As soon as I saw the new book by Robert Lane Greene You Are What You Speak, I know he and needed to speak. Not just because we both speak Danish (we didn’t even talk about that). It’s mainly because the book takes on so many of the same issues that I do in The World in Words podcast. It’s like the pod on steroids, done with proper research.

Underlying You Are What You Speak is a love of the relative chaos of language. We can’t predict, let alone control how language evolves, Greene argues, so why try? Well, it seems we can’t help ourselves.

Sometimes it’s governments that issue linguistic admonishments: France and Turkey have been especially active. Sometimes it’s individual armchair stylists: Cicero (“At some point…I relinquished to the people the custom of speaking, I reserved the knowledge [of correct grammar and pronunciation] to myself”); Strunk and White (“Do not join independent choices by a comma”); and Lynn Truss (“Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation”). Of that lot, Turkey’s switch from Arabic to Roman script appears to have been the most successful. In France, the Académie française is admired but largely ignored. And most of the armchair stylists lose out to common usage. The more free, open and democratic a society is, the less it is likely to follow anyone else’s language rules.

Here in the United States, the Tea Party has embraced the English Only movement. This video, uploaded in 2007, has more than 14 million hits on YouTube, and the musicians have performed it at numerous Tea Party events:

This is just one way in which language is bound up in identity. Another is via the power of our mother tongue: how much does our first language set and restrict how we think, and how we perceive the world? Think of all those people who write in a second or third language.Lijia Zhang, who grew up in China, but writes in English, is convinced that her English self is different from her Chinese self. For one thing, Zhang says, she’s ruder in Chinese (the Big Show’s science podcaster Rhitu Chatterjee says the same of her native Bengali self).

Not only does English have words that don’t exist in Chinese, says Zhang. Also, writing in English frees her to say things that in her native tongue are taboo. She recalls a time in the 1980s when she met a young Chinese man “who I rather fancied.” She said to him, in English, “you look cool.” It was somehow OK to say that in English; had she said it in Chinese, it would have meant instant rejection and humiliation.

Now, that may have as much to do with memory and custom as it does with the instrinsic nature of English vs. Chinese. The words in Chinese were available to Zhang. They were just freighted with expectation and fear. In English, Zhang could be irresonsible, and blame it on the language.

Greene deals with this question of language and personality by citing a number of recent studies, some of which we’ve talked about in previous pods (here and here). In linguistic circles, the pendulum has swung back and forth between those who believe that language shapes thought, and those who argue that thought forms language.

Download MP3

• The World in Words Podcast on iTunes
• The World in Words Podcast via RSS
• The World in Words on Facebook
• Patrick Cox on Twitter

The French of Gréco (pictured) is moody and melodramatic, as befits this veteran chanteuse. Her pitch swoops to low octave depths and her Rs rrrrroll, as she sings of love, betrayal and Paris. The songs sound like personal confessions, but most are not: she became famous by singing the poems and lyrics of Raymond Queneau, Jacques Prévert and others. Now in her 80s, Gréco is bringing her über-Frenchness to a London stage.

Anna Sam records the mendacious and the mundane that she overhears at the supermarket checkout.

Sam recently retired after eight years working as a hôtesse de caisse (cash till hostess) — that was her official title. Less officially, she was a beepeuse (a woman who beeps). She was doing it to bankroll her university degree in French literature — not that the customers knew, or would have cared.

Anna Sam overhead humanity at its meanest and most idiotic. Couples surreptitiously kissing in the frozen food section, or having sex next to the detergents. People so umbilically attached to their mobile phones that that they didn’t stop to say “please” or “thank you.” Mothers telling their children: “If you don’t work hard at school, you’ll end up a like that lady behind the counter.” And when she clocked off and went home, Sam couldn’t stop hearing the beep…beep…beep of the scanner. She recorded her observations in a blog, which became a book, Les Tribulations d’une Caissière (translated into several languages including English). Her fame may yet spread, with talk of a movie.

Also in the pod, the UN Security Council resolution that got lost in translation. Resolution 242. is one of the Security Council’s most famous documents, the so-called land-for-peace concept in the Middle East. The French and English versions don’t quite say the same thing. The result? Confusion and conflict, with no end in sight. Not a good advertisement for translation or multilingualism.

And to round things off, we hear from the founders of Meena, an Arabic-English bilingual poetry journal, out of the U.S. port of New Orleans and the Egyptian port of Alexandria. (Meena means port of entry). Arabic never did sound so sweet.

Download MP3

Liberian English and its cousin Liberian Kreyol are littered with pithy sayings. Most of them, though, are as incomprehensible as badly translated Chinese fortunes. For example: Your child cannot poo poo on your lap, and you cut your legs off, you just have to clean them off. Or: If one keeps pressing a young bird in his palms, the bird may one day stooled in his hands. So, on the face of it, lots of toilet humor. But the meanings of many of these sayings aren’t intended to be funny. Several include refererences to Liberia’s civil war and refugee camps. Jason’s report centers around the night when he and his fellow Jason — with plenty of help from local experts — picked the best proverb.

Is this script a language? Yes and no. The writing system is Arabic. But the language isn’t. In this case, it’s Mandinka, one of many African languages that often use Arabic script. In fact, these languages have borrowed Arabic script for more than a thousand years. What’s interesting though, is that Ajami has been overlooked by most historians; African history has been told through the lens of English, French or Arabic documents. Also, because Ajami isn’t a language, Africans who used it were often classified as illiterate, even though they were quite capable of writing sentences of Mandinka or Hausa or Wolof. Now Ajami is getting a bit more respect, thanks to people like Fallou Ngom of Boston University and Dmitry Bondarev of the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies.

Every year, 4,000 staffers at the United Nations in New York sign up for language classes. There, they learn not just how to say things in other languages but how to say them diplomatically. Which can mean being clear, or being extremely unclear, depending on what’s required. That takes practise, as does learning how to interrupt and assert yourself without being rude. Most of us have trouble with that in our mother tongues.
Download MP3

• The lost script
• Scholar Leads African Language Learning Project to Recover Lost Knowledge
• The World in Words podcast

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: Africa remains one of the world’s poorest and most under-developed continents and experts point to a number of reasons. One of them is the region’s reported high rates of illiteracy. Yet many more Africans may be reading and writing than the official numbers indicate. They’re using a writing system that dates back to the days when sub-Saharan Africans began converting to Islam. The World’s Katy Clark explains.

KATY CLARK:  More than a thousand years ago, religious leaders modified Arabic texts to help spread the Koran to African shepherds and shop keepers. The writing system they used came to be known as Ajami. Ajami’s an Arabic word. In the early days, it was used somewhat disparagingly to refer to anything that wasn’t Arabic. But as Boston University Professor Fallou Ngom explains, the term evolved. It now describes the writings of various African languages that use this modified Arabic script to this day.

FALLOU NGOM:  Especially sub-Saharan Africa from Senegal, Gambia, the Western part to the Horn of Africa, all that Sahelian band that had been influenced by Islam since the 10^th century has used the Arabic script, modified it to write their own languages. So the literature that is produced is produced in African languages, although the script may look like Arabic.

CLARK: Ngom says Arabic speakers might be able to read an Ajami document because they’d recognize the script. But they might not understand what they were reading.

NGOM: If you look in the French colonial libraries, Ajami documents were referred to “unreadable Arabic.” And the sections where they were kept were labeled the [INDISCERNIBLE].

CLARK: Undecipherable Arabic, which is part of the reason Ajami has largely escaped the attention of Westerners. Even many educated Africans aren’t familiar with the Arabic-based writing system. Ngom, who grew up in French-speaking Senegal, didn’t learn about it until 2003. That’s when he stumbled upon an IOU written in Ajami by his late father. Until then, Ngom had considered his father illiterate.

NGOM: I would see him writing, but I really never paid attention to what he was writing. Probably because I was so influenced by the intellectual tradition that produced me, that disregarded anything that was not French as not important.

CLARK: Ngom later discovered that his father also kept a diary in which he recorded information about his family, and his thoughts on current events. Ngom describes Ajami as the “emotional voice” of sub-Saharan Africa that’s largely gone unheard. This summer, he came across Ajami documents written by a Mandinka teacher living in Senegal during World War Two. The teacher was angry that so many young men from his remote village were being drafted into the French military to fight Nazi Germany. The poem curses Adolph Hitler.

NGOM: It says, “Hitler the German has brought evil to this world. May God take away all his evil. If he’s assisted by great spirits may those great spirits be destroyed.”

CLARK: Ngom says cursing was a potent weapon in the community, and that the poem represents the spiritual leader’s effort to destroy Hitler. Ngom believes that by translating Ajami texts like this one, we get a much richer, much more detailed understanding of African history and every day goings on than if scholars were to simply focus on Arabic, French, or English documents. And he’s not the only one who thinks this. Dmitry Bondarev is with the University of London’s School of Oriental and African Studies. He says the study of Ajami throws open the door to previously unknown areas of Africa.

DMITRY BONDAREV:  For example, in Bambara [INDISCERNIBLE] areas in Mali, Senegal, one only got the information from oral tradition. And recently some Ajami texts put down in Arabic script in the 19^th century brought up some local histories of the cities, of the families which we would never know if we didn’t get access to Ajami material.

CLARK: One potential problem, though, is that there aren’t many scholars who can read Ajami texts. Ngom is hoping to change that. Under his direction, Boston University is training 17 students this semester in Hausa and Wolof, two African languages with rich Ajami traditions. It’s a first step towards teaching them to read Ajami. Ngom himself hopes to uncover as many Ajami documents as he can. He says his dream is to translate Ajami texts written by African slaves brought over to the Americas. For The World, this is Katy Clark in Boston.

WERMAN: If you’d like to hear more of that Ajami poem cursing Hitler, check out the video at our website, TheWorld.org.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

Gauldin has a good record of improving ELL students’ English skills, in marked contrast to many of the schools in neighboring Los Angeles. The situation there is so dire that the the U.S. Department of Education has launched a investigation to determine if if the Los Angeles Unified School District is violating the civil rights of English Language Learners. The feds are also taking a look at Boston schools. (A few months ago, Carol Hills and I discussed Arizona’s decision to penalize ELL teachers whose accents are deemed too foreign. Arizona is still defending its policy, which itself has come under federal scrutiny.)

Also in the podcast, a Creole-speaking Haitian girl newly arrived in New York City enrols in a high school, with help from a community group in Brooklyn. The girl fled Haiti after the earthquake there earlier this year. Like most Haitians, she wants to master the language and stay here permanently. But she only has a U.S. visitor visa. Then it’s back to California as an Arabic immersion program gets underway at FAME a public charter school in Fremont, CA.

Reporter Hana Baba provided us with this nice slideshow of scenes from the school, including the photo (left) of school founder Maram Alaiwat. Not surprisingly, many of the students at this K-10th grade school are of Arab and/or Muslim descent. More surprising is that the school has opened its doors to the FBI. The bureau offers FAME 5th graders the chance to become “junior special agents” .

Finally, the first Zulu-English dictionary in 40 years has just been published in South Africa. Some English speakers already know a few words of Zulu (also known as isiZulu) — words like ubuntu. Zulu has also borrowed from other South African languages such as Afrikaans, and many Zulu words offer their own linguistic takes on apartheid and AIDS. We talk with the publishing manager of Oxford University Press South Africa. Download MP3

• Slideshow for this story
• Learning in two languages series
• The World in Words podcast

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN: The language of the Koran, of course, is Arabic. And more and more Americans are choosing to learn that language. For the most part, it’s college students. But now a public school outside San Francisco is launching an immersion program where starting in kindergarten, students are learning in English and Arabic. Hana Baba of KALW reports from Fremont.

HANA BABA:  Fourth graders at the Fame Charter School are reading a poem in classical Arabic. The students are learning how to read, write and count in Arabic. Arabic has been part of the curriculum since the school opened its doors in 2001. And this year, the school is expanding its Arabic experience. It’s launching the country’s first public K-through-12 Arabic immersion program. Half the day’s instruction in Arabic, half in English. The school’s director Maram Alaiwat says they’re starting with the incoming class of kindergarteners.

MARAM ALAIWAT:  So they will have two worlds. They will walk into their very American, very English oriented classroom for half of the day and they’ll be moving into a second classroom where the posters and language and the toys and everything are labeled in Arabic. And that teacher will be speaking with them in full immersion Arabic meaning they will be immersed in the language immediately. Everything from asking to use the restroom to where’s my cubby. All of that will be relayed in Arabic.

BABA: Fame is open to anyone in the country. But so far, most of the students are the children of Muslim immigrants, from the Middle East, South Asia and Africa. At her home, 8-year-old Amal Abdella shows off some of the Arabic she’s learned at school.

AMAL ABDELLA: Jad means grandfather, jadda means grandmother, ab means dad, umm means mom, akh means brother, ukht means sister.

BABA: Her mother, Fatima Abdella, is an Ethiopian immigrant. Abdella wants her children to learn Arabic to better understand the Quran, though the school doesn’t provide any religious instruction. She says the school feels like a safe learning environment.

FATIME ABDELLA: You don’t see a security guard over there. We are like a family. We don’t see any police over there with a gun. We don’t hear anything, drugs going on, this teenagers fighting. So that is very comfortable for me.

RALPH DAVIS: I’m not trying to, as they say, diss the public school system by any means, but Fame is different. It’s fresh and it’s new, and it’s something that is available to all parents and children whether you be American or immigrant.

BABA: That’s Abdella’s husband, Ralph Davis. He’s a former Navy officer who grew up in nearby Oakland. He says learning Arabic will improve his kid’s job prospects in the future.

DAVIS: I know people right here in Fremont who have actually been recruited as Arabic speakers to go to Iraq. As far as working for the State Department, the FBI, even local government, county, city and state agencies, Arabic speakers will definitely be needed.

BABA:  And the FBI has expressed interest in the school. Last year, it offered a special partnership for 5^th graders called Junior Special Agents. The program encourages them to be crime-free, drug-free, and gang-free. Parent Ralph Davis says he thinks the partnership is good for the kids, the community and the government.

DAVIS: I think it will help and benefit the different agencies of the FBI, the CIA, whoever. Even local police departments and state agencies to dialogue with immigrants because that way it will give, I feel, the immigrant a feeling of security that they can dialogue with these people rather than be fearful of them. I will want my children to participate.

BABA: But some other parents I spoke with are less comfortable with the idea. They didn’t want to speak on tape. But they question why the FBI chose this predominantly Muslim school for its only partnership in the San Francisco Bay area. Some worry the program is just a way for the FBI to keep a close eye on their community. The FBI’s San Francisco representative Joseph Schadler says the reason was more mundane.

JOSPEH SCHADLER: Realistically, the entire reason we chose that school is because we were in a dialogue with the administrator because she was part of our citizen’s academy, and with her interested and excited about the possibility of the program, that is 80% of our work in getting a program like this started.

BABA: For her part, Fame director Maram Alaiwat says she understands the parents’ anxiety. She notes that many come from countries where government agencies are often abusive. But she says that’s precisely why such a program is needed, to lessen the tension between new immigrants and the feds.

ALAIWAT: My point of introducing it to our parents was to help build bridges among the community, to help the free flow of communication. I think communication is knowledge. And if you don’t communicate, that’s how fear develops and that’s how hatred develops.

BABA: Alaiwat says it’s not clear whether the FBI program will be back this school year. But for now, classes are getting underway. And Alaiwat says they have more applicants than spaces for the Arabic Immersion Program. For The World, I’m Hana Baba in Fremont, California.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

5. An Israeli-British study shows bilinguals may respond differently depending on the language of the questions. According to the study, Arab Israelis are more likely to respond warmly to certain Jewish names if they are asked about them in Hewbrew, as compared to Arabic. Does this mean we think differently in different languages? No, but it might help explain why someone who is bilingual (or trilingual in Rhitu’s case) is “more polite” in one language.

4. New research points to a possible breakthrough in deciphering ancient scripts.

3. Sarah Palin compares her coinage of new English words to Shakespeare’s. Her most recent coinage, of course, was refudiate, which she said on Fox News and then tweeted a few days later. (She somewhat refudiated her own invention by zapping the tweet, before acknowledging it and making the Shakespeare comparison in a subsequent post.) For his part, Shakespeare came up with gnarled, premediated, fitful, and hundreds more, none of them via Twitter. Maybe in time we’ll prize refudiate as highly. My guess though, is that like wee-wee’d up, an Obamaism, refudiate ain’t gonna make it. Let’s face it: most of Shakespeare’s coinages appear to have been based not on ignorance but inventiveness.

2. A science writer argues in a Discover magazine blog post that language diversity condemns a society to poverty. I don’t fully understand the argument, but it made for a lively conversation.

1. Clark’s adventures in linguistically confused Belgium. Yes, The World’s tech man about town has just moved to the land of beer, waffles and linguistic discontent. So which of the country’s two main languages should Clark learn, Dutch or French? And in choosing one, has he upset speakers of the other? Mr Boyd reveals all, including the surprising nationality of the podcaster/language teacher he’s following.

Download MP3

• BBC coverage
• Icann
• Egyptian Ministry of Technology (Arabic script)

Read the Transcript
This text below is a phonetic transcript of a radio story broadcast by PRI’s THE WORLD. It has been created on deadline by a contractor for PRI. The transcript is included here to facilitate internet searches for audio content. Please report any transcribing errors to theworld@pri.org. This transcript may not be in its final form, and it may be updated. Please be aware that the authoritative record of material distributed by PRI’s THE WORLD is the program audio.

MARCO WERMAN:  A quick note now on a big change today for internet users, at least for those who use languages that are not written with Latin script characters.  Until today, web addresses could only be spelled out in Latin script.  The letters used in say English or Spanish.  Now the body that regulates the internet, ICANN, has switched on a system that allows for web addresses written in other scripts, including Chinese and Arabic.  Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and the United Arab Emirates became the first to have country codes in Arabic script.  ICANN says the move is intended to make the web more global and accessible for everyone.

Copyright ©2009 PRI’s THE WORLD. All rights reserved. No quotes from the materials contained herein may be used in any media without attribution to PRI’s THE WORLD. This transcript may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, without prior written permission. For further information, please email The World’s Permissions Coordinator at theworld@pri.org.

The rest of the pod is devoted to the second part of the BBC’s documentary on Yiddish. Reporter Dennis Marks picks up the story in the 1960s, when Yiddish was staring extinction in the face, after many decades in which it language thrived among Jewish Eastern European immigrants, as in this World War Two-era poster). But more recently in New York City, the language has began to undergo a modest revival. A big contributor to that was Aaron Lansky who founded the National Yiddish Book Center, which rescused thousands of Yiddish volumes from depositories and dumpsters: as he puts it to take books “out of the dustbin of history and put them back into use.”

We also hear from YY Jacobson, a rabbi in the Crown Heights section of New York and editor of the Hasidic Yiddish newspaper Algemeiner. His contribution to the survival of Yiddish is the most overtly religious. Others have cultural or ancestral reasons for investigating the language: people like klezmer violinist Alicia Svigals, novelist Dara Horn, and a family who speak with each other in both English and Yiddish. The teens in the family text message each other in transliterated Yiddish, complete with texting shorthand: ZG is zei gezunt (be well) and BSH is biz shpeter (until next time/goodbye). Download MP3

Also in this week’s podcast, I speak with author Katherine Russell Rich on learning Hindi at a language school in Rajasthan. Her book “Dreaming in Hindi“ is also an investigation into what happens to our brains when we learn a learn a language. Rich quizzed several neurolinguists, so she could get a handle on the challenges and all-round weird linguistic moments she encountered in her pursuit of Hindi mastery. So there are answers (not THE answers perhaps) to the following: what’s the difference between learning a language “intuitively” as a child and in a classroom setting later on? Why is it so difficult to have a perfect accent in your second or third language? Why do so many people verbally shut down for weeks or months when learning a language? How does language effect personality and vice versa? And is there blowback from your learned language that changes how you speak your native tongue?

On the subject of the last question, check out this fascinating conversation on The World’s science podcast on the latest research into what happens to your native tongue when you learn a second one. According to this study, you’ll never read your first language in the same way. Also, that cognates can trip you up.

Finally, we cast a somewhat shameful eye over a tough-to-translate expression in Spanish.

Photo credit: Daniel Estrin
[nggallery id=3]

5. Google Translate gets to work on the virtual streets of Teheran: Google released a tool that translates Persian blogs into English and vice versa. Google was already working on this, but it rushed the release due to the turmoil inside Iran, and because of Google’s stated goal improving people’s access to information. A few days earlier, Twitter delayed a planned upgrade that would have brought the microblogging website down in Iran. That came after a call to Twitter from the State Department. I’m sure the Iranian government viewed that as proof of American intervention in domestic Iranian affairs. But it’s a far cry from sending in spies, or the Air Force.

4. A music festival in Quebec runs afoul of language sensitivities. A couple of acts that sing in English were nearly dropped from a bilingual festival in Montreal. One of the bands was heckled by Quebec sovereignists as it performed (in English). The band’s name is um, Lake of Stew. It’s the latest iteration of Canada’s relentless language struggles.

3. Microsoft’s choice of Bing as the name for its search engine to rival Google may not go down well in China. In Chinese, bing means many things, depending on how it’s pronounced. One of them is “sick.” Microsoft says Bing will be pronounced differently. But with their love of wordplay, many Chinese may yet make the sicko connection.

2. Two articles in English-language newspapers in China suggest that authorities may be easing press restrictions. The articles are on sensitive topics, the Tiananmen Square protests and gay rights (that’s the organizers in the picture). But the stories did not appear in Chinese-language papers. So while the vast majority of Chinese citizens didn’t read about these issues, the Chinese government can nonetheless claim that it’s easing up on press censorship.

1. An alleged drug ring in Pennsylvania used Iraqi Arabic dialects in its communications. The police had to bring in a language expert to help solve the crime.