Icelandic Language and History

            The Icelandic language has several unique characteristics to it, and these can help us understand about Icelandic culture and how it values its history. The fact that Icelandic has these features actually tells us a lot about just how important preserving the culture is for most Icelanders.

            First of all, Icelandic employs a unique system of adopting foreign words into the language. Instead of just adopting the word straight into the language, they will form a new word out of existing Icelandic words. For example, telephone becomes talsimi, which combines the Icelandic word tal for talk, and simi which means thread. Thus, talsimi, or talking thread.

            Because of this system, Icelandic has not changed very much, even over hundreds of years. People who speak Icelandic today can still read Old Norse sagas from hundreds of years ago. This aspect of the language shows us just how much Icelanders value their history and traditional culture.

            For many Icelanders, their traditional language is a very important part of their history and culture. If they change their language, they feel that they will lose their heritage. This has led to an intensifying of the preservation of Icelandic in everyday life. Unfortunately, the rise of globalization and the spread of languages like English threaten the continued preservation of the language.

            If Icelandic does become extinct or less prevalent, it will be interesting to see whether or not the history and culture is destroyed as well. If they are so tightly bound together, it seems that losing the one would cause the other to be lost as well.

Bibliography

Cox, P. (2015, June 3). Will Icelanders one day ditch their language for English? Retrieved November 11, 2016, from http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-06-02/will-icelanders-one-day-ditch-icelandic-english

Icelandic Language. (1957). The encyclopedia Americana. USA: Americana Corporation.

ICELANDIC LANGUAGE. (2016). Retrieved November 11, 2016, from http://www.nat.is/travelguideeng/icelandic_language.htm

Ísleifsdóttir, B. (2015, August 18). Son and Dóttir. Retrieved November 11, 2016, from             http://icelandreview.com/magazine/2015/08/18/son-and-dottir

Jóhannesson, G. T. (2013). The history of Iceland. Santa Barbara, CA: Greenwood.

Karlsson, G. (2000). The history of Iceland. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.

The Rise and Fall of Languages

Language as we all know is a crucial part of our existence as humans. We use it to communicate directly as well as indirectly through means of speaking, writing, signing, etc. Now as language is essential to life and communication would it surprise you that some languages are dying? It is predicted that by the year 2100 that 90% of the World's languages will disappear and cease to exist (BBC, 2016).

Now if this is the case shouldn’t we be informed or even concerned? Sure the news will cover the multiple wars that have been occurring or all of the violence that happens around us, but why do we not ever cover language? One of the many things I found interesting reading through the multiple articles and readings that Linguistic Anthropology provided was that the extinction of languages is quite common in today’s world. Then following this it seems like most of society doesn’t seems to know or quite frankly care that some languages are disappearing.

Language is one of the many things that make a person, culture, society, etc. unique. So my question is why do we turn a blind eye on languages that desperately needs our help to stay alive? Every language that is lost is a little part of history and culture being lost with it. I understand that some people do recognize this loss in language and culture but for some reason they think they can’t do anything about it. A language should never be abandoned or be seen as a lost hope. If a person should truly care about a language and its importance in this world they should go out and try their best to conserve it. Language is everything for everyone in this world so why give up on it?

Tom Colls, (2016). Retrieved December 1, 2016, from BBC News: http://news.bbc.co.uk/today/hi/today/newsid_8311000/8311069.stm

The Death of the Greek Language and its use of Communication Channels

When meaning is understood there is no more need for words to express them, such an example channel is eye contact. The practice of interacting in close personal space while talking allows for a deeper feeling of connection. When a person lacks these behaviors it can be interpreted as rude (Hagan, 2013). These present forms of communication and channels in Greek represent the ways that it has a unique senses of sender, message, channel, receiver, and the effect. In Greek, the sender has a typical knowledge of how a message will be received. The message itself doesn’t always have to be fully conveyed for the receiver to understand the effect. As fore-mentioned, Hagan states that if the receiver understands the meaning of the message they may interrupt the sender, which may cause a change in the effect of the message. The use of nonverbal communication within Greek such as the use of hand motions or affectionate touching shows that the senders and receivers do not necessarily need words to convey their messages, especially in the region of emotion. However, because the cultural use of nonverbal cues is so significant there can be a lot of information lost when words are not utilized. Hagan mentions that it may be difficult for people from other cultures to pick up on certain messages because of the way they are presented in Greek. The primary example that the author provides is the use of the word no. Many Greek speakers tend to tip their head back when saying no, thus giving the illusion that they are nodding. This can prove confusing if conversing with a non-native speaker, for there is not a universal gesture that is always associated when stating the negative.

The death of a language is an interesting phenomenon, partly because it is seen as an end of a cultural way of life, but also because of the residue that the language leaves behind. Greek has approximately 13 million speakers (Ager, 2016), which means it will not likely to die out in the immediate future. Also, the speakers of Greek live in various parts of the world, including the mainland country of Greece, the surrounding islands, and parts of Italy (Ager, 2016). This diversity of regions means that even if the language was to decline in some areas, it would still persist in others. However, as it is only spoken by 1/538 of the world, which could limit the time frame in which it dies. If Greek were to die out in one thousand years, the remnants of the language would still exist, just as Latin is still used even though it is a dead language. The English language alone has over 150,000 words that are derived directly from Greek (Peraki, 2015). Because the language has impacted other major languages all throughout history, it would be a tragic loss to have such an influential language die out. The loss of Greek would be very similar to the death of Latin. About 10 percent of Latin words have directly been transitioned into English, which is a considerable amount when taking into account the total number of words in English (Peraki, 2015). Likewise, other languages would still employ the words they have adopted from Greek, but without the original language there to gain insight from, a major amount of impact would be lost. 

Sources:

Ager, S. (2016). Greek. Retrieved from Omniglot: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/greek.htm

Hagan, J. (2013, October 7). Awareness of Greek Culture. Retrieved from Wordpress: https://jhagan92.wordpress.com/2013/10/07/communication-in-greece/

Peraki, M. (2015, May 18). How has Greek influenced the English language? Retrieved from British Council: https://www.britishcouncil.org/voices-magazine/how-has-greek-influenced-english-language

Russian and Language Policy in the Soviet Union

The Soviet Union is well known for many things that were often brutal and disturbing, but something that is far less well known were the Soviet Language Policies. Language policies or language planning are the tools and ideas used to change the way a language is used throughout a country. This change can be enforced or a generally mutual agreement among the people of a nation.

In the Soviet Union, language policy was used as a tool to enforce Russian throughout the Union. Initially, the Soviets used language planning and Russian as a tool to increase literacy throughout the Union, because in 1917, Russian illiteracy was almost 100% (Grenoble, 2003).

In the beginning, Vladimir Lenin, the original leader of the Bolshevik Party, approached language planning through a socio-linguistic view, meaning he saw all languages as equal (Kirkwood, 1990), but after his death, the Soviet views on language changed significantly.

After Lenin’s death, the Soviets followed an instrumental planning view, meaning they saw language as a tool that could be manipulated to fulfill a certain task, and that task was the unification of the USSR (Grenoble, 2003).

Lewis (1983) writes, “[Stalin’s forced] migration of populations, industrialization, and urbanization [were] not planned primarily with linguistic changes in mind, it is true nevertheless that such social changes are expected [to occur in this type of setting].” Stalin and his successors viewed Russian as a superior language and felt that the Soviet Union would be more powerful with one uniting language.

However, even with these views and the measures taken to enforce them, it is hard to say how effective the Soviet Language Policies were. They changed a great deal, and were very dependent on the local communities and officials for their success. Today, there has been nothing else quite like the Soviet Language Policies, and there may never be, they were truly unique to their time.

References

Grenoble, L. A. (2003). Language Policy in the Soviet Union. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers

Kirkwood, M. (1990). Language Planning in the Soviet Union. New York: St. Martin’s Press

Lewis, G. (1983).  Implementation of Language Planning in the Soviet Union. In Cobarrusbias, J., & Fishman, J. A. (Eds.) Progress in Language Planning: International Perspectives. (pgs. 309 – 326). New York: Mouton Publishers.

The Russian Language: Gendered Nouns and Social Inequality

The topic of my two papers in our Linguistics class was Russian, and in the second paper I delved into gendered nouns, and the possible social inequalities that occur because of them. 

To give a basic overview, Russian is spoken by 137,000,000 people within the Russian Federation, with 201,373,900 speakers worldwide, with it generally being a primary or secondary language for said speakers (Lewis, Simons, and Fennig 2016). Russian was based on the Moscow dialect, and the three main dialects in use today are the dialect in the North, the dialect in the South, and the Central dialect (Ager 2016). The written language is based on a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet, with 32 letters, or 33 if the character for a silent sign is used, and uses six cases: Nominative, Genitive, Dative, Accusative, Instrumental, and Locative (Encyclopedia Britannica 2016). 

To delve deeper into what my second paper was about, we have to look at the gendered noun system that is present in Russian. There are three genders that are applied to nouns in Russian, those genders being masculine, feminine, and neuter (Rodina, 2012), and there are also three main declensions. The first consists of feminine nouns, the second of neuter and masculine, and the third of feminine (Garnham, 2015). The nouns will either be inanimate, which makes the gender assigned to them arbitrary, or animate, in which case they will generally be given a masculine or feminine gender, perhaps signifying a lack of gender neutral pronouns in Russian society (Garnham, 2015). 

The main focus of my second paper was the inequality that could be correlated to gendered nouns. In some cases occupations were unnecessarily gendered in a masculine form when a neuter noun would have worked just as well (Women and Language, 1999). In addition to this, some nouns that were given masculine nouns seemed to have been given that specific gender to try and keep women out of the upper reaches of power through defining women more in private spheres (Women and Language, 1999). There have also been studies done that show broad stereotypes throughout various gendered languages, such as a ‘secretary’ always being feminine, and thus seen as an appropriate job for a women (Garnham, 2015). While this could be coincidental, as correlation does not imply causation, the correlation between gendered nouns and social inequality is fairly strong, though hopefully as time goes on, the inequality will lessen or even cease.

Sources:

Ager, S. (2016). Russian. In Omniglot. Retrieved from: http://www.omniglot.com/writing/russian.htm

Garnham, A., & Yakovlev, Y. (2015). The Interaction of Morphological and Stereotypical Gender Information in Russian. Frontiers in Psychology. Retrieved from http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=HRCA&sw=w&u=wylrc_uwyoming&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA448817024&sid=summon&asid=4cfb4ddc6f072417ce06d7ed2cf6616b

Lewis, M. P., Simons, F. G., Fennig, D. C. (2016). Ethnologue: Languages of the World, Nineteenth edition. Retrieved from: http://www.ethnologue.com.

RODINA, Y., & WESTERGAARD, M. (2012). A cue-based approach to the acquisition of grammatical gender in russian. Journal of Child Language, 39(5), 1077-106. Retrieved from: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S0305000911000419

Russian Language. (n.d.) In Encyclopedia Britannica Online. Retrieved From: https://www.britannica.com/topic/Russian-language

Sex, Gender, and the Status of Women in the Russian Language. (1999). Women and Language, 22(2), 58. Retrieved from: http://go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=ITOF&sw=w&u=wylrc_uwyoming&v=2.1&it=r&id=GALE%7CA59877462&sid=summon&asid=430153d30345907cb1896b1e3a8cd7e9

A Short Introduction to Arabic Dialects

The Arabic language is quite unique in one particular way, it has about 75 different dialect used amongst its speakers. While it is widely contested exactly how many dialects of Arabic exists, my research has averaged in the sixty to eighty range. As we learned in class, dialects are generally used for speech and not for written language, and this is true for Arabic dialect speakers. Arabs use the dialectal language in all their daily tasks, but when they encounter a language situation calling for greater formality, Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is spoken instead. Benkharafa (2013) argues that in every area of the world where Arabic is spoken, there is a colloquial language. The colloquial language of a specific area is spoken regularly and is what the native speakers learn as their first language (p. 202).

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the standard version of Arabic, and is considered the universal language of the Arabic-speaking world. It is the language of the majority of written material and of formal television shows, lectures, and radio broadcasts (Ager, 2016). However, MSA is a learned language. It is no one’s mother tongue. Ager, (2016) estimates that there are about seventy different colloquial, also known as dialectal, Arabic varieties. MSA is more or less the same throughout the Arab World, while there are large differences between the various colloquial dialects. These dialectal varieties show differences in grammar, pronunciation, and vocabulary (Abu-Absi, n.d.).

The linguistic dualism between MSA and dialectal Arabic, commonly referred to as diglossia, involves the complementary use of two varieties, high and low, in specific contexts (Benkharafa, 2013, p. 201-202). The high variety is Classical Arabic (also known as MSA) and it is seen as the example of pure Arabic since it is the language of the Quran. Also, since Classical Arabic has no country attached to it, it is known that only formally educated people can understand, fluently speak, and read MSA. This means that illiterate or uneducated people are dependent on their dialectal Arabic. The low variety refers to various regional colloquial varieties used for everyday interactions. (Benkharafa, 2013, p. 201-202). There are many negative connotations around the low dialectal Arabic because MSA Arabic is seen as the purest form of the language. 

References

Abu-Absi, S. (n.d.). History of the Arabic language. History of Islam: An encyclopedia of Islamic history. Retrieved September 24, 2016, from https://historyofislam.com/contents/the-modern-age/the-arabic-language/

Ager, F. (2016). Arabic: Alphabet, pronunciation and language. Retrieved September 15, 2016, from http://www.omniglot.com/writing/arabic.htm

Benkharafa, M. (2013). The present situation of the Arabic language and the Arab world commitment to Arabization [Electronic version]. Theory and Practice in Language Studies, 3(2), 201-208.