if they don’t speak the same language as the lost person? They have that person speak in his or her own language over public address system.

A man dressed as Hindu goddess Kali, the goddess of power, performs with a burning camphor tablet on his tongue during a religious procession ahead of the Kumbh Mela. (Reuters/Jitendra Prakash)

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Now, on the eve of the Super Bowl, there is criticism that a Volkswagen ad due to be broadcast during the big game is racist because it features a white guy speaking Jamaican patois. This appears to be a spoof of a spoof: the lilywhite Minnesota office setting (complete with token Asian man) appears to be playing off NBC’s The Office, which has had characters faking Jamaican accents.

But Jamaicans seem happy that the ad is giving their nation and culture some free publicity. And they also seem to understand that in the ad, the joke is on the deeply unhip white office guys.

Also in the podcast: will a 15-year-old Icelandic girl get to officially use the name her parents gave her? A court in Reykjavik has decided.

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Hodges wasn’t crazy about the separatists’ message, at least as perceived by English speakers like him: that Anglophones weren’t welcome in Quebec.

So he wrote the bilingual Notre Home (“Our Home”).

“A lot of people are getting discouraged,” Hodges told the CBC in September 2012. “They feel like the language laws are going to be enforced a lot more and it’s going to push the English[-speaking] people outside and not consider Quebec our home.”

The message of Notre Home, said Hodges, is: “We are here, this is our home, we have an identity, we are people.”

Since then, Quebec’s separatist government has pushed ahead on the language front. It has introduced a bill that would, among other things, strip as many as 90 towns of their bilingual status—meaning they would only be permitted to communicate with residents in French.

Tensions are rising, just as they did last time Quebecers battled over language. It’s not a surprise that Notre Home has become popular.

The idea of Notre Home was to make English-speakers feel at home in Quebec. So it has come as a shock to many Quebecers that the separatist government has deciding to bankroll performances of the song. The government is underwriting a tour of Hodges and his band.

“We want to give the signal [that] you’re here to stay,” said Jean-François Lisée, Quebec’s minister responsible for the province’s English speaking community, at last week’s official announcement. “We want you to be here to stay.”

Lisée later told the CBC he was impressed by the song’s video, which shows young Montrealers of all colors playing together in a park.

“When they showed it to me,” said Lisée, “I thought that was a great way to anyone who would doubt it that Anglo-Quebecers are here at home for ever.”

But as far as many Anglophones are concerned, Lisée is just the good cop, the rest of the Parti Québécois being the not so pleasant cops. Lisée himself admits that after he wins the trust of English speakers, it’ll time to talk language reform.

“Once we are secure in the fact that we’re all Quebecers, we’re going to have a number of issues that we should deal with,” says Lisée. He says it’s important that Anglophones “not believe that every issue is an attack on … identity.”

In other words, there’ll be a new language law reinforcing French coming down the pike. And many English speakers aren’t going to like it.

One mayor of small town that currently sends out a bilingual newsletter to its residents isn’t impressed.

“Instead of composing a song,” he told TV channel CTV, “maybe they could let us communicate with our Anglophone community in our newsletter.”

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For reasons that’ll soon become clear, I couldn’t help imagining that those little Chinese snacks we were eating were…alive. Now, some Asian food items really are alive when you put them in your mouth—but that’s a different story. The dishes we we’d ordered weren’t moving, except for the fact that I’d just viewed them in another form—walking, talking and fighting.

Here’s a taste of Goh and Woo’s creation, Dim Sum Warriors: “Their bravery and skill have inspired millions worldwide, while the mere mention of their names causes enemies to quiver like tofu.”

Dim Sum Warriors is a comic book that started as an iPad app. It started online, and now is out in book form, the reverse of most tech-savvy comic book series.

Goh and Woo created Dim Sum Warriors partly for their daughter, Kai Yen Goh. She’s learning to understand both English and Chinese by using the app.

“We felt especially because we were bringing up a daughter in America we wanted something that would represent her mixed-up cultural heritage,” says Goh.

On an iPad, you can read Dim Sum Warriors in English or in Chinese. Or, you can flip between the two languages. If you want to hear the audio, you tap a word balloon. If you hold your finger on the balloon, you get a translation—script and audio.

Click to view a larger clip. (Courtesy: Dimsum Warriors/Yumcha Studios)

Nick Sousanis is a big fan of Dim Sum Warriors. He teaches a class at Columbia’s Teachers College on using comics in classrooms. He says the Dim Sum Warriors is that it makes clever use of some relatively new behaviour patterns.

“If you read the New York Times on the web and you want to know what a word means, you click on it,” says Sousanis. Dim Sum Warriors operates like that. “You can see the action you know what the characters are doing, you see the word. You can associate the word with what that action is. It just synergistically holds together.”

Kids seem to like it too. Third-grader Finn Myers, who lives in New York, says he’s read Dim Sum Warriors “at least” seven times.

“It’s like you’re doing two things at once but you don’t even know,” says Finn. “You’re learning the language and reading.”

Now, that’s something of dream for language teachers—distracting students with a strong narrative so they want to read on.

Of course, it may not work on all kids. But Finn’s teacher Kyla Huang says Dim Sum Warriors will be a valuable addition to many classrooms. Huang says Chinese teachers in the United States do more than teach. They’re “also authors” of teaching materials because there aren’t enough officially approved materials available in the US.

It helps that Dim Sum Warriors is an iPad app—iPads and other tablets are already a big hit in many schools

Yen Yen Woo tried out Dim sum Warriors on some other 3rd graders. She said they liked the idea of Chinese food items talking to each other. But something was missing.

“They all said ‘what about scallion pancakes…and spring rolls?’” says Woo. “They also said teachers should have them read it just before lunch because it’s going to make them very hungry.”

It’s true, you do get hungry. But you also want to read to learn how the likes of Crown Prince Roast Pork Bao fares in the face of the evil Colonel Quicky Noodle. (Woo and Goh describe him as a mixture of Robert Downey Jr and a mutant pot of instant ramen.)

Colin Goh’s favorite character is the pompously-named Master Phoenix Claw, who’s actually nothing more than a chicken foot. But in dim sum menus, chicken feet are described as phoenix claws. “I always envisaged him as a sort of used car salesman,” says Goh. “He’s always trying to pull a fast one on everyone.”

There’s the blend again of Chinese and American culture. Who could be more American than a car salesman? What could be more Chinese than a menu item with an over-the-top name? Put them together and you get something new.

“A lot of the comics in the past have portrayed Asians in this stereotypical way, like you’re either dragon lady or the mysterious Zen master,” says Woo. “We really wanted our child to grow up being confident of her own culture and to see all these character as being part of the universe.”

And so in Dim Sum Warriors there is American-style teenage introspection, but also kung fu fights, albeit enacted by dumplings. Just the idea of a comic book is American, or at least not Chinese. Most Asian comic books are Japanese, though comic book scene in Taiwan is picking up pace.

It’s from Japan, too, that the idea of talking food comes. The Japanese have featured various personified food items in comics and cartoons for years. But with its breadth of characters, Dim Sum Warriors takes things a few wacky steps further.

Even though you can now read Dim Sum Warriors the old-fashioned way, you need to experience it as originally conceived, on an iPad, for the full effect.

To grasp the difference, Colin Goh casts his mind back to when he was teenager, obsessed with Japanese pop culture. He taught himself the language in a painstaking way, “by sitting there with manga and three dictionaries and trying to figure out what they were saying.” The iPad, he says, “enabled us to make the comic into what I would have wanted back when I was 15 years old.”

Another advantage is that apps debut in scores of countries—less of a distribution problem than books. So far, though, there are fewer Chinese using Dim Sum Warriors to learn English than the other way round. Woo and Goh hope to change that with a visit to China later this year.

They even have the idea of turning their fantasy into a stage musical—another American genre making inroads in China.

Here’s a previous post and podcast featuring Colin Goh and Yen Yen Woo. They talk about their role as editor of a dictionary of Singlish, the mashed-up street patois that all self-respecting Singaporeans use.

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This is the final part of a BBC series called Our Language in Your Hands. In the first part, Turin returns to a village in Nepal where two decades ago he learned and documented the Thangmi language. In the second part, he’s in South Africa to assess how its languages are faring nearly 20 years after the end of Apartheid.

Here’s a related BBC post on part three. And here’s a 2012 story that we did on a Garifuna language music project that was sponsored by the New York-based Endangered Language Alliance.

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This is the second of a three-part series Turin did for the BBC. Part one, on the changing linguistic landscape in Nepal, is here.

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When exactly will their voices break? It’s an inexact science.

“A boy’s voice doesn’t just suddenly break,” says Martin Ashley who heads the Education Department at Britain’s Edge Hill University. “It goes through approximately five stages of change that correspond with other known changes of puberty.”

“All of those stages are just coming sooner,” Ashley adds. He and a colleague in Germany have just completed a study of boys’ voices that suggests something dramatic has been happening in recent decades.

Ashley and his team tested the voices of 1,000 boys and compared them to similar tests done in 1960.

“What we would have seen in 1960 in 14-year-olds we’re seeing now in 12-year-olds,” says Ashley. The boys’ voices are breaking two years earlier.

Ashley says if this trend continues, teenage boys’ choirs won’t have anyone to sing the soprano parts.

Some choir directors are already accounting for these changes. “We do recruit younger and we give ourselves a little more time than we used to,” says New College’s Director of Music Edward Higginbottom.

But Higginbottom disagrees that the voice change is quite so recent and sudden. He says the age at which boys’ voices have been breaking has been gradually coming down for hundreds of years.

“You can find evidence in the 17th century for boys voices continuing till [the age of] 20,” says Higginbottom.

There’s evidence spanning many centuries suggesting that boys’ voices didn’t break until they were quite old. Bach, for example, wrote music to be performed by boy sopranos and altos in their mid-to-late teens.

But researcher Martin Ashley brushes that aside.

“A lot of people mention Bach’s boy sopranos,” he says. “I’m almost certain that you would have found they were hitting puberty at around 14 or 15, but there were singing techniques that I’m sure that Bach would have used that allow their voices to continue up to 16 or 17.”

New College’s Edward Higginbottom, though, doesn’t think the puberty will begin much earlier than it does now. He’s not altogether serious when he muses the following: “If we have boy basses at the age of 10, clearly it’s a wonderful occasional for the girls to stride in and help us.”

Girls in a boys choir? What is the world coming to? Next, they’ll be playing soccer…

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J.R.R. Tolkien’s book The Hobbit is getting the three-part Hollywood treatment. The return of the Elvish languages to the big screen is a reminder of just how inventive fiction writers have been over the years in dreaming up new tongues. Think of Anthony Burgess’ A Clockwork Orange, with its thuggish Russian-inflected slang called Nadsat (a girl is a devochka, a friend a droog).

This urge to create new words starts at a young age. Children often make up words before they have a proper command of their native tongues.

“We enjoy exercising the way we produce sounds,” says Indiana University’s Michael Adams, editor of From Elvish to Klingon: Exploring Invented Languages.

Adams says he likes to play with the sounds of language, ”in the car or the shower or wherever I am…in the way that I suppose a poet has to think about sound and language.”

Tolkien needed to do a lot of that. A trained philologist, he developed the Elvish languages for years before writing them into stories.

He worked on his fantasy languages during the First World War. It helped to pass the time, says Adams: “He did a lot of language invention and some of the prehistory of the language of Elvish is from those days in the trenches.”

The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings came decades later. By then, Tolkien had imagined an entire history of his languages.

“He would even leave unexplained thing in the languages he was working on,” says Adams. “Any real language you were reconstructing would have unexplained things in it too. So he was trying to mimic behavior of natural language very closely.”

That degree of detail may be unrivaled among novelists, although Michael Adams does have someone up his sleeve. More about that in a moment.

First, consider what most language creators do in their novels: they set up thought experiments.

In her science fiction novel, The Dispossessed, Ursula K. Le Guin created the Pravic language. Or rather, she created a breakaway society of anarchists who themselves created Pravic.

This group of anarchists “want to remove from the language anything that implies ownership,” says Le Guin.

Any kind of private possession. Your name doesn’t belong to you—it is assigned to you, after someone else with that name dies and the name can be recycled.

That’s reflected in Pravic too: the language has no possessive pronouns.

That was the thought experiment. Could words shape thought, could a language make people behave a certain way? It’s a linguistic hypothesis much poo-pooed by academic linguists, not that it worries Le Guin.

China Miéville’s recent novel Embassytown contains another thought experiment, which owes a debt to Gulliver’s Travels. Miéville creates a language for a group of aliens called the Ariekei.

It’s a language that mimics language of the garden of Eden, where the word is the thing. In other words, there’s no difference between an apple, and the word for an apple.

The Ariekei can’t lie. “If they want to use figurative speech at all they have to construct a situation which they can then refer to,” says Miéville.

“If you wanted say ‘oh I feel like an angry lion today’ you would have to get a lion and make it angry. Otherwise you couldn’t say it because it didn’t exist.”

Miéville came away from his thought experiment with the view that if human language marks a fall from grace, it’s quite a good fall. It allows us to use metaphor, as well as to lie.

Back now to the writer who may have out-Tolkiened Tolkien. French author Frédéric Werst has published something approximating a novel called Ward. It’s about a group of people called The Ward who speak a language called Wardwesân. The entire work is written in that language, with a parallel French translation.

Michael Adams says Werst is the first novelist he knows of “who’s tried to do a literary work from start to finish in a language never before known in the world.”

Tolkien never went that far, though he did tell his publisher that wished he could have included more of his fictional languages in his novels. Restraint, in that case, was probably wise.

Tolkien remains an inspiration to others. He wrote about inventing languages in an essay called The Secret Vice. “It’s a charming essay,” says novelist Ursula K. Le Guin.

“He’s thought of the fact that there just are a bunch of us who love to invent languages as well as to learn them,” Le Guin says. “A lot of kids do a certain amount of it and some people carry it on all their lives. It’s like kids who draw maps of imaginary islands. Some of us go on doing it until we’re 80.”

A two-volume selection of Le Guin’s short stories, The Unreal and the Real, has just been published. It’s been a treat for me to read the stories. Growing up in Britain, I was only exposed to Le Guin’s novels.

For more in the pod about invented languages, there is this interview with Arika Okrent, author of In the Land of Invented Languages, and this podcast on the Game of Thrones language, Dothraki.

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• Televised debates for Ghana’s upcoming presidential election have all been conducted in English, despite the fact that English is understood by an estimated 20% of Ghanaians. Critics say the debates penalize candidates with poor English, effectively turning them into linguistic beauty contests. Now there are calls for future campaigns to include debates in the Twi language/dialect, which is far more widely spoken than English.

• Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni has co-written a thesaurus for his mother tongue, Nkore-Kiga (also known as Runyankore/Rukiga). Museveni says Ugandans favour English, along with Arabic and Swahili, over their neglected indigenous tongues.

• Gabon is the latest Francophone country in Africa to consider switching its allegiance to English. If it does, it would follow Rwanda, which in 2009 switched its language of instruction in schools from French to English. The future for French in Africa looks uncertain at best.

• South Africans are debating what to call President Zuma’s newly refurbished home. The US media would call the multi-acre, multi-building home a ‘compound,’ but that word has unfortunate connotations from the Apartheid period. Calling it ‘Zumaville,’ as it’s popularly known, may imply corruption, so the South African Broadcasting Corporation is directing its reporters and presenters to refer to this place as the president’s ‘residence.’

• A call for more bilingual education in multilingual India.

• Having the peach, eating cold rice, other food-based idioms from around the world. Some of the best of these can be found in Adam Jacot de Boinod’s wonderful Tingo books.

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Amazon to the rescue. Search word: “Pure.”

Do that, and you’ll find no fewer than four novels published in 2012 under the title Pure (and countless more published before 2012).

Of the four published this year, one is set in Thailand, another in France, the third in the future, and the final one in a really scary place: Teenageland.

Book titles are endlessly recyclable. With a few exceptions, copyright law doesn’t cover book titles. So it’s fair game to “rip off” Fyodor Dostoevsky and title your novel The Double. Many have.

Other perennials: Twilight (though the series may change that); Nemesis (Phillip Roth wasn’t the first novelist—and he won’t be the last—to call his novel that); The Innocent; The Fury; The Awakening.

There’s a biography of music and TV mogul Simon Cowell out called Sweet Revenge. That’s also the title of at least 15 romance novels written in the past decade.

There are, of course, what appear to be blatant attempts at deception. In the UK, you can buy an ebook called The Vampire with the Dragon Tattoo. And guess what? The cover art resembles the cover to Stieg Larsson’s bestseller, The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.

There are protections. Trademark law, it it turns out, is more useful than copyright law. The Harry Potter books fall under trademark law, partly because they’re a series, partly because they’ll also a movie series, and partly because of all that Harry Potter merchandizing.

Does all this mean that even with more books and ebooks being published, there will be fewer titles? Probably not. There’s still likely to be plenty of books called Pure and Nemesis.

But with the rise of marketing localization, it is possible that in the future, a book may spawn several titles. Already, some books in translation are known by two titles. The 1992 Danish thriller Frøken Smillas fornemmelse for sne was translated in most parts of the English speaking world as Miss Smilla’s Feeling for Snow.

The American version was snappier and more alliterative: Smilla’s Sense of Snow. It was a huge seller.

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No-one at the Beeb feels like celebrating a birthday. But the BBC is 90 years old. And, awkward or not, it’s marking the day—November 14, 1922—when it made its first broadcast.

At exactly 5:33pm London time on November 14, 2012, scores of BBC stations in the UK and around the world dropped their regular programming. Instead, listeners heard the chimes of Big Ben, followed by a scratchy old recording of an announcer: “This is 2LO calling…” 2LO was the name of the BBC’s first transmitter from 1922.

After that, an old tune—a hit from 1922. Mixed into it was rhythmic birdsong. And then a child’s voice: “Hello future,” the child said. “I hope music still matters because music is everything. Without it there’s nothing; just silence.”

And then there was silence, before the program restarted with a mishmash of more sounds—some eerie, some sweet. All made you listen on.

The BBC commissioned musician Damon Albarn to put this audio collage together. Albarn’s resume is itself a bit of a collage. He’s the front man of the bands Blur and Gorillaz. He’s also recorded songs with African musicians, and he’s written an opera that was staged by the English National Opera in 2011. The BBC asked Albarn to create something that would convey a sense of not just the past 90 years, but also the next 90 years.

And through its various radio outlets – talk stations, music stations, foreign language stations – the BBC solicited responses to this question: “What message would you give to somebody listening in 90 years time?” Albarn said he was overwhelmed by the responses.

“It varied from the very old and wise who tended not to imagine the future but were interested in providing a piece of hard-earned wisdom,” said Albarn.

Middle-aged people tended to be “quite downbeat,” said Albarn. But the young were different. “They in a way were the most interesting because they were very free—in a sense, the only people will have the only connection with 90 years.”

In the soundscape, one child says: “I think there will be more people and because there’ll be more people I will tell them to be careful not to get lost because it might be like really, really busy.”

Not all the messages are delivered with the human voice. Philosopher Bertrand Russell’s famous quote, “Love is wise, hatred is foolish,” is rendered in Morse code. There’s also the sound of what Albarn calls a “scary” Cold war spy station.

At the end, there are the BBC’s “pips” which—like Big Ben—usually mark the top of the hour. Albarn weaves the pips in and out of a piano tune.

And then, after three minutes, BBC programming returns to its regular schedule.

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BBC Acting Director General Tim Davie on Sky News (Photo: Screen Grab/Sky News)

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In Israel, there’s a move afoot to change that. The country’s roughly 10,000 Maronite Christians are seeking official recognition as a national group. They’re currently classified as Arabs—a label that the Israeli government insists on. But the Maronites say they’re distinct, and they are appealing to Israel’s high court. They say they should be known as ‘Aramaic.’

As part of an effort to maintain their culture—and to prove to the authorities that they are deserving of their own classification—Maronite activists have organized Aramaic language courses for kids. Most Israelis Maronites speak Arabic as their mother tongue. Volunteer teachers—whose Aramaic skills are of varying quality—want to ensure that the next generation speak the language better than they do.

In the pod, we speak with Israel-based reporter Ksenia Svetlova about all this. Her fascinating report for the Jewish Daily Forward outlines the history and politics of this linguistic initiative. It also explains why largest concentration of Aramaic-speakers today is in, of all places, Sweden.

A book written in Aramaic (Photo: Reuters/Andreas Manolis)

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Shriver is an American who lives in London. Luce is a Brit who lives in Washington DC. Both have one foot in and one foot out of America. They are each insiders and outsiders.

Lionel Shriver is author of We Need To Talk About Kevin and ten other novels. She has lived much of her life outside the United States—in Kenya, Thailand, and now, Britain.

Her annual trips home to New York have become a way of measuring America’s decline. When she drives the Brooklyn-Queens Expressway, she sees what was once a serviceable highway now “completely rusted out.” The repairs “look as if they’re made with plywood.”

“You see this all over the United States,” says Shriver. “For visitors it’s quite a shock. Since I only go back every summer, I see this in juddering increments.”

Over time, Shriver has come to a stark conclusion about her homeland: “The United States is failing—and failing big time.”

There’s plenty of evidence to support that. The Pentagon recently commissioned a report on the nation’s defense-industrial preparedness—essentially, a compendium of the companies manufacturing key materials for the military.

Of the nineteen most critical industries servicing the US military, American companies led in all categories in the early 1990s. It now leads in just four of those categories.

That damning statistic was cited by Edward Luce, a Washington-based columnist with Financial Times, in his book called Time To Start Thinking: America and the Specter of Decline. (The US version subs the softer Descent for Decline.)

Luce spent time at the National Defence University, quizzing the kind of military people who he believes will be running the Pentagon a decade from now. He describes them as “panicked” about the disappearance of America’s manufacturing strength.

“They completely depart from Republican Party orthodoxy by saying that the first thing we must do is withdraw from the world,” says Luce. These officer-scholars believe that military strength “is based on economic strength.”

And so they have concluded that the Pentagon needs to slash its budget, freeing up public money for the domestic economy—primarily, education and infrastructure.

That may or may not be a solution. But will it see the light of day in the current political climate? Could such fundamental rethinking be adopted in today’s Washington? Luce doesn’t think so—and nor does Lionel Shriver. They think the country is too polarized.

For someone like Shriver who lives abroad, the gradual tribalization of political America into red and blue appears anything but gradual. It seems not just sudden but difficult to reverse.

Shriver recalls going to a party outside New York on one her recent trips back from Britain.

“Everyone agreed with everyone,” says Shriver.

“I had a conversation or two in which I indicated that I supported the Conservative Party in the UK, that was of course the wrong word.”

She says that made her a pariah. She calls this new-found tribalism, “political apartheid.”

“If you go to a party in the New York area you know that they’re all going to be Democrats. And if you open your mouth and say something that seems faintly Republican or even mildly pleasant about the other side, you’ll shock everyone,” says Shriver. “They will physically pull away from you.”

Writ large, that isn’t a great recipe for solving the country’s problems.

There’s plenty of despair in Shriver’s words—Luce’s too. It may be that they are chroniclers of America’s decline. But they are also passionate chroniclers, who believe that the country can yet learn from its missteps.

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