The 2010 FIFA World Cup is just around the corner, starting June 11 and ending July 11. Beyond the hype over which team is favored to win (it seems that almost everyone has a different prediction—Spain, England, Brazil—), it is impossible not to recognize the congregation of languages that will occur during that one month. Like the Olympics, the World Cup brings extremely diverse countries together (thirty-two in total for the games, tens more, of course, as spectators) and facilitates the friendly, if not heated, competition between them. With thirty-two countries represented, eighteen official languages are shared from English to Spanish to Korean, but tens of various dialects enter the mix as well: Riverense Portuñol spoken in Uruguay or Algerian Arabic spoken, obviously, in Algeria.

In addition to the languages spoken by the teams and spectators, the languages of the host country also require special consideration. This year’s World Cup is being hosted by South Africa, a country that recognizes eleven official languages in its constitution and is home to a host of other dialects as well. The eleven official languages are as follows: Afrikaans, English, IsiNdebele, IsiXhosa, IsiZulu, Northern Sotho, Sesotho, Setswana, SiSwati, Tshivenda, and Xitsonga. Other languages spoken in South Africa and mentioned in the constitution, though not official, include Kho, Nama, San, sign language, Arabic, German, Greek, Gujarati, Hebrew, Hindi, Portuguese, Sanskrit, Tamil, Telegu, and Urdu. The indigenous creoles and pidgins like Tsotsi taal and Fanagalo vary the language mix even more. While these languages are not recognized or considered in the constitution, they are used by various language groups to communicate in the urban environment.

In today’s global economy, it is easy to assume that English would be the lingua franca of South Africa—a globally common language that would enable a linguistically diverse population to communicate. While English is popular, representing a total of 8.2% of the population (according to the dated 2001 census), it lags behind IsiZulu (23.8%), IsiXhosa (17.6%), Afrikaans (13.3%), and Northern Sotho (9.4%). Setswana actually ties with English at 8.2%. English might be used for business communication, but, as the fifth most popular language, it obviously doesn’t hold a prominent position compared to South Africa’s more indigenous and other colonized tongues.

Given the diversity and distribution of languages in the country, it is useful to consider the four most popular South African languages ahead of English, especially in regards to the World Cup. Different Cup matches will take place in stadiums across the country—Bloemfontein, Cape Town, Durban, Johannesburg, Kimberley, Nelspruit, Orkney, Polokwane, Port Elizabeth, Pretoria, and Rustenburg. These cities are located all over South Africa and since the country’s official languages tend to be centered in specific geographic locations, a brief history and explanation of the languages help ground the matches in their cultural-linguistic spaces.

IsiZulu

IsiZulu, the most popular language in South Africa, is the language of the Zulu people, South Africa’s largest ethnic group. It is a tonal language and is grouped in the Nguni language group along with IsiXhosa, SiSwati, and IsiNdebele. While the language is spoken across the country, it is most concentrated in the province of KwaZulu-Natal. A spoken language until the mid-nineteenth century, the written language developed after Christian missionaries first translated the Bible into IsiZulu in 1883. The first work of IsiZulu literature translated was Thomas Mofolo’s Chaka, which appeared in 1910 and was published in 1925.

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Simon Critchley wrote an interesting commentary for the New York Times on Sunday, May 16, 2010, titled What is a Philosopher? He opens the article by stating the obvious—“There are as many definitions of philosophy as there are philosophers – perhaps there are even more”—and then follows a round-about, but highly informative history of Greek philosophy. While a simple etymology of philosopher can come in handy—hailing to us in English from the Anglo-Norman and Middle French “philosophe” + the “er” suffix which comes from the Latin “philosophus” to mean “an authority of ancient learning”—I think Critchley’s historical grounding of the word and the profession gives us more flavor than the knowledge that philosophy is “study or pursuit of wisdom, philosophical thought, particular philosophical system or school of philosophy, view of life, attitude,” as evidenced by the classical Latin “philosophia” and Greek φιλοσοφία, meaning, literally, the “love of wisdom.”

In opening, Critchley references Plato’s dialogue “Theaetetus,” suggesting that a philosopher is someone who looks “at the sky” or at things not grounded on/in earth and in doing so is unaware of the things at his feet (as Thales was when he was so intent on looking at the stars that he fell into a well). The philosopher, thus, is a joke. He adds that there are many layers in this water metaphor—one being that the water is Thales’ philosophers stone and that he therefore fell into his own philosophy.

Another aspect of the philosopher, though, is time—the ability to have time, to take time. In differentiating between the philosopher and the lawyer (the pettifogger), Socrates tells Theodorus that they are, indeed, at leisure. According to Critchley,

Socrates says that those in the constant press of business, like lawyers, policy-makers, mortgage brokers and hedge fund managers, become ‘bent and stunted’ and they are compelled ‘to do crooked things.’ The pettifogger is undoubtedly successful, wealthy and extraordinarily honey-tongued, but, Socrates adds, ’small in his soul and shrewd and a shyster.’ The philosopher, by contrast, is free by virtue of his or her otherworldliness, by their capacity to fall into wells and appear silly.

Further, the philosopher, according to Socrates, is unconcerned with the things of the polis—his body dwells within the city walls, but his thoughts are elsewhere. Ironically, of course, Crtichley reminds us that Socrates literally ran out of time in the courts and was sentenced to death, his words remaining only through the lens of Plato. So time is of the essence and is constantly in opposition to the philosopher—best friend and worst enemy.

Critchley goes on to expound on the philosopher’s role as a gadfly and as a dissenter against the gods, for “nothing is more common in the history of philosophy than the accusation of impiety.” In this way, he proposes, “perhaps the last laugh is with the philosopher;” perhaps what society finds so uncanny and dissenting in philosophy is really what is needed—after all, isn’t this why we study ancient philosophy to this day?

With warmer weather comes an increase in outdoor activities—swimming, running, and biking, just to name a few. Although the Boston Marathon was held last month, many of the other big ones lie ahead—Chicago, New York, and Leadville—and the season has just started for triathlons and major cycling events. Given the world-wide popularity of these sports, it’s not surprising that many of them have international roots.

Here’s a behind-the-language guide to some of your favorite summer sports, and maybe next time when you’re at mile twenty of a marathon or one-third of the way through a triathlon, these histories will give you something to think about and get your mind off the grueling journey.

Marathon

A marathon is a long distance foot race with an official distance of 42.195 km or 26.2 miles. The name is rooted in the legend of Pheidippides, a Greek messenger, who in the fall of 490 BCE was sent from the battlefield of Marathon to Athens to announce the defeat of the Persians in the Battle of Marathon. Interestingly, he was forced to run the route as a messenger after he spent days fighting in the battle. Apparently his commanding officers thought highly of his athletic ability. He managed to run the entire way without stopping until he burst into the assembly and cried out “We have won,” and then collapsed, dead.

While the historical accuracy of the legend is questionable, the name stuck for the race which was developed for the 1896 first modern Olympic Games in Athens. A male-only race, the first winner was Spiridon “Spiros” Louis, a Greek water-carrier, and he won with a time of only 2 hours, 58 minutes, and 50 seconds. It wasn’t until 1984 that the women’s marathon was introduced to the Olympic Games and it was won by Joan Benoit of the U.S. with a time of 2 hours, 24 minutes and 52 seconds. Outside of the Olympics, over 500 marathons are organized worldwide with the most prestigious races being the Boston, New York City, Chicago, London, and Berlin races.

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On April 20, when the Deepwater Horizon Transocean-BP oil rig exploded, killing eleven workers and, two days later, sinking completely into the Gulf of Mexico, everyone knew that the damage was going to be immense—but no one knew it would be quite as far-spreading as it now appears. The Deepwater Horizon was an ultra-deepwater rig which, in September 2009, drilled the deepest oil well in history with a vertical depth of 35,050 and a measured depth of 35,055 feet (with just over 4,000 feet of the depth in water) in the Tiber oilfield. At the time of the explosion, the rig was located in the Mississippi Canyon area, forty miles offshore from Louisiana with an estimated water depth at 5,000 feet, just a few feet short of one mile. At the leak rate of 5,000 barrels (210,000 gallons) per day, the Deepwater Horizon spill is slated to become the worst environmental catastrophe in over a decade—perhaps surpassing even the Exxon-Valdez spill in 1989.

Cofferdam

The magnitude of the spill is due to many factors, one of the main ones, of course, being the failure of BP—the company leasing the rig from Transocean—to successfully implement the emergency plans. The initial attempt to lower a gigantic containment dome known as a “cofferdam” on top of the largest leaking area on the seabed failed this weekend (it had never been attempted before at such depths), leaving BP rushing for a new plan. And each plan isn’t without its own industry slang.

Top Hat

Plan B for BP is known as the “top hat”—a containment box that will be placed over the smaller of the two leaks. The top hat would limit the amount of water exposed to the leak and thus, hopefully, bypass the dangerous formation of ice-like hydrates which clogged the containment dome’s pipes and made the dome buoyant. While the top hat isn’t the end-all-be-all solution for the spill, it would help to check the unfettered leak taking over the Gulf.

Top Kill

Another idea is called a “top kill” which involves shooting mud and concrete directly into the reconfigured blowout preventer—the device that failed during the April 22 explosion. If it works, the top kill will plug up the leak, preventing the oil from reaching the ocean, but it could take several weeks before it is effective.

Junk Shot

One of the stranger solutions is the “junk shot” where tires and golf balls and shredded rope are literally shot into the blowout preventer to clog it. Like the top kill, however, BP would not be able to utilize the junk shot for two or three weeks, and, like all containment efforts, it has never been performed at such depths—the possible success of the junk shot is unknown.

Until the leak is completely capped, there is no way to know the damage that will occur to the Gulf coast. Already, tar balls, pieces of emulsified oil, have washed up on Dauphin Island, Alabama, and several birds have died due to the oil slick—not to mention the economic effect of the diminished fishing industry. For the moment we can only hope that one of the strangely coined secondary plans works.

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Photo by Pan-African News Wire

For the last 30 years, ALTA has provided language training to corporate clients and government agents whose relocation to foreign countries requires them to achieve high levels of proficiency in a new language. High proficiency includes the ability to communicate in an advanced way with native speakers of the new language — a range of people from professionals who use specialized terminology, to everyday people encountered while navigating a new culture: grocers, neighbors, taxi drivers, lawyers, and doctors. Our experience has taught us a lot about language acquisition: the best methods, how long it takes to become fluent, the most helpful exercises, and the importance of going beyond words to learn the nuances of the culture.

If you’ve decided to learn a new language but don’t know where to start, here are five tips that will get you going in the right direction.

1. Self-guided Programs versus Instructor-led Programs

Our experience has taught us that the best way to acquire a new language is through personal customized training led by a professional instructor who is a native speaker of the target language.

There are also many self-guided language programs that may be a good place to start for individuals with zero knowledge of the new language. These resources are unlikely to guide learners beyond basic proficiency levels — greetings, basic requests, and so forth, but many of them do provide good introductions to the new language, and a bit of a foundation before starting intensive training. Self guided options include mp3/cd and book based courses by the Foreign Service Institute and, for free, the Massachusets Institute of Technology’s Open Courseware, a collection of activities, notes, and audio/video lectures.

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Over the past few decades, the United States has seen a steady increase in college enrollment. With higher education readily accessible to more and more people—from 1987-1997 college enrollment increased by 26%, and, from 1997-2007, college enrollment increased by an additional 18%–the ability to learn a second or third language is available to a broader audience. Given that in order to graduate from most higher education institutions a student must take at least two introductory semesters of a foreign language, and that, for many jobs, the ability to know certain languages is an asset, the percentage of students enrolling in both introductory and advanced foreign language courses has skyrocketed over the past twenty years. With that increase, there’s been a decided shift from some languages to others, but overall, the number of foreign language learners has steadily increased.

While the data from the Modern Language Association (MLA)’s 2006 study, “Enrollments in Languages Other Than English in the United States Institutions of Higher Education” is a few years old, there is still much to be gleaned from the report’s findings. From 2002-2006, the number of foreign language learners, in languages other than Greek and Latin, increased by 175,734 students, or 12.9%. Interestingly enough, during that same time period, college enrollment dropped by 48,000 students, according to the Digest of Education Statistics. So while postsecondary enrollment has increased since 1960, when the MLA began its analysis, in recent years the number of students enrolled in foreign language classes has increased while college enrollment has fluctuated by 50,000 students or so.

But what does this say about enrollment in specific languages—are certain languages like Spanish and Arabic more popular now than before?

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One decade in to the 21st century and we’re already starting to look for concrete trends that actually hold water. While fashion and the housing market and car design are mutable, where does language fit into the picture—and how will English impact global society? In a recent UK Guardian blog post, Robert McCrum, author of Globish: How the English Language Became the World’s Language, forthcoming from Penguin, argues that Globish, a form of simplified, non-grammatical English, will become the lingua franca of the 21st century.

Coined by Jean-Paul Nerriere, a French-speaking retired IBM executive, Globish refers to a non-standard English, a simplified form of English that could be spoken by anyone—Chinese, Indian, American, etc.—with a limited vocabulary of some 1,500 words. McCrum, in turn, argues that Globish, as an extremely viable and viral linguistic tool, is concerned with “the way in which Indians, Chinese and many Africans are now turning to English as a liberating and modernising phenomenon,” and how, as a linguistic force, it “begins to identify the viral nature of this lingua franca, the qualities of the English language and its culture that make it so contagious, adaptable, populist and even subversive.”

While I have nothing to argue with the idea of Globish as a linguistic force in the marketplace—as a way in which businesses can communicate with others in a universal tongue—I wonder how viable Globish is in a non-business setting. In terms of medical, scientific, literary, etc. communication, Globish seems limited. In breaking from the autonomous rule of standard languages, Globish does allow for broader communication. But within that broader communication, nuances are lost. McCrum elevates the idea of cross-cultural connections—“Globish analyses Twitter, Iran’s green revolution and Slumdog Millionaire, and places them all in a new context: a Globish-speaking society”—but one has to wonder what culture will be lost in the translation, or what role literacy plays in the transfer from standard language to the non-standard Globish.

Can Globish address both business and cultural concerns, or is it pigeonholed to economic forces? Be on the look-out for McCrum’s book in May—perhaps it will give us some answers, or at least a few more ideas on economic-cultural linguistics.

It’s hard not to have fun when newspapers roll out with brand new words like the 2008 recessionista , the “style maven with a budget,” or, more recently, the femivore, a stay-at-home mother who finds empowerment through feeding her family organic and locally sourced food. The latest neologism is hegan.

This week, the Boston Globe reports on the growing (or, at least, potentially growing) sector of middle-aged male vegans in the article, Men Leave Their Own Mark on Veganism . The piece explores the relationship several middle-aged men have to food and posits that while the idea of veganism is usually associated with twenty- or thirty-somethings (mostly women), there are more vegans that you think. The term vegan was coined by Donald Watson in 1944 as a term to limit the broader term of vegetarian:

Veganism is a way of living which excludes all forms of exploitation of, and cruelty to, the animal kingdom, and includes a reverence for life. It applies to the practice of living on the products of the plant kingdom to the exclusion of flesh, fish, fowl, eggs, honey, animal milk and its derivatives, and encourages the use of alternatives for all commodities derived wholly or in part from animals.”

According to the OED, a vegan is “one who abstains from all food of animal origin. A strict vegetarian,” but this definition leaves room for expansion. Many vegans abstain not just from food of animal origin—the meat itself, eggs, dairy—but also from honey, wool, and leather. Yes, honey—many vegans consider honey production exploitative, that the bees, who can feel pain and who are live animals, are mistreated through the process. Leather and wool, of course, fall into the same category—exploitation of live animals for human consumption.

So that brings us back to the hegans—what are they, anyway? They are men who “in their 40s and 50s embrace a restrictive lifestyle to look better, rectify a gluttonous past, or cheat death” And, according to the Globe, they’re here to stay.

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新年快乐, xīn nián kuài lè, 過年好, guò nián hǎo, or Happy New Year!

Yesterday marked the first day of the Lunar New Year and all around the world people celebrated by feasting, wishing each other peace and prosperity for the year to come, and by setting off firecrackers. As the longest and most important holiday during the Chinese Lunar year, Chinese New Year is celebrated in areas with significant Han Chinese populations (the dominant people group in China, representing 92% of the country’s population) including (but not limited to) Mainland China, Hong Kong, Macau, Singapore, Taiwan, Indonesia, Laos, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. While not an official holiday in Australia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere, significant celebrations occur in the countries’ various Chinatowns and in homes everywhere.

The date of the New Year differs from year to year and is determined by the lunisolar Chinese calendar (the calendar indicates both the lunar phases and the time of the solar year). According to the Gregorian calendar, the new year falls on a date between January 21 and February 20; according to the lunisolar calendar, it occurs during the eleventh month, generally on the second new moon after winter solstice. Each year is marked by an animal of the zodiac—rat (鼠), ox (牛), tiger (虎), rabbit (兔), dragon (龍), snake (蛇), horse (馬), sheep (羊), monkey (猴), rooster (雞), dog (狗), and pig (豬)—along with a ten year cycle of the heavenly stems—the five elements of Chinese astrology: wood, fire, earth, metal, and water. The five stems are alternated yin and yang (yang wood, yin water, yang metal, etc.). This year, 2010, for example, is the yang metal tiger, and it happened to fall on February 14, Valentine’s Day.

Chinese New Year Traditions:

Some of the traditions associated with the New Year holiday include a thorough cleaning of one’s house. The act of sweeping away dust and dirt is believed to sweep away the bad luck of the previous year and readies the home for good luck. Once the broom and dust pan is put away, good luck cannot be swept away. The color red is also associated with the New Year, and many cut out paper symbols of luck and prosperity and decorate their homes with them.

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