Now, I say dubiously scientific here because I’ve always been suspicious of this whole “expatriate” idea. Not to mention its cutesy shortened form, “expat”. What makes an expat an expat, rather than an immigrant (or shall we say, to make it equallly cute, an “immy”)? HSBC did not set out to define, among the 2,155 persons they surveyed, what an “expatriate” was other than “an individual who relocates to another country”.

In the meanwhile, it seems that anxiety about “relocating” types in Germany has begun to simmer a bit. There have been rumblings of adding an article to the constitution simply stating that the language of Germany is German.

According to the Independent, this is due to worries about the encroachment of “Denglish” – the English peppered mishmash that has brought Handy, downloaden and babysitten into the language. On the other hand, another motivation for the legal move may be to buffer the inferiority complex that comes with the disparagement of the language by the rest of the world, starting with – to be rather scientific about it – comedienne Tina Fey, who in a recent Vanity Fair article called German “so uncool”.

(via Omniglot)

]]> http://blog.babbel.com/liebe-deutsche-liebes-denglish-germany-named-love-destination-for-expats/feed/ 0 http://blog.babbel.com/lack-of-language-a-security-risk/ http://blog.babbel.com/lack-of-language-a-security-risk/#comments Fri, 12 Dec 2008 10:50:53 +0000 Lorenz http://blog.babbel.com/?p=519

More then 200 Million high school students in China study English while about 25,000 of their U.S. counterparts study Chinese language according to a Report from a Northwestern University graduate journalism student. It is not only  global competition in economic terms which suffers under the unwillingness of more then the half of US high school students to learn a foreign language – but, according to some,  it’s also a national security risk. A language professor was cited as saying: “As the U.S. helps piece together the recent terrorist attacks in Mumbai, India, the former intelligence agent said he suspects there will be a greater need for Urdu, spoken in Pakistan; Hindi, spoken in India; and possibly Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan or Dari, spoken in eastern Iran and western Afghanistan.”

The Marines, at least, are taking language learning from a security point of view: Working together with the monolith of language learning software – Rosetta Stone – which won a $1.2 million contract for courses, the soldiers can learn about 30 languages in 150-200 hour courses through the MarineNet distant learning portal.

Apparently there are people who lack any alphabet for their spoken language. You find such groups for example on some of the 10.000 islands of Indonesia – that’s what linguists from South Korea are reporting. But these minorities are ready to embrace “Hunminjeonguem” -nowdays called “Hangeul” – the Korean alphabet, researchers found out.

The aphabet was invented some hundred years ago as an alternative to the rather complex Chinese characters. Hangeul (or Hangul) is well known for its logical design: It has 24 letters – ten vowels and 14 consonants — and is capable of expressing 11,000 different sounds.

Since last year, another group of Korean linguists has been working together with ethnic minorities in Yunnan, China, to preserve their cultural heritage: They speak with eldery tribe members, “walking museums” and try to develop a custom Hangeul writing system to record it all. Some of the minority groups in Yunnan lost their language altogether, adopting Mandarin or other ethnic languages.

(via Omniglot)

I’m willing to wager that even those who’ve been speaking English their whole lives couldn’t tell you with confidence what a bogey or a mulligan is. Sports vocabulary has always constituted something of a rarefied language. I mean, words like scrimmage, sack or blitz have got to sound like Greek to the unintiated. Yet the LPGA (the US-based Ladies Professional Golf Association) recently took an iron swing at the rest of the world — and female golfers from Asia and Latin America in particular — when it attempted to implement a mandatory basic English language oral test for all of its members, failure of which would have meant suspension of playing privileges.