Mengting H.
Hi trilinguals,
As a bilingual person who can speak two languages (English and Mandarin) quite well in Montreal, I am very jealous of you who can also communicate fluently in French. I have lost many study/job opportunities, since I am not qualified enough in French, or sometimes even in English. Sometimes, I wonder how much better my life in Montreal will be if my French can also be native-like.
Continue reading “A letter to fluent trilinguals”HS
According to Tani (2005), One of the most visible differences that Asian students bring to class is a low level of in-class participation. Lei (2003) also reveals a stereotype in the USA that there was a prevailing image of black girls as “loud” and “visible” and Southeast Asian male students as “quiet” and “inconspicuous”. It is not hard to notice that most Asian students in our classroom are also quiet and reluctant to express our thoughts unless we are called to. At the same time, we are talkative outside the lecture time and during small group discussions. What are the reasons?
Continue reading “The Quiet Group”By Anonymous (EW)
There was an interesting article by Ravindranath (2015) about language contact that we read this semester. According to this article (which is backed up by research of course), languages in contact don’t always necessarily change each other. Languages also evolve internally over time, and if contact does cause a change in the languages, it may be hard to tell if it is because of the amount of time the languages have been in contact or the similarities between them. The article examined many social and linguistic factors to examine to determine whether a change is due to internal evolution or contact with other languages. It ends with a discussion of how globalization is both creating new multilingualisms and at the same time resulting in massive language extinction which has implications for culture and society at large.
This was a good article to preclude the other reading that was assigned for that week about Facebook as a platform for Mayan language revitalization in Mexico by Cru (2015). Youth are using Facebook as a platform for a grassroots movement for the advocacy, destigmatization, and promotion of their ancestral languages while developing multilingual literacy skills that draw on their full repertoire of linguistic resources. It is a resource that adolescents perceive as cool during a critical period of personal language choice, it has the potential to create an ideological shift by reaching a wide audience via the worldwide web, and it is part of the young people’s process of social identity formation. I found this article fascinating, because I have been interested in Indigenous language revitalization since the start of my master’s program at McGill, and because I love the internet… almost too much. The amount of time I spend on it is a bit alarming, even to myself, and YouTube is my greatest weakness.
Continue reading “Indigenous Language Revitalization and the Internet”by: anonymous
One of the articles I found most compelling this semester was the Allen (2006) piece about immigrant student integration in schools in Quebec. In this study the researcher observed and interviewed five students in the accueil program who were over the age of sixteen, eager to complete their secondary studies like their peers in their home countries, and barred from mainstream classes in their second year in Quebec because of their “inadequate” French. These students expressed feelings of discouragement, depression, anxiety, and disappointment. Because they were delayed and held back, many of the students viewed French as a barrier to learning rather than an academic tool for success. What I found the most heartbreaking was a Korean girl’s descriptions of her feelings of failure, blaming herself for her circumstances, and not feeling smart like she had in her home country (Allen, 2006).
Continue reading “language is a tool not a status symbol”Ana
Last year, one of my professors – that I am going to call Rosseforp* – apologized in class because they would not have a potluck party on the last day of class like one other professor was going to do. On the day of the party of this other professor, as the whole department had been invited, Rosseforp showed up. I approached them and said “You should ‘borrow’ this party”, and they promptly answered “It’s not ‘to borrow a party’, the correct expression is ‘to crash a party’”, and went away, leaving me with my mouth open, ready to answer that that was not what I meant. I was trying to suggest to Rosseforp that they should “use” the party as if it was their own (thanking people for coming, for example) because most students were in both classes anyway. Isn’t that what the word “borrow” means? We certainly use it more often with concrete objects, as in “borrow a pen”. But it can also be used figuratively, as in “borrow a word from another language” or “borrow an idea”. However, I guess, being a non-native speaker, any deviation from the standard or “acceptable” language (as usually decided by whomever is the self-proclaimed language expert available in the area) will be regarded as a mistake and there will be no attempts to recognize any possible intentional meaning behind the words chosen.
Continue reading “Cansada”By Anonymous
For the week where we read about linguistic differences between age groups and generations, we did an activity in class where we talked to a partner about the way we used to speak when we were teenagers. In this activity I talked to my partner who happens to speak Spanish as a first language about how people in my age group used to use Spanish words and phrases, because we thought it made us look cool or funny. Sometimes the Spanish words and phrases were real and sometimes they were not. Then the more I thought about it the more I realized that many age groups in the United States do this, not just teenagers, and it is very common in the popular media. Towards the end of the semester when I was trying to figure out my topic for my final project I was talking to Professor Sarkar about this aforementioned linguistic phenomena, and she told me it’s called mock Spanish and referred me to a good article by Jane Hill (1998) that explains why this is linguistic racism.
This article was enlightening. I learned of a term I had never previously heard of before: linguistic appropriation. This happens when hispanophones who speak Spanglish in public are called impolite, harsh English-only policies are created to restrict their language use, and their accents are criticized whether they truly have a Spanish accent or not, while simultaneously anglophones borrow from Spanish, speak with heavy accents, and carelessly use the language incorrectly without reproach. It is clearly a case of linguistic inequality, in addition to making a mockery of the language and culture and trivializing hispanophones’ contributions to American culture (Hill, 1998).
Continue reading “Translanguaging for linguistic equality”Dantong
American historian and feminist theorist Joan Scott (1994) proposed that the analysis of language provides a starting point for understanding how social relations are conceived and how collective identity is established. French feminists also argue that language, signs, and symbols are keys to understanding gender construction (Kristeva, Jardine, & Blake, 1981; Cixous & Kuhn, 1981 ), English and American feminist linguists have discussed the substance of the English language as literally man made and under male control (Spender & Bardin, 1985; Penelope, 1990). As for Chinese, the analysis of Chinese characters and idioms can provide the context for understanding the historical construction of gender roles, and the ideas that inform the oppression of women in ancient Chinese society. I will give some specific examples in Chinese to further illustrate it.
The ancient Chinese character for female (女, this is the simplified Chinese character for female) consists of a pictographic representation of a person kneeling with hands folded, a pose seen as a form of submission.
by Zahra Zamani
During the recent decades, Canada has gained an international reputation as the instigator of multiculturalism and a pioneer in immigration and refugee intake in the world. The questions that arise because of the great number of intakes are: to what extent Canada has been successful in integration of these refugees in the society, and if the Canadian government established the practices for their integration in Canadian society.
Since education is a factor that has the capacity to encourage development in individuals through evoking talents and giving awareness which lead to empowering people, it can be a good framework for including refugees in host countries. In this respect, investing in education can be a fast way a country maintains to promote refugees’ economic and social welfare. Moreover, at the individual level, success in education mostly leads to employment success and financial stability in life. Thus, educational accommodations can prepare the ground for better integration of the refugees, and their doing well in schools can bring about their future economic success.
Continue reading “Educational Policies and Refugees’ Integration in Canadian Society”Lauren Schellenberg
I was listening to episode 32 of Slate’s Lexicon Valley on which linguist John McWhorter was talking about how much he hated the word veggies. That’s an odd word to hate, I thought. It seems pretty innocuous. So I got to thinking about the words that I hate. There are many of them, but I always have a good reason:
Some for misogyny – hysterical
Some for cacophony – bucolic
Some for imagery – pustule
Some for pedantry – copacetic
And some for solecism – irregardless
As I was congratulating myself on how very logical I was in my loathing of certain words, it struck me that I hate the word Legos.
Legos.
With an s.
Continue reading “I haaaaate it”Chris
There’s a new show on Netflix called “Huge in France”, starring French comedian Gad Elmaleh. In the show, he plays a version of himself in which the premise has him moving from Paris to LA, to be closer to his son. The prolific funny man is immediately a fish out of water, as he is relegated to use a language he is more or less comfortable with. His English is good, as he can communicate what he wants, but when it comes to comedy, his character is simply unable to get any laughs. He tries his stuff at a local open mic night (inside a bowling alley), only to bomb miserably; this is from a guy who sells out stadiums in his native France. Afterwards he tells his friend, “I’m just not funny in English”. I wanted to contrast this scenario with a podcast I was listening to, which was promoting an upcoming Netflix special about a comedy gala featuring around 50 comedians from across the globe. The hosts of the podcast mentioned that many of the routines would be done in foreign languages, so people would have to read subtitles. This made me think about Gad, and his inability to be funny in English, yet these comedians had no problem being funny through subtitles. One of the comedians on the podcast said that the subtitles would obviously not capture everything about the performance because comedy is a subtle art, but that didn’t really matter because comedy was ultimately a written work and therefore should be funny on paper. He adds that “there are nuances and vocal inflexions that sometimes push a joke over but for the most part it should be funny on paper if it’s funny spoken.” So for the life of me, I couldn’t understand how Gad Elmaleh couldn’t be funny in English, at least not enough to make a few hillbillies at a bowling alley chuckle. I did a little research and found an article from the Language and Linguistic Compass journal (2009) which characterizes several semantic and pragmatic types of verbal humour. Going through it I realized that Gad’s comedy isn’t predicated at telling “jokes” (with a traditional build-up and punch line) but revolves around what the author calls “conversational humour” (Dynel, 2009). Gad tells stories, which Dynel calls “shaggy dog stories”, which are “lengthy stories without punchlines” (Dynel, 2009). These stories aren’t particularly funny, but hinge on the way Gad tells the story. He does so by weaving language into a rich tapestry and by doing a variety of exaggerated impersonations. In doing so, he also involves the crowd, and kind of feeds off them in what the author calls “spontaneous interactional humour” (Dynel, 2009). I would be very surprised if he ever told a story in his routine the same way twice. His mastery of the French language is very impressive and I can see how his routine cannot be replicated in English. Since his routine goes way beyond telling jokes to invoke humour, it is evident that he would need to be armed with a rich knowledge of the language.
References
Dynel, Marta (2009). Types of Conversational Humour. Language and Linguistics Compass, 3 (5), 1284-1299.
