In Pakistan, there has been a growing trend of using the Latin script to write Urdu, the national language of the country, instead of the official Urdu script.

This trend is still fairly limited, but it has left some Urdu purists concerned about what will happen if the trend continues.

While it may sound harmless enough, it’s creating some unintended side effects. Because the first generations of mobile phones couldn’t send text messages using Pakistan’s Urdu script, Pakistanis improvised and started transliterating Urdu phrases into the Latin alphabet. Even though Urdu-capable phones are more common now, many people have become used to using the Latin script.

Shaista Parween, who teaches math and computer studies, said texting-mad students are just as comfortable writing Urdu in Latin as they are using the regular Urdu script. In fact, she said they sometimes even do their schoolwork using the Latin alphabet to write Urdu.

“I’m facing this a lot in my classes,” Parween said. “Latin Urdu is being used so much, what can we do? We can’t say it’s wrong if they are trying. It’s used so much in the media and television, that’s why.”

Not the First Time

Officially, and overwhelmingly, Urdu is written in a variation of the Arabic script. But while the use of Latin letters for Urdu has reached unprecedented levels, it isn’t the first time it’s been done.

European missionaries and administrators transliterated Urdu into the Latin script back in the 18th century. And in the 1950s, military ruler Ayub Khan proposed officially writing Urdu in Latin letters, just as Ataturk had done for Turkish decades earlier. But religious leaders thought the Arabic script to be an important marker of Pakistan’s Islamic identity, so Ayub abandoned the idea.

Oddly enough, tech-savvy kids are inadvertently doing today what a military dictator couldn’t achieve 40-years ago.

And many Pakistanis aren’t happy about that.

“Trying to write a language in another script is like trying to drop off your skin and trying to have a new one,” said Rauf Parekh, an assistant professor at the University of Karachi’s Urdu Department. He’s concerned about the impact this will make on society if people stop learning the Urdu script.

“They will be cut off from their culture, from their tradition, their history, their classical literature. How are they going to enjoy if they cannot read it in the original. So it’s a kind of deprivation on cultural and educational side. They won’t feel it perhaps now, but maybe hundred years from now they will realize what a great loss they have incurred,” he said.

But while professor Parekh bemoans the loss of traditional Pakistani culture, a new kind of “text messaging culture” is emerging.

Pakistanis use text messages for just about anything, but especially for passing on political jokes, poetry, quotes and for flirting.

Urdu Alphabet with Devanagari and Latin transliterations. (Photo: Goldsztajn/Wikipedia)

One book is titled “Cool SMS”, another “Love & Love SMS”. Their notable feature is that each joke or poem in the booklet has both the Urdu script and the Latin transliteration.

“It’s been about 10 years that these books have been published now,” Shop owner Basharat explained. “There was a lot of demand for them initially. This is because the majority of our population is not educated, so Latin Urdu books were made so that every person can read the books and send SMSs. It made it so much easier.”

Nowadays, Basharat said, the SMS booklets don’t sell as much, in part because cell phone companies have caught on. And are sending out the Latin-Urdu text messages themselves.

The official Romanian dictionary now uses the term Roma, and now recognizes that the word Gypsy, or Tigan, has a pejorative connotation. Groups that promote Roma rights are celebrating, but many Romanians are against the change — as are some Roma themselves.

In an alley behind a busy farmer’s market in the capital, Bucharest, a Roma man named Aurika said his people call each other Tigan, not Roma.

“For me it’s not a negative word,” he said. “But, if you and I have an argument, and you call me a Tigan, we’re going to have a problem.”

Aurika’s son, Antoni, 11, chimed in.

“I want to be called Roma,” he said, shyly.

His father got angry.

“Why?” he asked. “Because they tell you in school that the Tigan are bad?”

The boy said yes.

“That’s wrong,” Aurika said. “You are both Tigan and a Romanian citizen.”

Such prejudice, anger and linguistic confusion is nothing new in Romania. Some Roma groups have been asking for changes since the early 20th Century. This year they finally got their way.

Monica Busuioc, a linguist at the Romania Academy, is among those who decided to replace the word Gypsy or Tigan with the word Roma. (Photo: Gerry Hadden)

The Romanian Academy, the guardian of the tongue, has officially defined the group as Roma. Behind that big change is tiny Monica Busuioc, an elderly, bespectacled woman who works on the Academy’s fourth floor.

On a recent day, Busuioc sat with the latest edition of the official Romanian dictionary before her. She said it not only recognizes Roma as the correct name of the ethnic group, it makes an equally important modification of the old name, Tigan.

“Before it said, ‘someone with villainous behavior.’ And we added ‘insulting epithet for someone who has uncivilized behavior.’ ”

Busuioc said linguists have no right to remove terms like Tigan from dictionaries, no matter how offensive, because they’re part of history. The word Tigan, she said, appears in documents dating back as early as the 14th Century.

But the Academy can modify definitions to reflect social realities.

“This term was frequently used in proverbs and sayings, and so on. One cannot eliminate this from the Romanian language. A dictionary cannot eliminate a word,” Busuioc said.

Introducing Roma to the dictionary is also offending some Romanians because, in the Romanian language, Roma and Romanian sound a lot alike.

Many Romanians don’t want to be confused with the Roma.

At a Bucharest bus stop, a woman who would said her name was Julia said Roma are dangerous and they give Romanians a bad name, especially overseas. She said her sister is an honest, hard working nurse in Italy.

“Every day, my sister’s coworkers show her articles in the paper saying, look at what you Romanians are doing,” she said. “But what they’re showing her are crimes that the Tigan have committed.”

Ana Avasiuc, a worker with a Bucharest non-governmental organization named Impreuna, said when people refer to the Roma as Tigan, it's further isolating them from mainstream culture

Roma rights groups say this is the attitude they want to change, and taking the term Tigan out of popular usage can help. Ana Avasiuc, with a Bucharest non-governmental organization named Impreuna, said using the word Tigan amounts to linguistic ghettoization.

“I was reading about the Roma community of Baia Mare in central Romania, around which the town hall built a wall that cost 60,000 euros,” she said. “Instead of spending this on things Roma are entitled to get as citizens, it used it to push them as far away from daily life as possible.”

That wall was made of cement. In another Romanian city, officials built one out of metal. The Roma there tore it down and sold the metal for scrap.

These incidents haven’t done much to improve the Roma’s, or Romania’s, image locally or abroad. The question is, can changing a word in the dictionary really change things. Busuioc said she’s not sure.

“I cannot combat the discrimination,” she said. “Only at the level of words. It is a problem to change mentality. Surely the word helped. If they hear Roma, Roma, Roma, instead of Tigan, then the men will begin to use Roma.”

Language needs centuries to change, she said, but you have to start somewhere.

Beyond language, the Romanian government will soon unveil a plan to improve the Roma’s lot, through social integration and jobs programs, improved housing and education for the young.

The European Union has given all member states until the end of the year to come up with plans to improve the Roma’s situation.

“I still remember the little house there and they would practice and you would hear music coming from number 5 Moho Street,” says Lovell.

Pen Cayetano sang in Garifuna. But this wasn’t the traditional music that Lovell had heard growing up; this was a new sound called Punta Rock. Cayetano was singing about everyday life in the town of Dangriga where Lovell lived. Lovell was hooked.

“He was singing about issues in Dangriga when it comes to be laid off of work,” says Lovell.

One day Cayetano was performing and as it started to rain, the singer then began to sing an impromptu song about the rain. “He’s saying, it’s raining, it’s raining right here in Belize,” says Lovell.

At 16, barely able to speak the language of his family, Lovell decided he was going to be musician like Cayetano who would sing in Garifuna.

“To do that I had to be able to speak it. I had to be able to sing in Garifuna.”

Lovell started to speak in Garifuna with his parents and others. He also began visiting a village called Hopkins where everyone spoke Garifuna. “I just had to make that conscious effort to speak it and I did that,” says Lovell.

The Garifuna people come from the Caribbean island of Saint Vincent. But no one speaks Garifuna there any more. No one has since the 18th century, when the Garifuna were exiled by the British to Honduras. The diaspora is now spread throughout Central America in Honduras, Nicaragua, Guatemala and Belize.

The Garifuna language has survived but over time, Spanish, English and several creoles have become more dominant. The pattern is familiar: parents speak in their native tongue. Kids answer back in the language of the adopted country.

Linguist Daniel Kaufman calls this process social coercion. “A society comes to a point where … the children think that it’s not the language of modernity anymore, it’s the language of the old people,” says Kaufman.

Last year Kaufman helped to found the New York-based Endangered Language Alliance, a collection of linguists, students, and language enthusiasts. The group has been doing academic work like analyzing the grammar of the rare Mexican language Amuzgo.

But Kaufman and his team have also been supporting rejuvenation projects inspired by people like Lovell. A linguist might study and describe every intricacy of a language, but to keep it alive people like Lovell are essential.

For a language to live “you can’t just restrict it to one domain,” says Kaufman. “It has to live … all over the place.” Including, for example, in Michael Jackson songs, translated into local languages. .

Kaufman is delighted that Lovell is translating popular English language songs into Garifuna. He’s also helping Lovell raise money for an after-school program to teach Garifuna to kids in Lovell’s Brooklyn neighborhood—kids who, like Lovell, came from Garifuna backgrounds but don’t speak the language.

Lesson one for these kids: the pre-school hit I Love You as sung by Barney, the giant purple dinosaur.

“I want to be known as the Garifuna artist … teaching the language to Garifuna and non-Garifuna,” says Lovell.

Lovell describes this as his “calling”. And there is an otherworldly look that comes over him when he’s singing. A slight smile that you can see in his eyes and radiates from the corners of his mouth—whether he’s singing Barney or a traditional Garifuna song.

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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.

Publisher and dictionary-maker Ramakrishnan (Photo: Alex Gallafent)

Another 10 million speak a different form of the language in Sri Lanka.

In south India at least, Tamil is at a crossroads.

It has ‘so many problems,’ says Mr. Ramakrishnan in Chennai, formerly known as Madras.

“Problems in terms of meaning. Problems in terms of forms of a word. Problems in terms of syntax.”

Ramakrishnan is a man on a mission: to standardize modern Tamil.

“We don’t have a comprehensive grammar of modern Tamil. The last grammar was written in the 12th century,” he says.

That’s not to say Tamil is an endangered language. All those millions of people aren’t going to suddenly stop speaking Tamil anytime soon.

Still, it is struggling.

Written Tamil is different to the spoken Tamil people use every day. Tamil shares that feature with several other languages, notably Arabic.

For many, writing in Tamil can be off-putting. Ask someone to try and they’ll respond, “‘Oh no, I can’t write Tamil’,” says Ramakrishnan.

“The reason he says this is because subconsciously he thinks if he writes it should conform to the classical standards.”

Sadanand Menon is a well-known writer in Chennai. He argues that Tamil has become lost in a sense of nostalgia which does not enable it to be a modern language.

Menon says that after the British left India, local politicians used the centuries-old classical Tamil of epics and royalty to define a proud regional identity.

Since then politics has moved on. But day-to-day Tamil hasn’t.

“So like if we were discussing this instrument that you’re holding, in Tamil, then just about everything that is part of your radio equipment–recorder, your microphone, your earphones—for everything I’ll have to use English words. Tamil has got locked in the past and hasn’t found a device to describe what is happening around them at the moment,” he says.

That’s reminiscent of the challenge Hebrew faced at the turn of the 20th century. It couldn’t describe the modern world either.

Now it’s a fully-functioning modern language–and classical Hebrew is a different animal altogether.

Arguably it took the building of a nation to produce such a radical shift. But there’s no such impulse for Indian Tamils, who got their own state within India in 1969: Tamil Nadu.

Besides, now they’re hungry for something else: English.

English words are scattered across Tamil movies and songs. Sadanand Menon rolls his eyes as he recalls choruses like this:

“Shakalaka baby, shakalakababy, will you fall in love with me?”

But it’s not just pop culture. English is infiltrating everyday life too.

Ramakrishnan worries that people in Tamil Nadu–especially the poorly educated–know neither English nor Tamil very well, and get by only with a limited mash-up of the two.
He says you can’t even give directions to a local cab driver without using English.

“So today if I tell my driver ‘turn right’ in Tamil, he will not understand. I must use the words ‘right’, ‘left’ and ‘straight’,” he says.

The local government has been trying to improve Tamil’s status. A new law requires business signs to be written in Tamil as well as English–the same kind of thing happened years ago in French-speaking Quebec.

And official committees have invented thousands of new words–although it’s not clear they’re being used.

Then again, between Tamil and English, people are getting on OK. English words often gain new meanings in Tamil: ‘assault’, for example, has come to mean ‘casual.’

Plus, in the last couple of decades there has been an explosion of contemporary Tamil fiction–those books are written in an updated form of the language.

But that kind of writing is the exception. The general standard of written Tamil isn’t very high.
And so, in purely economic terms, its value is limited. The language can’t take your business around the world, like English, or even across India like Hindi.

To do that, Ramakrishnan says, Tamil needs clarity and consistency.

“We don’t have a grammar, we don’t have a thesaurus, we don’t have a good English-Tamil dictionary. We need so many things.”

For years he’s been building his own Tamil dictionary, painstakingly charting the modern use of the language. Take the word for ‘put’. That one word and its 54 shades of meaning in Tamil took him weeks.

And Ramakrishnan wonders, “If you have to spend nearly one month on one word, what word do you call it except madness?”

Maybe, maybe not. No language can be modernized in isolation. Along with the challenge of English, the Tamil spoken in India has to contend with, say, how the language is used in Sri Lanka, and how it’s morphing online.

But as Ramakrishnan ticks off elements of Tamil grammar, it’s hard to argue that a few rules along the way can help.

In reality, there is no such language requirement in China. Nor is there one for immigrants to the United States. The only language proficiency test in the United States is for citizenship.

But there is now such a test in Britain.

It has been introduced by Britain’s Conservative-led government, which has vowed to tighten immigration and reverse policies of multiculturalism.

“Under the doctrine of state multiculturalism, we’ve encouraged different cultures to live separate lives apart from each other, and apart from the mainstream,” said British Prime Minister David Cameron in May. “We’ve even tolerated these segregated communities behaving in ways that run completely counter to our values.”

Cameron’s government has introduced a new English language proficiency test for some would-be immigrants.

Anyone applying for a visa for long-term residency— roughly equivalent to a U.S. green card— will now be tested to make sure they have a basic grasp of English.

As a result, Rashida Chapti, a naturalized British citizen, cannot get a visa for her 58-year-old husband, who, like her, was born in India.

Chapti said if her husband was younger, it would have been different. “If he’d come [to Britain] earlier, he would have learned English. But now he’s old.”

Chapti is suing the British government on human rights grounds. She’s essentially arguing that’s she’s being deprived of the right to be with her family.

Aside from the language issue, her husband meets all the other requirements to qualify for a visa.

Mian Myat, a local councillor from Leicester, the city where Chapti lives, said Chapti’s husband cannot reasonably be expected to take English lessons before he arrives in Britain.

For one thing, he lives in a remote village where no-one speaks English.

“He would have to travel something like 180 miles just to take these lessons,” said Myat.

Myat said Chapti’s husband would need to take at least 40 lessons to pass the test, and that would cost him “something like 15 times his annual salary.”

Family reunification is at stake. It’s a principle that’s been enshrined in British— and US— immigration law for decades. But under the new rule, Rashida Chapti and her husband don’t qualify for it.

Conservative member of parliament Dominic Raab supports the new rule.

“Of course one feels sympathy for the Chapti family but I think the government policy is right,” he said.

“Coming to Britain is a privilege, not a right [that carries] certain responsibilities. One of those is to learn enough English to get by in the community”

Raab is particularly annoyed that Chapti’s lawyers have invoked the European Convention on Human Rights. Many British politicians resent European laws that supersede their own.

But in rejecting multiculturalism, the British government’s rhetoric is actually in line with many on the European mainland, notably Germany.

Chancellor Angela Merkel has declared that multiculturalism has “utterly failed” and that everyone living in Germany should learn German.

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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Some foreign media organizations have made the comparisons (for example, here and here). Also implicitly making the connection was Prime Minister Naoto Kan, who has called the quake and its aftermath Japan’s worst crisis since World War Two. A further sign of the historical significance of the moment, and of the country’s plight: Japanese Emperor Akihito made the first television address of his reign.

That said, there are significant differences between the 1945 bombings and the earthquake. The most obvious is that the 1945 events were military attacks (though the vast majority of victims were civilians). The destruction of two cities and the radiation released was fully intended by Japan’s wartime enemy, the United States. Also, radiation levels today are nowhere near as high as in the aftermath of the bombings. Nor, so far, is the loss of life, as shockingly high as it is.

In the podcast I put together for the 65th anniversary of the dropping of the Atomic bombs, there are two takes on self-censorship. A child survivor of Hiroshima explains why she kept quiet about her experiences for so long, through the pain and guilt of survival. She was seven when the the bomb fell, killing her parents and siblings but inexplicably sparing her. Late in life, Sueko Hada tells her story, in the presence of her daughter and granddaughters. They’ve heard some of it before, but she includes many new details this time. I snapped the picture above of the family on the day I interviewed Mrs Hada in 2005. My report originally aired on The World as part of a series on the mental health of A-bomb survivors, known in Japan as hibakusha.

Before I met Mrs Hada, I don’t think I fully understood why people with painful pasts remain silent, essentially censoring their own histories. But if you grew up in post-war Japan, surrounded by people who believed that radiation sickness was contagious and hereditary, you too might keep quiet about your past.

The legacy of Hiroshima and Nagasaki is hard to gauge. Japanese children still visit the Hiroshima Peace Memorial Museum (left). But these days, Tokyo Disneyland is a far more popular destination for school groups.

For many Americans, the use of the bomb remains a hugely sensitive issue. Views both pro and con seem entrenched, dialogue virtually impossible. The debate — such as it is — hasn’t progressed much since the 1995 controversy over The Smithsonian’s Enola Gay exhibition. But there has been new research about some of the earliest news reporting of the bombs. That began in 2005, when several dispatches written by Chicago Daily News reporter George Weller were published first time by the Tokyo newspaper Mainichi Shimbun. That was followed by publication in English of those and other reports in First into Nagasaki, a book put together by Weller’s son, Anthony.

Weller blamed U.S. military censorship for the previous non-publication of his reports. But Japanese freelance reporter Atsuko Shigesawa disputes that in a new book. (Japanese links here and here.) At the Library of Congress, she came across a statement from Gilbert Harrison, who was a sergeant in the US Army Air Forces and went to Nagasaki with Weller. Harrison went on to become editor of the New Republic. In his statement, he describes how he delivered Weller’s reports to a Chicago Daily News employee in Tokyo. As far as he knows, he says, the reports were filed there and then and were not subject to military vetting. He says he “doesn’t know why” the New York Times and the Arizona Republic reported in 2005 that “our reports were censored and not printed for 60 years.”

Atsuko Shigesawa believes that the true acts of censorship in reporting on the A-bombs were self-imposed, sometimes by reporters, sometimes by their editors. In Weller’s case, she believes his editors at the Chicago Daily News killed many of his stories. And when it came to other reporters filing stories from Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Shigesawa found that newspapers routinely cut the segments dealing with radiation sickness and other after-effects of the bombs on the human body. (The photo to the right was taken at a hospital in Tokyo. The original caption reads: “The patient’s skin is burned in a pattern corresponding to the dark portions of a kimono worn at the time of the explosion.”) In addition to these editorial cuts, at least one correspondent chose not to report on his hospital visits, believing that they were part of a plot to hoodwink him. William Lawrence of the New York Times wrote that American reporters were being subjected to “a Japanese propaganda campaign calculated to shame Americans for using such a devastating weapon of war”. He continued: “I am convinced that, horrible as the bomb undoubtedly is, the Japanese are exaggerating its effects in an effort to win sympathy for themselves in an attempt to make the American people forget the long record of cold-blooded Japanese bestiality.” For those reasons, Lawrence did not write about his hospital visits and the cases of radiation sickness he witnessed until 1972, in his memoir.

We don’t — and probably never will — have the full story of what influenced those initial reports of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But there’s enough to suggest that self-censorship played a prominent role.

For another take on the meaning of Hiroshima and memory, check out Rahna Reiko Rizzuto’s memoir Hiroshima in the Morning. It is a 2010 finalist in the autobiography category of the National Book Critics’ Circle Award.

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How much is human consciousness shaped by language? Somewhat, says theoretical psychologist Nicholas Humphrey. He’s more interested in the other things that shape it, like what he calls the “lake of sensation” — colors, lights and sounds. I guess you could argue that those sensations themselves comprise the elements of a language of consciousness.

Humphrey views this kind of raw feeling as predating language in infants. Maybe, but recent research on the bilingual brain suggests that we may begin our language development as early as in the womb. I talk with the host of the Big Show’s Science podcast Rhitu Chatterjee about this. She did her own podcast on the subject. One of the takeaway results of the research is that babies reared in a bilingual setting can distinguish between the two languages, and also between those familiar languages and unfamiliar ones.

Finally, we consider poetry. Some poems might be seen as attempts to revert to a pre-linguistic form of communication. Others try to bridge the gulf between consciousness and language. And then there’s the language of former Turkmenistan leader Saparmurat Niyazov. He liked to call himself Turkmenbashi or Leader of Turkmens (he was the self-appointed president of the Association of Turkmens of the World). His poetry was less engaged with issues of consciousness or language, and more with his own stupendously elevated place in the world. Not so much a lake of sensation as an ocean of self-regard:

I am the Turkmen spirit
And I was reborn
To bring you a golden age and happiness
I came here as a envoy of prosperity
And the music of the melody of life.

Photos: Joseph Pons, Wikimedia Commons

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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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Here’s one way to get under a Frenchman’s skin — suggest everyone in France should learn English. France’s education minister Luc Chatel recently announced he wants French children to study English, starting at age three.

That is already happening at some French private schools. At the Babylangue language school in Paris, toddlers sing songs and play games, to get a feel for the sound of English. They are too young to learn grammar and spelling, but they are learning colors and parts of the body.

Caroline Benoit-Levy, a linguist and founder of Babylangue, said it is easier for young children to learn a second language.

Learning a second language early

“Kids who learn a foreign language early in life have a better ability to read and write,” she said. “They have a vocabulary that’s richer compared to monolingual kids. Learning another language helps you get better at your first language. It enhances your mother tongue as well.”

But for most children in France, second language instruction doesn’t start until age seven, and most French people never master any language but their mother tongue. Education Minister Luc Chatel has said that he would like to rectify that.

“The fact the French have not mastered English is a major handicap,” Chatel said in an interview with French public television. He plans to reinvent how English is taught there. Chatel said that would mean starting English classes in nursery school, using the Internet and podcasts as learning tools.

Language of power

French governments have made other attempts over the years to persuade the French to learn English, but none has provoked quite as much anger as Chatel’s recent announcement has.

“It’s totally pointless, if not ridiculous,” said Claude Hagege, a linguist who is one of the loudest critics of Chatel’s plan.

Hagege has won awards in France for his work to promote and maintain a diversity of languages, and he supports the idea of people learning several languages if they can. But Hagege said that language is power, and focusing on English gives too much power to countries like the United States.

“Speaking English is not quite innocent,” Hagege said. “Speaking English is a guilty act because it is the language of very wealthy, industrialized countries. And I think any person who has a minimum of sense of justice cannot accept that because this means domination by the countries whose mother tongue this language is.”

But for the parents who bring their children to study English at Babylangue, language diversity and international power struggles aren’t their primary concern.

One parent there, who didn’t give her name, said “French is a beautiful, melodious language but the fact is 80 percent of people in the world speak English, so it’s absolutely essential to speak it as well as another language.”

That statistic is an exaggeration.

Still, the woman said that she hopes she is giving her daughter a head start in a world where, like it or not, people who speak English often get the best opportunities.

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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Flag Anthem of the Cantonese People

That’s followed by a conversation about the merits of the King James Bible, which turns 400 in 2011. In secular Britain, those merits aren’t strictly religious. In fact, people like former UK poet laureate Andrew Motion view the King James Bible as a literary giant, second only perhaps to Shakespeare. He argues that we are fast forgetting how it has shaped English-language poetry, fiction and rhetoric.

Then, the main event: the R word. Or perhaps the R-rated word: rationing. For manyAmericans, the idea of rationing is, well, unAmerican. In Britain though, rationing is part of the national psyche: it got the country through two world wars, and its collectivist values are at the core of Britain’s government-run health service. Now though, the emergence of expensive, new end-of-life drugs are challenging Brits’ belief in rationing.

During World War II and for nine years after, the British government rationed most food items: meat, flour, eggs, sugar. The government also strictly controlled the supply of gasoline, soap, stockings—even the number of buttons on jackets.

Although there was wartime rationing elsewhere, including in the United States, it generally applied to fewer items over fewer years and was quickly forgotten. In Britain, however, rationing became a part of the national identity.

Many older Britons speak of rationing as a great legacy of those wartime and post-war years, when people sacrificed their own interests for the greater good.

After World War II, the British government extended this societal approach to health care. It created the National Health Service, the NHS.

Today, 95 percent of Britons get their care through the government-run program. In order to provide care to everyone, the government says it must place limits on the care it provides. It must ration.

Limits to Care

“We have a limited budget for health care, voted by Parliament every year, and we have to live within our means,” said Michael Rawlins, chairman of a government agency called the National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence (NICE).

NICE decides which drugs and other treatments can be prescribed by NHS doctors.

NICE was created in 1999 to clarify the reasons why certain drugs are approved and others are rejected. “In the old days it used to be done in secret, behind closed doors, in smoke-filled rooms,” Rawlins said. “Now it’s explicit. Everybody knows what the rules are.”

NICE’s rationing decisions start with a basic premise: The government should spend its limited resources on treatments that do the most good for the money. NICE calculates cost-effectiveness with a widely used measure called a quality-adjusted life year (QALY).

In essence, NICE asks these questions: How much does a drug or procedure cost? How much does the treatment extend the average patient’s life? And what is the quality of that life gained?

The calculations are complicated, but imagine that a cancer treatment costs $100,000 and that it extends the life of the average patient by four years. That means the cost of the treatment per year gained is $25,000.

Now imagine that for part of those four years the patient will be in pain and bedridden. NICE might figure the quality of that life at 50 percent of perfect health. Under NICE’s formula, that would make the drug half as cost-effective. In other words, the result would be $50,000 per quality-adjusted year gained.

NICE has set a maximum that it will spend on a treatment: about $47,000 per quality-adjusted year gained.

NICE tends to assume, without always performing calculations, that most common treatments are cost effective—including insulin for diabetes, cholesterol-lowering drugs for heart disease, and kidney transplants.

Instead, NICE analyzes only selected therapies, such as expensive new drugs that may extend life at the end of life. It has calculated that some of the more expensive drugs meant to slow the progression of Alzheimer’s Disease and some cancers fall below the cost-effectiveness threshold. In such cases, NICE says, the NHS shouldn’t pay for the drugs.

NICE chairman Michael Rawlins acknowledged that his agency’s decisions deprive some patients of drugs that may extend their lives by several months or more.

“We do recognize that the end of life is a very special time,” Rawlins said. “[It] allows people to attend weddings, see a grandchild born, seek forgivenesses.”

But he argued that if Britain spends a lot of money at the end of life, “we’re going to have to deprive other people of cost-effective care.” Rawlins said that might mean spending less money at the beginning of life—and might result in a higher infant mortality rate.

A Cancer Patient Fights Back

“Imagine how I feel when I hear people saying that if they give me the drugs I need to stay alive, babies are dying,” said David Cook, one of a growing number of British cancer patients speaking out against NICE and its rationing formula.

While sipping strong English tea in his village farmhouse kitchen, Cook argued that NICE’s logic breaks down when you go from the abstract formula to specific patients—like him.

A senior government manager in his fifties, Cook was diagnosed with kidney cancer in 2004. Two years later his prognosis was bad.

Cook’s doctor said he would die within months unless he got a drug to slow the growth of his tumors. But the cost of the drug was high—too high for NICE in light of the advanced stage of Cook’s cancer—and the NHS refused to pay for it.

Cook fought back. He contended that NICE’s rationing formula calculates cost-effectiveness based on the average patient, but individual patients might do better on a given treatment, which would make the drug more cost effective than NICE suggests. Cook’s doctor believed that was true for him, so Cook pleaded his case before a panel of experts.

“I had to persuade a total of six people that were in the room” he said. “I had to talk for my life.” Cook won his appeal—he got the drug—but he resented that he had to fight for it, that he was treated as an exception.

Cook has other complaints about NICE.

He says the agency treats patients inequitably; it is more likely to reject drugs for rarer cancers like his because the treatments are more expensive than those, say, for breast cancer or lung cancer. “We’re being penalized for having…the ‘wrong’ type of cancer,” he said.

Cook contends that NICE overreaches by measuring the quality of a patient’s life. He said it should not be up to bureaucrats to decide that the life of a bedridden patient, for instance, is worth a quarter or a half that of someone in perfect health.

Cook further argues that NICE neglects an important fact—that by helping a patient live longer, a drug may improve not only that patient’s life but also the lives of loved ones. For his part, Cook remains active and working and has helped care for his wife, who has been diagnosed with breast cancer.

Public Backlash

Stories like David Cook’s—about the government restricting access to life-saving drugs—have become common in the British media.

Part of the reason is that many new cancer drugs have become available in the last few years, and some of these drugs are extremely expensive.

NICE’s rejection of such drugs has fueled a growing backlash against the agency. Patient groups and drug companies have called it heartless and indiscriminate.

NICE’s future now hangs in the balance.

In May 2010, Britain’s ruling Labour Party, which founded the agency, lost a general election. The new Conservative-led government has said it will establish a cancer fund, totaling more than $300 million a year, to pay for some cancer drugs turned down by NICE.

This comes at a time of economic crisis in Britain. The government is making large cuts in just about every other public service.

Health economist Alan Maynard of the University of York said it may seem compassionate to set up a cancer fund, but it undermines NICE at a time when the country needs to be reminded of the value of rationing.

These days in Britain, few speak favorably about an agency that was set up to ensure that the government could provide the best care to the most people.

“NICE is not very popular,” said writer Lionel Shriver. “I may be the only fan of NICE in the country. After all, it’s the organization that says ‘no.’”

Shriver is an American who lives in London. Her latest novel, So Much for That, is about the U.S. health care system and how, in her view, it failed a woman who was dying of cancer. Shriver said her novel would have turned out “drastically differently” if she’d been writing about the British health care system.

The novel follows a character who has mesothelioma, a rare but deadly disease that is usually caused by exposure to asbestos. The character is partially based on a close friend of Shriver’s who lived 15 months after being diagnosed with mesothelioma. Shriver says her friend’s treatment cost $2 million.

“If she had been in the UK, that character would have been given palliative care alone,” said Shriver. “They would have tried to keep her comfortable and out of pain, but they would have skipped the major surgery. They would have skipped all that excruciating chemotherapy.”

“I think that my character and indeed my friend would have been better off in the United Kingdom,” Shriver said.

A Model for Other Countries?

Britain’s medical rationing has been noticed around the world. A steady stream of health officials from countries like Brazil, China, and Poland have visited NICE to see if setting up a rationing agency along similar lines makes sense for them.

Some American health care experts wanted to establish an agency like NICE as part of reforming the U.S. health care system. But after Sarah Palin cited Britain as the inspiration for what she claimed was an Obama Administration plan for “death panels,” that idea was dropped.

In fact, in this year’s health care reform law, Congress specifically prohibited British-style rationing. Medicare, for example, cannot apply quality-of-life tests in determining the cost-effectiveness of treatments.

Lionel Shiver is not pleased with that outcome. She said Americans still don’t seem ready to focus on some key end-of-life questions. “At least in the UK we’re having the conversation. How much is a life worth? And what kind of quality of life is that?”

But as other countries look to Britain as a model, it’s far from clear that the model itself will survive.

And that begs the question: Can explicit health care rationing work anywhere if it’s in trouble in the very country that may be best equipped to take it on?

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