Most of these words (for the time being) originate in English, and migrate to other languages. Some languages go with two words: their adaptation of the English word, and something made up in their own language. Chinese, for example, has a couple of ways of expressing email: 伊 妹儿 (yimeir, which sounds a bits like email) and 电子 邮 件 (dianzi youjian: electronic mail, often shortened to 电邮: dianyou).

When it comes to naming the as yet unnamed, social networking sites are fantastically helpful. My colleague at The Big Show, Jonathan Dyer, used Facebook to great effect when he posted this request:

“Is there a word for someone you have never met yet you share dozens of friends in common and they like or comment on just about everything your FB friends post? If not, will someone invent one so that I know how to refer to <name withheld> when/if I ever meet him?”

Here’s what he got back:

Perifriends

Pre-friend

Viral acquaintance

Virtual friend potential or possible electronic frenemy

Franger

E-quaintance

Strend

Friends once removed

Pseudofriends

Digifriends

Half-lifes

Visiblings

Friendeavours

Friendvilles

Friends-once-removed

Second-friends

Secondhands

Seconnections

The Uninvited

Friendlings

2nd-degreers

Beyonders

Outsidekicks

Plus-twos

Members of my unnetwork

Twoodles

Stalkwards

Collabores

Commentals

Michele Bachmann

Facebrat

Jonathan’s favorite, though, was Facequaintance.

Also in the pod this week:

• The Iran-based translator of Firoozeh Dumas’ “Funny in Farsi” has vanished, probably arrested. (Check out an earlier segment on Dumas in a Persian-themed podcast.)

• Debunking myths about the Chinese language and things Chinese leaders are believed to have said.

• Multilingual Angolan singer Lulendo.

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There’s promotional video for the 2002 Salt Lake City Winter Games making the rounds now. It includes Mitt Romney, who headed the Salt Lake Olympic Committee, speaking French to welcome volunteers. The video (below) was made by a Democratic PAC. The translations are not the real translations of what he is saying.

For our once-a-month-ish gab fest, Carol and I just couldn’t pass this one up.

Sometime, corporations knock it out of the park with their inventions, or re-inventions, of words. Who can argue with Coca-Cola? And it’s not like they’re alone. Shakespeare did it (0r at least he popularized recently invented words). Kanye West does it. Soldiers do it. Prison inmates do it. Schoolkids do it.

But what about that sub-group of word reinvention, the spelling change? This happens most commonly when a word migrates from one language to another (Spanish for soccer/footbal: fútbol; Chinese for sandwich: 三明治 or sānmíngzhì). It can be an act of rebellion against the colonial master (American English spellings). It can be a way of transcribing an accent that may later be co-opted by the speakers of that accent (Lil thang, wassup, etc).

The corporate version of a respelled word is usually überclunky, probably because there is no reason for it to exist other than to satisfy the corporation’s desire to sell a product. The language, and the speakers who sustain the language, have not demanded it. Instead, it has been dreamed up in some boardroom or office. The result: terms like riDQulous and City Sentral .

Fear of a Chinese-Speaking Planet

L’arrivo di Wang (The Arrival of Wang) is an Italian thriller recently shown at the Venice Film Festival. In this scene, a police officer questions a blindfolded Chinese interpreter, who is suspected of colluding with a Chinese-speaking alien. The presumption that the alien has chosen to communicate in Chinese because it — or its masters — have concluded that Chinese is the planet’s most prominent language. The film’s characters can’t decide whether the alien is benign. Has it come to forge some kind of partnership or to colonize the Italians with its language, culture and values?

The arrival of The Arrival of Wang comes at a time when Americans and Europeans are debating whether Westerners will really learn Chinese and even if they do, whether it’s worth it.

Also discussed in this week’s pod:

The expanding reach of English means more varied accents. Here is the source of the accent test that I sprang on Carol. Here are the 100 words that linguist David Crystal has chosen to tell the story of English. And here is an update on previous pod discussion about Arizona’s harsh line on English language teachers who have foreign accents. (Under Federal pressure, Arizona has agreed to stop yanking such teachers out of the classroom and to retraining classes).

For Singapore’s Chinese, a challenge: The country’s former non-nonense leader Lee Kuan Yew says the city-state became an economic power-house because the government made eveyone speak English. While Lee says this should continue, he is also urging Singapore’s Chinese (who make up about 70% of the population) to speak Mandarin at home.

In Japan, English-speaking chatbots guarantee embarrassment-free conversations. Yup, if you don’t care for the constant humiliation of learning a language by trial and (mostly) error, a conversation with a chatbot is for you. And because a chatbot is not human, it will correct your errors without making you feel foolish– but also perhaps without your remembering them quite so well.

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Behavioral Economist Keith Chen is interested in how people make financial decisions. Last year, he started wondering if people whose native languages make fewer distinctions between the future and present might think differently about the future.

In Chinese, for example, there is no future tense. There are many ways for conveying the future, but you don’t do it through tense. In the movie Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon for example, a young female fighter beats up several men, and then warns them she’ll be back the next day.

“Tomorrow,” she says, “ I will uproot Wudan Mountain”

Except that in Chinese she doesn’t say “will” What she says literally translates to “Tomorrow, I uproot Wudan Mountain.” The word tomorrow indicates the future. The Chinese language doesn’t more than that.

So, is there any significance to that?

Chen says yes, but it’s subtle. In some languages, he says people are “slightly nudged every time [they] speak, to think about the future as something viscerally different from the present.” In Chinese, he says, that doesn’t take place. The present and future are the same.

Chen has concluded that having a separate verb tense for your future self might make your future self a little harder to relate to.

He knows it’s “kind of a crazy hypothesis, it’s a little bit out there.”

The flip side of this idea is that speakers who use the same verbs for the present and future might be a little better at thinking about the future– and maybe even better at saving for the future.

This is pretty controversial territory.

A lot us might feel like the way we use words affects our thoughts. Some bilingual speakers believe they think differently from language to the next.

But most linguists don’t buy this idea that we language we speak determines how we think.

Chen, however, persisted in his research.

He divided up world languages by whether they distinguish much between present and future tense.
He then compared speakers of those languages based on savings statistics.

He found “huge differences.”

For example, he found that people who speak languages requiring a separate future tense— English, Arabic, Greek, the Romance languages— are far worse at saving money than people whose languages don’t really distinguish between the future and the present, like Chinese, German, Japanese, or Norwegian.

After factoring in people’s education levels, their incomes, religious preferences, Chen found that the different-verbs-for-present-and-future people, were 30 percent less likely to have saved money in any given year.

By the time they reach retirement, these people will have saved on average more than $200,000 less than speakers of languages with no future tense.

Some linguists aren’t buying Chen’s conclusions.

John McWhorter, author of What Language Is (And What It Isn’t and What It Could Be), doubts whether verb tense and savings habits have much, if anything, in common.

Author John McWhorter (Photo: Audrey Quinn)

For example, he says Chen placed Russian in the wrong category.

Still, McWhorter says he’d love to be proven wrong: “If somebody really could prove it…I would even be open to finding that my skepticism about the language-is-thought hypothesis is unfounded.”

Chen insists he did go into his research with a healthy amount of skepticism.

But he says all the data points to his conclusion: “I haven’t been able to find a counter-example in the world yet.”

I’m learning Chinese, and so I have become accustomed to  keyboard technology that does much of work for me. If I want to type out  a sentence in Chinese, I switch my language preference in my word processing program from English to Chinese. Then I write the sentence in pinyin, the Latin alphabet version of Chinese. For each syllable, I am offered a variety of character options that correspond to a syllable or sound.  For example if I type wo, I can choose between  我 , 沃,  握 and several other characters.

I must, of course, be able to recognize the character: I need to know what it looks like in order to choose the right one. But I don’t need to learn or remember how to write it. The computer does that for me.

The trouble is, it’s not just Chinese learners like me who are using this character-inputting shortcut. Native Chinese speakers do it too. If they have access to a computer, they don’t need to write characters. Naturally, many people are forgetting how to write. Others don’t adequately learn characters in the first place. So calligraphy, the traditional practice of writing characters with the strokes of a brush, is back as a mandatory part of the curriculum for many Chinese school kids. Without this, educators fear that many Chinese will never be able to write in their own language.

Abroad, it’s a different story. Across the globe, there’s an explosion of Chinese-learning. The government in Beijing is playing its part. In the past seven years, China has opened almost 300 Confucius Institutes around the world. Still, you might not expect to find an institute in Rwanda’s capital, Kigali. But there it is, offering Chinese language classes to (mainly) young Rwandans.

Rwanda does not have great stability in its language policies. Most Rwandans are native  Kinyarwanda speakers. But many also speak English and French. In the wake of the 1994 genocide, Rwanda switched its language of instruction from French to English (there are suspicions among some Rwandans that the French were complicit in the assassination of the Rwandan President, that led to the genocide).  Now some Rwandans are learning Chinese.   More on this in Mary Kay Magistad’s blog post.

Another example of the expansion of Chinese soft power: the government-run China Radio International is seeking out new audiences in the United States.

The latest place you can hear it: WILD, an AM station in Boston. For much of the last four decades, WILD broadcast soul music and talk shows hosted by people like Al Sharpton and Tom Joyner.

But In June 2011, the station began leasing its airtime to an English language service of China Radio International.

CRI’s programs offer a mix that Voice of America listeners might recognize: news, programs on Chinese culture and society, cheesy, retro pop music programing, and the occasional Chinese language lesson. Nothing especially controversial, and absolutely nothing cutting edge. The very softest of soft power.

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“I like learning Chinese,” says Marianje Ayinkiamiye, who’s been studying here almost a year. “I’d like to study Chinese medicine, and bring it back here. Also, I like singing in Chinese. May I sing you something?”

Of course, I reply. Her voice is sweet, and rich. The song is a traditional Chinese ode to the jasmine blossom. When she’s done, I compliment her on her singing, and ask if she knows that this year in China, the government has been blocking online mentions of “jasmine.” It’s been worried about potential attempts to spread the “Jasmine Revolution” of the Middle East to China.

“Thanks for that news,” she says, with a little smile. “I hadn’t heard about it.”

No surprise there. China’s Confucius Institutes around the world are about spreading appreciation for Chinese culture and language, not news about political fault lines in China. The Confucius Institutes are part of the Chinese government’s multi-billion dollar effort to improve its image in the world, and increase its ‘soft power’ – the degree to which others admire, appreciate and want to emulate China. Since the Confucius Institute project started seven years ago, some 300 have opened around the globe – 21 in Africa.

“I want African people to know the real China,” says Kong Lingyuan, the Kigali Confucius Institute’s Chinese director. He’s lanky and laid-back, having apparently absorbed some of the local culture from when he was a PhD student in anthropology at Berkeley. But he still doesn’t think highly of Western media coverage of China – including coverage of China’s efforts in Africa.

“For instance, they say Chinese companies take out Africans’ resources, and pollute the environment,” he says. But in fact, in Rwanda, more than 80 percent of the roads were built by Chinese companies. And the biggest building was built by Chinese people.”

I suggest that both are true – that Chinese companies are involved in extracting copper, minerals and oil from places like Zambia, Congo and Angola but that they also build infrastructure. Kong shrugs good-naturedly, but says he still thinks the international image of China in Africa is off.

“Because the Chinese use these resources to serve the whole world, including America, Europe, Africa – not just China,” he says.

The Confucius Institute here has about 300 students now, with big plans to expand – to teach Chinese in Rwandan universities, high schools and eventually, primary schools. The first program in a high school is about to start. Kong says, while the outreach is intended to improve Rwandans’ understanding and appreciation of China, there’s something of practical value in it for them, too.

“Chinese language will become an international business language,” he says. “Right now, it’s English, but China will become more used. So people who want to do international business will do better if they learn Chinese.”

Some of the students here don’t need to be persuaded. Enable Sibomana, a 28-year-old physical education teacher, says he’d like to do an MA in physical education in China.

“If we speak the language, the Chinese government gives Rwandans a chance to go,” he says. “They give us scholarships – more than other countries.”

Sibomana throws himself into the kung fu instruction at the start of class, crouching and punching the air. He towers over his Chinese instructor – and when he crouches, his pants hitch up to reveal Tweetybird-emblazoned socks.

Confucius class in Kigali (Photo: Mary Kay Magistad)

Teacher Zeng Guangyu cues up the music as students file in. A t 28, he’s already been in Rwanda for two and a half years, and says he loves it here.

“No pollution. No traffic jam. And the weather is like spring,” he says with a grin. “And the peaceful pace of life – it isn’t like in China, where we’re always rushing.”

Zeng says he taught African students in China before coming here, and was impressed with how quickly they picked up language – perhaps not surprising, since many of them speak several. But here, he says, it’s a bit more of a challenge.

“They don’t have the context to use Chinese, so they don’t have much motivation to learn,” he says. “Even though they learn some Chinese, it’s not enough to apply to work for a Chinese company, or to use in daily life.”

Still, Zeng presses on. He explains to the class that they’re first just going to listen to China’s National Anthem. He plays it, and the other Chinese teachers in the room sit straighter as the familiar chords rush over them, the exhortation for Chinese to rise up against their oppressors, and use their blood and flesh to build a new Great Wall, a new China.

The song comes to an end, and Zeng turns hopefully to his Rwandans students.

“So, you’ve just heard the Chinese National Anthem for the first time. What is your feeling?” he asks.

There’s a pause. One student raises a hand. “It’s too short,” he says.

“Too short,” Zeng replies, looking a little deflated. “Ok. Well, let’s start learning it anyway.”

He walks the students through the first line, “Arise, ye who refuse to be slaves!.” They repeat, and repeat again. And again. When he gets to the part about “With our flesh and blood, let us build our new Great Wall,” he skips over translating “xuerou” – blood and flesh, but does translate “Great Wall.” After a few repetitions, he turns the recording back on, and the students try singing along.

It’ll still take some work. But then, the Chinese teachers also have to get cracking on learning the Rwandan National Anthem. One of the male students offers to come up and sing it. Its lyrics couldn’t be in sharper contrast to China’s anthem. It’s about how Rwanda is a land of beautiful mountains and lakes and volcanoes, of people living peacefully together. No mention of flesh and blood here. Rwanda has had more than its share of spilling both, and prefers now to focus on a more hopeful future.

The student finishes singing the Rwandan national anthem, and takes in the applause. Then, he says, “and now I’d like to sing a Chinese song.” He, too, launches into the song about the jasmine flower – singing in a high falsetto. The Chinese teacher, Zeng, looks slightly flustered.

“Wow, we haven’t reviewed that song in almost a year, and the students still remember,” he says. “I guess that shows how well you can remember words if you set them to music. So we must work on our national anthems!”

Director Kong already has the Rwandan anthem down. He thinks it’s important to show respect for the local culture, when teaching your own.

“The former director here, an older guy, had a bad relationship with the local director, because he didn’t know how to deal with local people,” Kong says. “He only wanted African people to learn Chinese, but he did not want to learn local culture. When I came here, I learned some of the local language, and the national anthem, and I learned Rwandan heritage. And they treat me very well. I think if you want other people to learn your culture, you should learn theirs first.”

After class, Kong runs into his Rwandan codirector, a woman, and they greet each other like old friends. Kong suggests they sing the Rwandan national anthem together, and they do, with relish, to the delight of the students who gather to listen.

Kong may just have tapped into the secret to real soft power — reaching not for power, but for a genuine human connection.

Your main clue is that the provincial capital is Karachi. And here’s another: the provincial government just decided to make Chinese language classes mandatory for school children there.

So, which Pakistani province are we talking about?

Answer: Sindh!

Officials there have decided to make Chinese language instruction mandatory in schools. The goal is to have all students there – ages 10 and up – attending Chinese classes by 2013. Haroon Rashid is senior editor of the BBC’s Urdu section in Islamabad.

Keith Oatley is a cognitive psychologist, formerly of the University of Toronto, and a fiction writer (here’s his latest novel). Oatley and his research team measured the amount of fiction a group of people read, and then considered their levels of empathy. They discovered that the more fiction their subjects read, the more empathy they had for others. This is documented in Oatley’s book Such Stuff as Dreams: The Psychology of Fiction. Oatley says that demographic known as the Introverted Bookworm is a bit of myth: reading fiction, in most cases, opens you out to the world. When reading a novel, you’re living with other people — often inside their heads.

Back to Jackie Collins: Does “trashy” fiction help on the empathy front as much as Tolstoy or Jane Austin? Oatley is silent on this, at least in his BBC interview.

I remember reading a potboiler called Acapulco by Burt Hirshfeld. It was the usual fare: film stars, psychedelic drugs, violence, sex. I read it while cramming for final exams at college. At night, I would be pretty wired from all the studying (not something I was especially used to). A chapter of Acapulco was the perfect sleep aid. Amusingly stilted dialogue, glamorous cocktails, deals by the pool, late-night beach liaisons: it sure beat thinking about Ibsen and Flaubert. Much as I loved getting inside the head of Madame Bovary, entering the mind of Acapulco‘s obnoxious movie producer Harry Bristol was, in its own way, more fun. And, who knows, perhaps it helped me empathize.

Also in this week’s pod: rumors have been spreading that former Chinese President Jiang Zemin has died. In response, authorities have blocked searches of certain words including a word for river (jiang) and heart attack.

And now, another extravanza from Nina Porzucki…

California’s legislature is moving to regulate how political candidates’ names are translated. The state is home to the largest Asian American population in the nation. Nearly a third of Asian American voters in California are not proficient in English.

Election materials have been translated into several Asian languages for years, but the law doesn’t specify how candidates’ names should be translated.

Consider the case of Mike Eng. Five years ago he was a candidate for the California State Assembly. “When I saw how my name was spelled [on the ballot] I almost fell out of my seat,” Eng says.

Eng was running for a seat in the California assembly. About 40 percent of his district is Asian American, with sizeable communities of Chinese, Japanese, Vietnamese and Korean speakers. Under federal law, election materials in Eng’s district must be translated into those four languages. So when Eng was asked if he wanted his name translated onto the ballot, he thought, “Well of course.”

Officials translated Eng’s name literally, into what in Chinese sounded like Mike Eng: 麦 可 恩 (or Mai Ke En) Literally, the characters mean something like “wheat can be kindness.”

When Chinese characters are strung together to create phonetic transliterations of Western names, they can sometimes turn into pretty nonsensical sayings like well, “wheat can be kindness.”

Mike Eng wasn’t so happy with a name that “doesn’t mean anything.”

As turns out Eng, who is Chinese American, also has a Chinese name that was given to him at birth by his grandparents. His Chinese name has nothing to do with wheat or kindness, but means “pride of our national day.” This was the name used by the Chinese media, the name that many voters knew him by. So Eng ended up spending the rest of his campaign telling voters “that this person that sounded like wheat in Chinese was actually me.”

Despite the confusion Eng won the election. But the situation still bothers him.

Unlike English, written Chinese is based on meaning as well as sound. You might think Eng is hung up on the fact that his ballot name meant “wheat”. But meaning is a big deal in written Chinese, says lexicographer David Prager Branner.

Characters that are used in Chinese names are also part of everyday language. “The meaning is right in your face with the Chinese writing system,” says Branner. “You can’t escape it.”

Take Branner’s name. In English, no one really thinks about what “David” means. But when he uses his Chinese name 德威 (De Wei) Branner says the meaning of the two characters (“virtuous inner strength” and “the power to awe”) is right there.

Under the Voting Rights Act, certain jurisdictions are required to provide minority language assistance. This means translated materials, ballots, signs, bilingual poll workers. But federal law is silent about name translation.

Some states regulate how names appear on the ballot in character-based languages like Chinese, but not California. In California the rules change from one jurisdiction to the next. Assembly member Mike Eng’s situation was unfortunate but by no means the most extreme example of a name change.

Some candidates may even have used this grey area of the law to gain favor with Asian American voters. In 2010, someone named李 正 平(Li Zheng Ping) ran for San Francisco Superior Court Judge. Someone named Michael Nava also ran. It turned out that they were one and the same person. Michael Nava quite legally assumed the name Li Zheng Ping in some of his outreach to Chinese-American voters. Li Zheng Ping is a Chinese-sounding name, and a good one for a judicial candidate. In Chinese, it means “correct and fair.”

Assembly member Mike Eng likens the situation in California to the wild west. “If you want to say that my name means ‘giver of million of dollars in profits to local governments’ then one could list your name on the ballot that way” he says.

California State Senator Leland Yee has introduced a bill regulating how candidates’ names are translated into character-based languages.

“All of us want good sounding names that engender warmth with the Chinese vote” says Yee. “But when I think that when you do that solely for the purpose of gathering that vote and nothing else than I think it’s a little unfair.”

In 2009, an earlier version of the bill was vetoed by then Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger, who declared that individual jurisdictions should decide this matter on their own. But Yee re-introduced it this year.

“If Chinese Americans think that the voting process is a sham and that politicians are trying to trick them, then they are less inclined to participate in the electoral process” says Yee.

Dean Logan, the Registrar of Voters in Los Angeles County, says under the proposed law, he would have to decide on which translations to use in LA County. He’s uncomfortable with that.

“You could ultimately have someone challenge that in court which further delays the process,” says Logan.

It’s somewhat surprising that California, with its large Asian American population, lags behind other states like New York where policy about candidate’s names has been in place for well over a decade. But that may change in soon. Assembly member Mike Eng certainly hopes so.

“Your name is your identity. Your name is your heritage,” says Eng. He looks forward to the day “when we can have a ballot that does truly reflect the true identity of those that are running because that’s better democracy.”

Finally in the pod, a little thing on the people of South Sudan learning their new national anthem.

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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.

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Prato Cathedral

There’s also a textile museum to visit in this city – it celebrates the city’s reputation as a textile producer as far back as the 12 century.

Problem is many of the old factories and mills are no longer operating, at least not the way they used to. As a result there’s tension in this textile town in Tuscany. Can you name this Italian city on the Bizenzio River?

The answer is the city of Prato, Italy. Megan Williams reports that competition from China forced many of Prato’s textile factories to go bankrupt. Now Chinese workers have moved in and are operating small textile businesses in Prato that some locals say resemble sweatshops.

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There is a comfort to thinking of the year of your country as the father or mother of the nation. And it’s not just countries with dictators that name their leaders in this way. Britain’s Margaret Thatcher was the Iron Lady (soon to be a biopic of the same name starring Meryl Streep). Finland’s President Tarja Halonen is often referred to as Moominmamma– partly ironically, but also out of pride. (The Moomins are a cartoon strip and set of children’s fantasy stories that are as big as Disney in Finland).

In Mubarak’s case, the pharaoh moniker is an insult. It’s shorthand for absolutism, state violence and destruction.

“If we go back four thousand years pharaohs were kings that ruled for life and built grand monuments to themselves,” says Joshua Stacher of Kent State University. “It’s not a good term.”

It wasn’t always that way. A few decades ago, the pharaohs were remembered proudly as demi-gods who “ensured the provision of water to the Egyptian peasants in the Nile Delta and upper Egypt,” says Tarek Osman, author of Egypt on the Brink. That is “an extremely positive role in the deep Egyptian psyche.” Maybe that sense of the pharaohs will return, now that Mubarak is gone.

Check out this post on Language Log for Chinese signs held by protesters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square. Were these people protesting Mubarak, or sending a message to China’s Communist rulers?

Also in the podcast, fears for the future of Cantonese, once the lingua franca of many Chinatowns around the world.

Beijing is stepping up its efforts to establish Mandarin as the official tongue of China. As a result, Cantonese is spoken by fewer people — and in fewer situations outside the home — even in Cantonese-speaking parts of China. There have been protests in the cities of Guangzhou and Hong Kong about proposals to expand the use of Mandarin on TV and in other public settings.

In the rest of the world, students of the Chinese language and their teachers see the writing on the wall: they are choosing to learn Mandarin rather than Cantonese.

These days in New York’s Chinatown, a mix of dialects is spoken. That means people often fall back on the common dialect Mandarin. But not Kim Mui. She teaches a Cantonese class. It’s going to take many people like her to ensure that Cantonese survives in the long term.

Finally, British cultural revolutionaries Gang of Four talk about their name, which derives from a group of notorious Chinese cultural revolutionaries. The bandmembers also talk about their new CD, and about phrases that include the word farm.

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Area in green shows the Cantonese dominant region in China (Photo: ASDFGH)

The language of Chinatowns across the world is changing. Traditionally, Cantonese speakers dominated most Chinatowns. But that is changing, as Chinese immigrants are arriving from many different regions of China.

Two people speaking different, mutually incomprehensible dialects are likely to fall back on China’s lingua franca, Mandarin.

But one Cantonese-American in New York has made it her mission to save her dialect. Every Thursday night you can find Kim Mui at a noisy café in the heart of Manhattan’s Chinatown.

Mui teaches Cantonese to adults. Her students pay no tuition, just donations. There are no fancy flashcards, just a book she has put together over nearly a decade of teaching.

“My ancestors came to America during the gold rush to build the transcontinental railroad,” says Mui. “I know they struggled a lot. So I want to pay tribute to my ancestors by teaching other people Cantonese.”

A decade ago the majority of Chinese Americans were of Cantonese origin and Cantonese was the Chinese dialect spoken in Chinatown. Not anymore.

New immigrants from different regions of China have brought different dialects, like Fuzhou and Hakka.

Dialect differences

Chinese shares a common writing system. But when spoken, each dialect is mutually unintelligible.

The Cantonese class in progress with teacher Kim Mui on the far left

So no matter which Chinese dialect any two people speak, they can share the same newspaper. They can “read the same article and laugh about the same things but they may not be able to speak to one another,” says Tay.

More and more speakers of Cantonese and other dialects are turning toward the northern dialect of Mandarin. Mandarin is the broker dialect between dialects.

The growing influence of Mandarin in New York mirrors, to a certain extent, what’s happening more forcefully in China. Every city – in some cases, every town – speaks some dialect variety.

No alternatives

There’s much more internal migration in China today, so people often have no alternative but to turn to Mandarin. What’s more, the Chinese government is stepping up its enforcement of Mandarin as the lingua franca of the country, according to lexicographer David Prager Branner.

Children speak Mandarin in school. Mandarin is used for government, business and commerce.

“There are a lot of people who simply don’t know the language of their grandparents,” says Branner. “That’s causing friction. “Local language is a big part of what makes you feel that you are who you are.”

Last summer, in the Cantonese-speaking province of Guangdong, a politician proposed that regional television news be broadcast in Mandarin instead of Cantonese.

His comments sparked demonstrations. Protestors held up signs that read, “If you can’t understand what we’re saying, then go back to where you came from.”

Julie Tay of Asian Cultural Exchange says Beijing was quick to recant the politician’s proposal. Tay recalls that a spokesman promised government support for Cantonese language and culture.

But, she says, the spokesman “was saying it all in Mandarin.”

In places like New York, no one is enforcing Mandarin over Cantonese. And while Mandarin is increasingly used for day-to-day interactions, Cantonese speakers find their own dialect more expressive.

“Most people see Mandarin as being pale and humorless,” Tay says. “And it’s not a language you can make love in or fight with.”

Cantonese is still the native tongue of more than 70 million people, in China and around the world. But outside the home, it’s spoken by far fewer people than a generation ago.

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5.Tibetan in schools

Tibetans have been protesting over the potential loss of their language in schools.

It started after the Chinese Communist Party’s Qinghai province chief, Qiang Wei reportedly called for “a common language” in schools. He went on to propose that Qinghai use Mandarin as the language of instruction in all schools. Now, it already is the language of instruction in most schools in Qinghai, as in the rest of China. But the province is also home to a significant number of Tibetans, who typically learn at elementary level in their own language. Those who stay on in higher grades switch to Mandarin.

Estimates put the number of protesters between several hundred and several thousand. They spread beyond Tibetan speakers, with Uigher-speaking students also taking to the streets in sympathy. They know they could be next.

4. Spain re-orders its family names

The Spanish government has drafted a law that would change birth registration rules. That could result in a dramatic transformation of naming customs. Spaniards have two family names. Right now, either of those names can come first, though it’s customary for the father’s name to assume priority. Under the proposed law, the two names would simply be listed alphabetically, unless otherwise instructed by the parents. This may well result in gender neutrality, but it would certainly discriminate against letters at the end of the alphabet. Zapatero? Forgetaboutit! Just think: had the law been around in 1892, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco might have been known as Generalísimo Bahamonde. Would he have won the Spanish Civil War with a name like that?

3. Events that shaped English

A non-profit group in Britain called The English Project is putting together a list of historical events and places that have shaped the development of the English language. It’s a thoroughly UK-centric list. Which is fair enough, until that time in history when Britain began exporting the English language. Here’s the list. Post your ideas for a more expansive global list on English either there or on this site.

2.When can you say you speak a language? There’s no widely-accepted standard for speaking a second language, nor should there be: people use languages in so many different ways that there can never be a single answer to this question. But it’s instructive to try to come up with your own definition.

For the writer of this Economist blog, it’s a test of linguistic skills in journalism: “If my editor sent me to a country where I needed to report on a topic of general interest for The Economist, could I pull off interviews and research? If yes, I speak it.”

The comments after the blog post are all over the map, as they should be: “When you find yourself dreaming in a language, you can safely say that you can speak it.” (I disagree: I dream more fluently than I speak). I prefer this one: “When you have mastered all, I emphasize all, the nuances contained in a given cuss word, and know when and when not, to deploy the word, so that you obtain the precise effect you want, not more, not less. This you do a native speaker of the language.”

1. We speak, therefore we think. New research out of Australia on how the languages we speak may determine how we think. Pormpuraawans — aboriginals living in a remote part of Australia — relate spatially to things according to the position of the sun. So while they think east and west, we English speakers often think left and right, Arabic and Hebrew speaker right and left, and Chinese speakers up and down. This plays in nicely to the recently renewed debate over language and thought: does language arise out of thought, or does it give shape to thought? Are we all prisoners of our native tongues?

Musings on this here and here. And more coverage of the research in a recent World Science podcast.

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This is not the usual fare on The World in Words: we don’t often offer the microphone to people who discourage the use of other languages. But Schultz argues that English is what keeps America — a land of immigrants and therefore of many languages — intact. He believes that Spanish in particular is fast becoming an unofficial official language here (if that makes sense). He says government agencies use Spanish and other languages without thinking about the message they are sending. What they should be doing, he says, is using English so that non-English speakers are encouraged to learn the language, and succeed in their adopted homeland. Finally, he acknowledges that bigots and racists may be among the supporters of English Only. But as far as he’s concerned, they do not form the mainstream, nor does he share their views.

Also, an election ad in Chinese, aimed at Americans who don’t speak Chinese. This comes courtesy of conservative think tank/advocacy group Citizens Against Government Waste, which clearly doesn’t think this glossy ad in a foreign language is a waste of money.

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Also in this pod, a conversation with philosopher Oscar Guardiola-Rivera about what the spread of Spanish in the United States is doing to the language, and to America. There are now particular identifiable dialects of Spanish specific to certain U.S. regions, and sometimes specific to certain groups: Cuban-American, Puerto Rican, Mexican-American, etc. The language is leaving its mark on the country too. It could be argued, for example, that in Miami, if you don’t speak at least some Spanish you’re at a disadvantage. Guardiola-Rivera is the author of What if Latin America Ruled The World?

Finally, Dora the Explorer and Kai-Lan: two fictional TV stars who introduce American kids to their first words of Spanish and Chinese. In Dora’s case, she also introduces Spanish speakers to their first English words, which may be why this doctored online image of Dora garnered so much attention earlier this year. The intention of the illustrator wasn’t clear. Was she sympathizing with opponents of the spread of Hispanic culture and language via illegal immigration, or was she mocking them? Both sides embraced the image, and poor Dora got it in the neck. For the record, Dora does plenty of travelling in her cartoon world; she appears to cross many borders, quite unhindered. As for her nationality, she appears to be American — at least that’s how she sounds — of undefined Hispanic heritage. (This is totally beside the point, but it doesn’t stop many of us from speculating…). One other thing about Dora: We English-speakers know her as a character who introduces kids to Spanish words. Well, the Spanish language version of the show Dora la Exploradora introduces kids to English words.

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