2011 Language Barometer

I am teaching English again. A friend of mine went to France to attend his brother's wedding and asked me to substitute him for two weeks at a small Spanish company in Madrid. It's nice to be back in teacher's shoes and finally do what I was trained to do academically in the first five years of my University studies (I am a teacher of English and German, after all).

As is common, the company is trying to attract as much international customers as possible, and actually a large part of their customer base are non-Spanish speakers. "Firing" is a curse word in the Spanish language and it virtually does not exist in the Spanish legislation and business practice. Thus, since laying off the linguistically-challenged working population and employing new, young and internationally savvy workforce is not an option, the company is forced to arrange English classes for their employees. Some interesting observations:

• 50% of those who are supposed to attend those classes (company-sponsored!!!) never show up;
• the control from the company's side over the syllabus and student progress is hardly seen;
• some students have been learning English for 4 years already, still are at the Intermediate level or so and the company continues to invest in their training.

I am only there for two weeks and surely I am not going to rock the boat and play the part of the indignant fiery revolutionary a-la Dolores Ibárruri, yet - I have seen it oh so many times when the sole purpose of the learning budget is simply to be spent.

I agree: calculating ROI on learning interventions is extremely difficult, but not doing anything about it is unacceptable. Sayonara.  

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P.S. IE has just publsihed this article about the shifting perspectives on learning foreign languages.

IE and busuu.com present the 2011 Language Barometer

Madrid, April 2011. IE Business School and busuu.com, a European online community for learning languages, have conducted the 2011 Language Barometer survey, the world's largest online report on the future of language learning. More than 16,000 people from over 150 different countries took part in the survey which was carried out in March 2011.
37% of the people surveyed believe that one of the best ways to learn a language is online. 24% specifically identify Web 2.0 platforms as the most efficient way to learn a language and 13% prefer individual online language learning. 32% of them believe that language courses abroad are the most efficient way to learn a language.

The lifetime average amount spent by survey participants on language learning is around 750 euros. More than 17% have spent even more than 1,000 EUR (1,400 USD) on language learning over time. 71% of them believe that the ability to speak a foreign language will directly improve their financial situation.
The reasons that people learn a new language are changing. The people surveyed want to learn a foreign language for travel (37.7%), business (35.7%), fun (37.1%), school/university (27.4%) and personal/family reasons (22.1%).

Regarding the difficulties found when learning a new language, 24% say that they don't have time, 16% think it is hard to keep up the motivation, and 15% believe that not having access to native speakers hampers their learning process.

82% of the people surveyed believe that knowing a foreign language in the workplace is important.  The report shows that 40% of companies actively support their employees when it comes to learning a new language.

52% of the people surveyed believe that the language of the future is English, 23% chose Mandarin and 8% Spanish. The rest are split between languages that include French, Japanese, Arabic, and German.

Inclusive Language

Ne doesn't like tem zeeself

Aug 16th 2010, 21:02 by G.L. | NEW YORK

VIA Stan Carey's Sentence First we learn that Dennis Baron, professor of English and linguistics at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has long been interested (some might use a stronger word) in the periodic attempts to institute gender-neutral pronouns in English, for those cases where "he or she" feels cumbersome but "they" is numerically inaccurate.

You might have heard of pronouns like "ze" and "zer" created for the purpose of discussing transgender and genderqueer identity. But according to Mr Baron's count there have been "more than 100 attempts to coin a gender-neutral pronoun over the course of more than 150 years", including heesh, hse, kin, ve, ta, tey, fm, z, ze, shem,se, j/e, jee, ey, ho, po, ae, et, heshe, hann, herm, ala, de, ghach... the list goes on.

Now, for the benefit of us web-rats, he has condensed the fruits of his research into ahighly entertaining blog post, which includes clippings of newspaper articles on the need for such pronouns, going back to the mid 19th century. See, for instance, this one fromThe Atlantic in 1878:

We want a new pronoun. The need of a personal pronoun of the singular number and common gender is so desperate, urgent, imperative, that according to the established theories it should long since have grown on our speech, as the tails grew off the monkeys.

It's nice to see that a scant 19 years after the publication of "On the Origin of Species", Darwinism was already considered "established", whereas today America seem to be moving in the opposite direction. And yet English-speakers have resisted gender-neutral pronouns as stubbornly as the cosmopolitans of the world have resisted Esperanto.

If we continue the natural-selection metaphor, then, this suggests that if words, or indeed whole languages, have an equivalent of evolutionary fitness (an organism's capacity to get its genes into the next generation), then merely being designed to suit a certain purpose is not enough to ensure fitness. Natural selection operates incrementally, after all; new species don't appear out of the blue, but form gradually as adaptations of existing ones that already have a niche in the ecosystem. Refudiate might catch on, because it's an adaptation. Ghach... forget it. Maybe with time "he or she" could gradually turn into "hershee" and then "hersh", or "s/he" become "sehee" and then "se", but coining them from raw metal won't work.

But if they evolve gradually, they're in an evolutionary arms race with "they". And my money would be on "they". It's more of a leap to introduce new pronouns that are gender neutral than adapt an existing one to be number neutral. As Mr Baron points out, "After all, if you, which is also gender neutral, can serve both for singular and plural, why can't they do the same?"

Language Tricks

“Culture is a like dropping an Alka-seltzer into a glass – you don’t see it, but somehow it does something”

One of my favorite professors at university once said, "As many languages you know, so many times you are a man". By "man", she obviously meant "man" or "woman" as she was no sexist for sure, but the message is quite ponderous: your chances of success in the increasingly globalized society depend on your linguistic ability. It so happened that during my summer vacation I ended up travelling three countries in Europe in three days, which speak three different languages: Spain, Germany and France. That was a bit of a overloading for my poor brain, but overall it was an exciting experience, as I made it a challenge for myself to speak those languages with the locals and refuse to admit that I speak English. The French were the greatest surprise. Their level of English was surprising and slightly frightening, since just a couple of years ago I would be struggling to find anyone there who would produce anything but a string of intelligible mumbling clearly identifiable in the whole world as the French language. Maybe I was travelling in the wrong place (Cote d'Azur, after all, is a highly touristic destination and the service industry adapts quicker than all others to the demands of the global community), but hey - those French waiters and shop assistants spoke perfect English (and some of them even Russian) - something I would have not expected merely a couple of years ago. I was not sure how to take it, as the French are known for their puristic stance on the matter of linguistic identity. So have they given in? It has always been an exciting discussion for me whether a country should yield and submit to English as the language of communication or whether it should preserve its culture and identity by insisting on keeping its language and culture "clean" of external influence, but that is a subject for a separate post.

Linguistic competence has been given a justifiably high weighting in the business world. When you put together your CV, the languages section is obligatory. When you apply for specific jobs, you will be given language tests during your recruitment process. If you are an expatriate, your company will make sure that you learn the language(s) of the country you have been deployed to. Reasons for this importance are obvious - if you want to understand how the society operates, you need to learn the language. I do not want to bore you with the intricacies of the Sapir-Whorf  theory, but in a nutshell, a language defines your thinking and perception of the world. Go back to your working environment and think what sort of language is used at the office. How often do people say "thank you"? What about gender-sensitive words? How do you treat those who do not speak the dominant language? Having answered such questions, you will arrive at realization of what the corporate culture is.

Linguistic failures are frequent and the most spectacular ones are well known. Of the more comical was Ford’s introduction of the ‘Pinto’ in Brazil. After seeing sales fail, they soon realized that this was due to the fact that Brazilians did not want to be seen driving a car meaning ‘tiny male genitals’. Here you will find many more examples of the Marketing Translation mistakes: http://www.i18nguy.com/translations.html (actually some are HILARIOUS!).

So what are the greatest challenges? There are many... the two that immediately spring to mind are:

- there are 23 languages in the EU Parliament with equal status. How can that institution function effectively?

- emerging BRIC countries with very particular and difficult languages. How do we enter those markets?

Seeing the rising importance of such problems I start thinking... should I drop my MBA classes and go back to my Linguistics degree? :)