global_jd

Arabic costs

Comments on learning Arabic, the difficulties, the time requirements. Like Chinese there's regionalism in speech, and like Japanese there are significant differences between formal and informal speech. Much anecdotal commentary; a wide variety of experiences.

Accessible English, Engaging English

Ann Althouse riffs off a NYT piece on how English as a second language is surpassing English as a native language. The article seems like one of those "top 5 topics on X" approaches, where different current events are fitted together, without solid overview or connection. But it does touch on some interesting topics:

o The differing advantages of writing English for widest accessibility, or for deepest accessibility and most engagement (idioms, regionalisms, cultural references). I think we need both, but I don't know how to describe when to use one or the other, and it was almost shocking to see someone else actually discuss this topic.

o How the dynamics of international interaction will change for the person who has spoken English from birth and who has not acquired additional skills.

o Nominal material on the use of English as a world hub language... nothing new here, but rare to see it in print, much less in the New York Times.

Interesting quotes:

"Mr. Nerrière said he got the idea from his travels in Asia while working for I.B.M. 'I observed that my communication with my Japanese or Korean colleagues [using limited-vocab English] was much easier, much more efficient, and much less inhibited than what I could observe between them and the American associates traveling with me,' he said."

"As the world learns to deal with the domination of English, whether through Globish or the more-intensive language training proposed by the British Council report, it is native English speakers who could be in need of extra preparation. Though English fluency can seem like the key to the kingdom today, in the future, if there are two billion people who can speak English, the English speaker without knowledge of another language will be at a disadvantage." (What's missing here is the understanding that language needs may differ: someone in Korea studying English requires very different levels of mastery than someone in Boston studying for a global future. Moving in to the hub is a different dynamic than moving out from the hub... different advantages, different requirements.)

"I think the kind of crisp short words used in web-writing are going to spread and people won't confine themselves to a tedious word list that requires them to construct clunky phrases containing boring filler like 'in which.' There will be some sort of global English, but I think it's likely to be, not Nerrière's 1,500 building blocks, but the kind of clear, straightforward English that makes for good blog writing. And you can write real literature in this language. Man, Nerrière annoys me. His vision of the future is no fun at all. It's infuriatingly desiccated! Or should I say it is so dry it makes me mad." (Part of me gags when hearing webtext held up as a model, but I'm not yet sure exactly what she was visualizing at the time.... ;-)

In this last quote we get to an important issue: How to write text for best use. Widest range is one goal; deepest engagement is another. These may not be mutually contradictory -- we may be able to write on multiple levels at once, with main ideas laid out in accessible English, and coloring added in engaging English. (I just invented those labels, by the way. :) A single conscientously-constructed message may be able to be read by multiple audiences simultaneouly, if you can insert the appropriate writing styles into the necessary places in the argument.

There is great intentionality when writing direct mail ads, or other commercial text which is measured by the response it receives. I have seen few discuss the appropriate construction of informal online messages (most bloggers can't seem to get to the point yet) (and I guess, because I'm rambling here, this would include me ;-) much less discuss this construction in the calculated method required to limn main points in accessible English, and amplifications in engaging English.

Summary: After reading those articles, and thinking a few days, here's what I end up with: I want to study the construction of messages whose main points are accessible to a wide audience, and whose deeper detail is rewarding to those who have studied the language more deeply. Of course, a summary with a semi-colon may not be the best example here, much less if I add some trailing ellipses....

Why bother?

Why should a native English speaker bother to learn languages of other regions? After all, English is the common language of business, and of the internet, right? If varied cultures each study English as a second language (ESL), isn't that good enough?

Inexpressible in English

MetaFilter has a discussion of concepts available in some languages which are not available in English. I just scanned it -- it's MetaFilter -- but am bookmarking it here in case I need the link in the future.

More Bell

The San Jose Business Journal has an article on the cross-cultural studies of Dr. Genevieve Bell of Intel. (This is a newspaper, so who knows how long this web link will be on the web?) She's nearing the publication of her paper on technology use in daily life in various Asian cultures. This article doesn't have much material that hasn't appeared elsewhere, however... there's the "kids living in one room" angle, the "bless the mobiles at the temple" story, and so on. Her final work should be interesting, however.

English as EU language

The Economist carries an article about how the practical common tongue of Central Europe evolved from Latin, to old German, to Russian, and is now moving to English. 75% of students are studying it as a second language. This movement in New Europe is reinforcing the trend already found in Old Europe. Russian is the second most popular choice to study in school in the Balkans, but falls in favor as you head south. It is still commonly spoken by the older generation, however. German has apparently not been promoted in those areas invaded during World War II. France is surprisingly popular in Romania, but nowhere else.

(In this situation, I'd wonder whether "English" is here seen as something relating to Great Britain or America, or whether it's seen as relating to Hollywood and world consumer markets... my gut feeling is that students are choosing English because it happens to be the easiest language to use across groups on the internet, but there's nothing in this article to buttress that suspicion of mine. In other words, they're not choosing "english" so much as "the internet's common tongue" of simple unaccented ASCII.)

Whatever, my main driver still applies: When people in every part of the world rely on English as a hub language to reach other cultures, then it's smart for people who have that hub language as their primary language to study reaching out to a wide variety of other cultures... while others study centripetally, we study centrifugally.

Ontario Sharia

Not about one of my target languages, but a good example of culture clash nevertheless... the Toronto Star reports on feminists' reactions to Islamic Law now that it is enacted in Ontario.

Genevieve Bell

Great set of articles about how different cultures approach technology, particularly mobile phones, from research done at Intel. The International Herald Tribune focuses more on attitudes towards technology while the BBC focuses more on religion. Snips: "'We thought, there's a group of people just like us all over the world who will buy the technology and have it fill the same values in their lives.' Bell's project sent her to seven countries: India, China, Singapore, Indonesia, Malaysia, Korea and Australia. In some places, she found, it's harder for some forms of technology to get over the threshold of the home -- not simply for economic reasons but for religious ones as well. For example, she said, values of humility and simplicity may make technology less welcome in some Hindu homes in India or some Muslim homes in Malaysia and Indonesia. If part of the value of the home is this space of purity that's protected from the pollutedness of the world, a place where you express values like simplicity, humility, modesty, grace, that becomes a barrier to adopting some technologies. She also pointed out that most American homes have space for leisure activities, and often that space is private. By contrast, Japan's tighter quarters afford little privacy, which may account for the attraction of young people there to text-messaging over mobile phones. Even the reliability of power may be an American assumption to be overcome: In Malaysia, power surges caused by monsoons can fry computer motherboards. Such insights challenged Intel's vision of a world of 'smart homes' and a chip-driven lifestyle, Bell said, which assumes that users are secular. All this prompted her to ask David Tanenhaus, Intel's vice president for research, 'What if our vision of ubiquitous computing is so secular, so profoundly embedded in a set of Western discourses, that we've created a vision of the world that shuts out a percentage of people in a way we can't really even begin to articulate'?"

Google global

CNET reports that Google is opening an office in Tokyo, in addition to California, Switzerland, Ireland, and increased staffing in India. "Not all great engineers live in Palo Alto (near Google's California headquarters). They live around the world," company spokeswoman Debbie Frost said. I wonder how they'll handle conference calls between staffers in New York, Tokyo, Zurich, and Bangalore... I guess English will be used, but there's still a bit of work to do in reconciling a European expository style, an Indian delegation style, a Japanese consensus/face style, and the American desire to get to the point. I think the primary-English culture is likely in the best spot to make these varied accommodations....

Accommodating Guanxi

Here's another thing I have to work through... how to handle different contexts for bribery and backscratching? From what I read, in China it's customary to either use contacts to get things done, or to offer cash incentives where those relationships don't exist. Me, I come from a place where each person is judged on their merits, and where hidden advantages are something to be embarrassed about. This is coming to head right now because of the revelations about how UN officials were skimming off Saddam's Oil-for-Palaces fund... as a westerner it's pretty outrageous, but I'm also trying to process how people in other cultural situations may find such bribery and hypocrisy normal, even admirable. Even the English words "bribery" and "backscratching" carry strong connotative content. I worry enough about reconciling the differing capital flows across societies (someone in California finds it easier to buy a Japanese good than someone in India, for instance)... the bigger issue may be how to reconcile such different attitudes towards doing business with each other. I guess I've made progress in realizing, non-judgementally, that societies do differ in use of off-the-board connections, but I'm not sure yet how to congruently work with such differing worldviews in practical terms.