http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/2007-08/17/content_6030543.htm

A dozen abbreviations including GDP, NBA, IT, MP3, QQ, DVD and CEO are among the 5,000 most-frequently used words in the Chinese-language media last year, according to a report on the 2006 Language Situation in China, which was released yesterday in Beijing.

The report said some parents are so keen on English letters that a couple tried to name their baby "@", claiming the character used in email addresses reflects their love for the child.

While the "@" is obviously familiar to Chinese e-mail users, they often use the English word "at" to pronounce it - which with a drawn out "T" sounds something like ai ta, or "love him", to Putonghua speakers. ...

For example, DNA is much simpler to use than its Chinese version tuoyang hetang hesuan, and T xingtai (T-stage or fashion catwalk) combines the English letter with Chinese characters to give readers a visual meaning. ...

Some language scholars fear such usage will contaminate the purity of Chinese and cause confusion in communication.

But Li Yuming, deputy director of the State Language Commission, said: "Chinese is a tolerant language which can absorb every advantage from other languages. ...

Following up on a recent discussion on the French forum:

I was disappointed by Dresdner Kleinwort's response to the recent claim of discrimination by Malcolm Perry, an Australian staff member. Mr Perry, DrK's former head of fixed income and credit, claimed he was pushed out for not being German or being able to speak the language.

I had hoped Dresdner was going to argue that while it did not matter what passports its executives carried, it was perfectly reasonable to expect senior officers of a German bank to speak German. Instead, the bank admitted it had dismissed Mr Perry unfairly but strongly denied discrimination. In his witness statement, Stefan Jentzsch, DrK's chief executive, listed several senior executives of various nationalities who did not speak German. They did not need to, he said. "English is the language in which Dresdner Kleinwort communicates." (The case, heard by an employment tribunal in London, where Mr Perry was based, has yet to be decided.)

I imagine there are German managers working at German companies who feel sore about not getting to the top because their English is not good enough.

But then English is the language of international business. You would not get very far without it. Globalisation required a common language and English is it. As a second-generation speaker of the language, I am gratefully aware of the opportunities this has afforded me. But it would not be a bad thing if we native speakers thought occasionally about the effort people put into speaking a language that is not theirs.

I spent three years working as a correspondent in Greece, attending press conferences and conducting interviews. There was often a simultaneous translation and many senior Greeks were happy to speak English. But some were not, and I did the interviews in Greek.

I managed, but I remember the fatigue and the worry. The fatigue comes from having to concentrate so hard. When people are speaking your native tongue, you can let your mind wander, think about the next question, even glance out of the window, safe in the knowledge that you can refocus the moment something important is said. You do not have that luxury in a foreign language. Lose the thread and you will find it hard to pick it up again. You worry constantly that you have missed or misunderstood something.

In 1991 Percy Barnevik, the leader of giant Swiss-Swedish conglomerate ABB, told the Harvard Business Review that fluency in English was a requirement for every senior manager in the company. But he knew what difficulties this created. "Only 30 per cent of our managers speak English as their first language, so there is great potential for misunderstanding, for misjudging people, for mistaking facility with English for intelligence or knowledge."

Many international companies have adopted English as their working language since then and experienced the same problems. Yet, given how long the issue has been around, this is a curiously under-researched field, possibly because studying it would require the co-operation of two groups who do not generally have much to do with each other: business school academics and applied linguists.

In a working paper , Alan Feely of Birmingham Business School and Anne-Wil Harzing of Melbourne University wrote: "The notion that cultural differences can be a significant barrier to doing business is now commonly accepted." Few, however, made the connection between culture and one of its principal manifestations: language. They quoted various writers referring to language issues in business as "the most neglected field in management", "the management orphan" and "the forgotten factor".

Pamela Rogerson-Revell, an applied linguist at Leicester University, is one of the few working in the area . She studied meetings held in English by the Groupe Consultatif Actuariel Européen, representing actuarial associations around Europe.

One continental European actuary mentioned how hard it was to make a spontaneous contribution in English. "I was sitting . . . listening to the discussion. Suddenly I thought that the meeting was missing an essential point and I started to plan an intervention. It took me a few minutes to prepare myself, especially to find the right English words etc, and suddenly I realised that the discussion had moved on to another subject."

Another problem for non-native speakers is idiomatic expressions. I remember a briefing for the British press by a French company. The chief executive, who spoke good English, was thrown by one of my colleagues asking whether a change of strategy was "a case of horses for courses".

Of course, a lot of business communication in English these days takes place between Italians and Germans, or Bulgarians and Belgians, without any native speakers present. It must be a relief.

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/0/f52d0b12-7080-11dc-a6d1-0000779fd2ac.html

http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5i5ZPD4TAFCJcbFyZ0dLr5mUh3uMw

Anyone reading the official transcript of Bush's statement on education Wednesday would see that he said "children do learn."

Except that's not what he said.

Bush flubbed the line and said "childrens do learn" — a particularly embarrassing gaffe given that he was surrounded by young students and talking about the importance of education. It also harkened back to another infamous misstatement, when Bush rhetorically asked "Is our children learning?"

On Thursday, press secretary Dana Perino said the White House never meant to clean up Bush's language after the fact.

The White House transcript is distributed to reporters, posted on the Web and widely used as a lasting record of what Bush said.

Perino said no one in Bush's press operation had ordered the stenographers office to fix Bush's slip-up in the transcript.

She did, however, order that the transcript be amended later so that it would accurately include the president's mistake.

Sure enough, it now reads "childrens (sic) do learn."

Sweden has no official language to date. The government now wants to change this and introduce a new law stipulating Swedish as the main language. The daily considers this a good idea: "The status of the Swedish language in Sweden is no longer as clear as it used to be. In certain circles - particularly among people with a high degree of training in technical and medical professions and the sciences - Swedish has been almost completely supplanted by English. This is referred to as loss of domain. Those who want to protect the language fear similar losses over the coming years in certain sections of the work world and in politics. ... In Sweden, the ability to speak another language must be perceived as an opportunity, not an obligation." Sydsvenska Dagbladet (Sweden) http://europe.courrierinternational.com

By GORDON BROWN

...I propose that together Britain and America strive to make the international language that happens to be our own far more freely available across the world. I am today asking the British Council to develop a new initiative with private-sector and NGO partners in America, to offer anyone in any part of the world help to learn English.

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB120830718371518015.html?mod=djemEditorialPage

[snip] News of the protests has been purcolating on the Internet for weeks now, in part because the German activist Martin Krämer was refused entry to Hokkaido in March by customs officers in the port of Sapporo-Otaru. Krämer, who had been invited by the Sapporo Esperanto League to help prepare for the protests, arrived on a freighter playing "The Internationale" on a trumpet, the London weekly magazine New Statesman reported.

The worldwide community of Esperanto speakers has for years highlighted the issue of globalization, or Tutomondig in their language. They feel indebted to the Polish ophthalmologist and humanist Ludovic Zamenhof, who developed the language and in 1887 published a booklet aimed at literally improving the understanding among different peoples. ...

The Japanese Esperanto demonstrators' main goal is to send out a protest message against the linguistic dominance of the G-8 countries. The Esperanto enthusiasts claim that those countries make up only 14 percent of the world's population, with English speakers making up online 5 percent. So why does English remain the world's predominant language? ...

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,557368,00.html

In "Translate" his latest essay, Belgian philosopher and jurist François Ost, sings the praises of multilingualism, the one alternative to the hegemony of global English: http://www.presseurop.eu/en/content/article/18351-ost-translation (this review is available in 10 languages)

When my children were very young they learned and unlearned Danish and English with the speed of light. They would learn to speak Danish in a few months, speak it fluently, forget English, move back to Canada, relearn English and forget the Danish. As adults they both understand Danish, but of the two only my daughter speaks fluent Danish. She has never learned to read Danish and, she says, she doesn't understand written Danish...

Use It or Lose It? Study Suggests the Brain
Can Remember a "Forgotten" Language

Many of us learn a foreign language when we are young, but in some cases, exposure to that language is brief and we never get to hear or practice it again. Our subjective impression is often that the neglected language completely fades away from our memory. But does “use it or lose it” apply to foreign languages? Although it may seem we have absolutely no memory of the neglected language, new research suggests this “forgotten” language may be more deeply engraved in our minds than we realize. Psychologists Jeffrey Bowers, Sven L. Mattys, and Suzanne Gage from the University of Bristol recruited volunteers who were native English speakers but who had learned either Hindi or Zulu as children when living abroad. The scientists asked the volunteers to complete a background vocabulary test to see if they remembered any words from the neglected language. They then trained the participants to distinguish between pairs of phonemes that started Hindi or Zulu words. As it turned out, even though the volunteers showed no memory of the second language in the vocabulary test, they were able to quickly relearn and correctly identify phonemes that were spoken in the neglected language. These findings suggest that exposing young children to foreign languages, even if they do not continue to speak them, can have a lasting impact on speech perception.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/observer/getArticle.cfm?id=2571#gut

Do it be makin' sense?

THERE'S a predictable kerfuffle over the news that America's Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) is looking for people to translate wiretaps into English from, among other languages, Ebonics.

The real controversy doesn't seem to be about the DEA's quite sensible recognition that it has a problem understanding certain groups of people on the phone. (One of the other languages listed in the DEA's request for bids is Jamaican patois.) It's about what they call it. "Ebonics" has been a loaded word ever since the school board in Oakland, California decreed in 1996 that black students should be taught partly in Ebonics because that was what they spoke at home. It set off fears that they would never learn "proper" English, though in fact the purpose of the resolution was to make it easier to teach them standard English. Ever since, any recognition that there is such a thing as Ebonics sets people foaming at the mouth.

I bet there would have been not a peep of controversy if the DEA contract had specified African American Vernacular English (AAVE) instead, which is what most serious linguists call Ebonics. Because, after all, that's just a sociolect of English, and that's fine. Right?

Actually, it turns out that AAVE has some interesting grammatical properties. Its tense structure is apparently quite different from standard English; the future tense, for instance has "immediate", "post-immediate" and "indefinite future" phases; and "to be" as an auxiliary verb has a much wider range of meanings than in standard English, for example:

I been bought her clothes means "I bought her clothes a long time ago".
I been buyin' her clothes means "I've been buying her clothes for a long time".

http://www.economist.com/node/21009971?fsrc=nwl