#language acquistion

[lingthusiasm]

Lingthusiasm Episode 86: Revival, reggaeton, and rejecting unicorns - Basque interview with Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez

Basque is a language of Europe which is unrelated to the Indo-European languages around it or any other recorded language. As a minority language, Basque has faced considerable pressure from Spanish and French, leading to waves of language revitalization movements from the 1960s and 1980s to the present day. Which means that some of the kids who grew up among language revitalization activities are now adults, and the project of Basque language revival has taken on further dimensions.

In this episode, your host Gretchen McCulloch gets enthusiastic about new speakers and multiple generations of language revitalization in the Basque country with Dr. Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez, who's an Assistant Professor at California State University, Long Beach, USA, and a native speaker of Basque and Spanish. We talk about how Itxaso grew up learning Basque at school and from her parents, who'd learned it as adults as part of the Basque language revitalization movement, and how studying linguistics gave her names for her linguistic experiences and made her realize she wasn't alone. We also talk about a paper Itxaso wrote with several other multilingual linguists about how academia needs to stop searching for "unicorn language users", aka users of minoritized languages who perfectly match a monolingual majority control group. Plus: Basque language revitalization through punk rock, reggaeton, and more music recs! (Links to songs in shownotes.)

Click here for a link to this episode in your podcast player of choice or read the transcript here.

Announcements:

Thank you to everyone who helped share Lingthusiasm with a friend or on social media for our seventh anniversary! We appreciate your support so much, and it was great to see what you love about Lingthusiasm and which episodes you chose to share. If you'd like to share more of your thoughts on Lingthusiasm, take our 2023 Listener Survey! This is our chance to learn about your linguistic interests, and for you to have fun doing a new set of linguistic experiments. If you did the survey last year, the experiment questions are different this year, so feel free to take it again! You can hear about the results of last year’s survey in a bonus episode and we’ll be sharing the results of the new experiments next year. Take the survey here until December 15th 2023. In this month’s bonus episode, Gretchen and Lauren get enthusiastic about giving advice by answering your linguistics questions! Join us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80 other bonus episodes, including our 2022 survey results episode, and an eventual future episode discussing the results of our 2023 survey.

Here are the links mentioned in the episode:

Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez's website

Basque at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign blog (posts in Basque and English)

'Bilingualism with minority languages: Why searching for unicorn language users does not move us forward' by Evelina Leivada, Itxaso Rodríguez-Ordóñez3, M. Carmen Parafita Couto, and Sílvia Perpiñán

Basque music recommendations from Itxaso:

Berri Txarrak 'Libre' on YouTube. This band, mentioned by Itxaso in the episode, was huge in the 90s and 2000s. This song was a big hit, and it is very philosophical about topics also related to Basque politics. This one discusses 'Freedom'.

Su Ta Gar 'Mari' on YouTube. This band was huge during the 80s, 90s, and 2000s, and key to the revitalization processes - at least for the younger generation that wanted to see themselves as young 'rebels'. 

Gatibu 'Aske Maitte' on YouTube. This band is from Gernika, they became active in 2000s and are one of the leading bands in Basque Country today. Their topics continued with the general theme of freedom, but also tackle lots of issues of feminism in a softer rock way.

Zetak 'Hitzeman' on YouTube. The band has become a biiiig hit in the Basque Country in the past few years. Super romantic and fun.

You can listen to this episode via Lingthusiasm.com, Soundcloud, RSS, Apple Podcasts/iTunes, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcasts. You can also download an mp3 via the Soundcloud page for offline listening.

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Lingthusiasm is on Bluesky, Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Mastodon, and Tumblr. Email us at contact [at] lingthusiasm [dot] com

Gretchen is on Bluesky as @GretchenMcC and blogs at All Things Linguistic.

Lauren is on Bluesky as @superlinguo and blogs at Superlinguo.

Lingthusiasm is created by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our senior producer is Claire Gawne, our production editor is Sarah Dopierala, our production assistant is Martha Tsutsui Billins, and our editorial assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is ‘Ancient City’ by The Triangles.

This episode of Lingthusiasm is made available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike license (CC 4.0 BY-NC-SA).

[ravenlesslangblr]

Hi! Do you have any tips for getting the most out of immersion? Do you have any suggestions on how to utilise input to learn a language?

Hello, I’m so sorry! I only saw the ask now and I don’t recall receiving it at all. I must be very late! I am all about the immersion! To me at least, it is the most important aspect of language acquisition. Most of what I do to learn languages is that as soon as I can somewhat comprehend texts and spoken word, I just learn from that and study vocab or grammar from whatever I encounter. I think my biggest tip that I have here from my own experience is - please do not just focus on learner oriented materials. They’re great and all, nothing against them. But I also feel like they are often very simplified to the point when they’re not as useful, especially when their helpfulness relies on translation into your first language. Now don’t get me wrong, I can imagine that it works for someone. But personally, I cannot remember learning anything from a bilingual book that had text on one side and translation on the other. However, if I spend half an hour reading one official news paragraph in a target language I barely know, I usually learn so much more. Also I think this one might be easier for me to say than to do for others (based on my experiences and others’ experiences), but in general, try not to translate as much as you can. And if you have to, it should be just a word or a phrase, never the entire sentence. Or, this is something that I tend to do if I have to translate a word - I use my other target languages.  Another tip I have is especially good for audio/video stuff - just play it and watch it/listen to it. The radio is probably the best for this since you can just have it on in the background. You do not have to understand, you do not have to be immediately able to pick up the meaning/sentences, but every now and then, you’ll catch a word that you do understand. And I do believe that even if you don’t understand, your brain is still able to listen and analyse and remember. I don’t really know about the science behind it or if anybody has researched it, but I have a personal story and while I would not swear by it, having radio on in the background in a foreign language never hurt anybody.  And last thing - a method I have read about, but only tried a little bit - shadowing. You put something on and repeat whatever is said. (This is definitely better for when you’re about beyond B1 CEFR, when you are able to understand full sentences, subtitles should be fine too). More info about this here

There are just some tips I could think of off the top of my head. If you have more, feel free to add. Also, if you have any questions about any of these, let me know! Similarly, if you want more details, e.g. how I use these for my own language learning, also feel free to ask :)  lol I’m always so surprised to see how much I have to say! :D 

[jeannereames]

Why Students of Color Don’t Take Latin

Dispatches From The Front Lines

Really excellent analysis and suggestions. If you are thinking about teaching Latin in high school/other, or Greek, this explains why so many Greek and Latin programs have both institutionalized racism AND classicism.

[nootrlept]

25 English Business Idioms YOU MUST KNOW!

[lingthusiasm]

One of the really nifty things about stories is how they can explore striking and unexpected ways that communication could be different from what we're used to, whether that's communicating with alien life forms or across space and cultures.  

In this bonus episode, Lauren and Gretchen get enthusiastic about some of the linguistically interesting fiction we've been reading lately! We talk about the challenges of communicating with sentient plants (from the plant's perspective) in Semiosis by Sue Burke, communicating with aliens by putting babies in pods (look, it was the 1980s) in Suzette Haden Elgin's classic Native Tongue, communicating with humans on a sailing ship using a sorta 19th century proto-internet in Courtney Milan's The Devil Comes Courting, and taking advantage of the difficulty of translation in communicating poetry across cultures in A Memory Called Empire by Arkady Martine.  

Warning: this episode may make you want to read some books! We don't spoil major plot points, but we do discuss setup premises and tiny worldbuilding details; if you're someone who likes to go into a book wholly ignorant, check out the books before listening!

Listen to the quirky communication in lingfic episode, and get access to 53 more bonus episodes by supporting Lingthusiasm on Patreon.

[sangriastainedlips2]

Trying to Learn Langauges

Trying to Learn Langauges

My Languages Learning languages is hard especially when you’ve been monolingual most of your life. I’m the typical American that didn’t start learning languages until middle school.  I didn’t take the class seriously at all. So right now I´m a B1 level Spanish learner and I´m also using a phone app to learn some Tagalog before I go to the Philippines.   I have taken psycholingustic classes,…

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[aimlesstangents-blog-blog]

Genie (Secret of the Wild Child)

[thewriterscaravan]

But let’s back up a little. There’s one point that everyone agrees upon: our species exhibits a clear biological preparedness for language. Our brains really are ‘language-ready’ in the following limited sense: they have the right sort of working memory to process sentence-level syntax, and an unusually large prefrontal cortex that gives us the associative learning capacity to use symbols in the first place. Then again, our bodies are language-ready too: our larynx is set low relative to that of other hominid species, letting us expel and control the passage of air. And the position of the tiny hyoid bone in our jaws gives us fine muscular control over our mouths and tongues, enabling us to make as the 144 distinct speech sounds heard in some languages. No one denies that these things are thoroughly innate, or that they are important to language.

What is in dispute is the claim that knowledge of language itself – the language software – is something that each human child is born with. Chomsky’s idea is this: just as we grow distinctive human organs – hearts, brains, kidneys and livers – so we grow language in the mind, which Chomsky likens to a ‘language organ’. This organ begins to emerge early in infancy. It contains a blueprint for all the possible sets of grammar rules in all the world’s languages. And so it is child’s play to pick up any naturally occurring human language. A child born in Tokyo learns to speak Japanese while one born in London picks up English, and on the surface these languages look very different. But underneath, they are essentially the same, running on a common grammatical operating system. The Canadian cognitive scientist Steven Pinker has dubbed this capacity our ‘language instinct’.

There are two basic arguments for the existence of this language instinct. The first is the problem of poor teachers. As Chomsky pointed out in 1965, children seem to pick up their mother tongue without much explicit instruction. When they say: ‘Daddy, look at the sheeps,’ or ‘Mummy crossed [ie, is cross with] me,’ their parents don’t correct their mangled grammar, they just marvel at how cute they are. Furthermore, such seemingly elementary errors conceal amazing grammatical accomplishments. Somehow, the child understands that there is a lexical class – nouns – that can be singular or plural, andthat this distinction doesn’t apply to other lexical classes.

This sort of knowledge is not explicitly taught; most parents don’t have any explicit grammar training themselves. And it’s hard to see how children could work out the rules just by listening closely: it seems fundamental to grasping how a language works. To know that there are nouns, which can be pluralised, and which are distinct from, say, verbs, is where the idea of a language instinct really earns its keep. Children don’t have to figure out everything from scratch: certain basic distinctions come for free.

From "There is no language instinct", published in Aeon Magazine;