Photo from Pixabay
Follow-up to “Hard Languages,” November 13, last month’s
topic.
What is an easy language for English speakers to approach
and immerse in? Since language is such a
basic key to culture, familiarity or fluency have a great enabling effect in
opening up an entire cultural dimension, either in one country or across a wide
cultural empire (as Spanish, French, Portuguese, or Arabic provide). The issue here is the time and exposure
needed to achieve the needed level of comfort and speed in sending and
receiving--or speaking and decoding. The
artificial intelligence revolution was jump-started by the US government goal
to develop a machine program that could learn to translate and transcribe
natural language.
Babies under six months can distinguish speech sounds from
any language in the world. But the brain
soon begins to focus on a single language practice and its sound differences
and starts to ignore other distinctions less important in that language. Young children can learn two languages
equally well. The window to learn any
language seems to be 12 years—beyond that, language acquisition doesn’t map
well to the maturing brain as its patterns become set (Linden, The
Accidental Mind, 2007). Acquiring everyday facility in a language is one
thing. Mastering its nuances, its
cultural structures, is quite ornate, involving a long process of immersion and
practice in context. That is the
principle behind the idea of shibboleth, a difference in pronunciation that
separates native insiders from outsiders.
Languages within the same language family are typically the
easiest to learn because of familiar cognates (roots in common), grammar, written
form (Latin alphabet), conjugation rules, tonality, and pronunciation. For
English, that is West Germanic. This branch includes English, German, Dutch,
Afrikaans, and Yiddish. 80% of the most-used English vocabulary, and the
grammar, is Germanic. The larger family grouping
is Indo-European, spoken by the largest percentage of speakers worldwide—close
to half. English worldwide has 1.5
billion speakers, of which just under 400 million (about a quarter) call it
their native language. And for
non-native speakers from other language families, English is not an easy acquisition.
Selecting a new language also depends on its useful cultural
position: where the language is spoken,
how widely distributed, and its global media influence. Non-European languages that use the Latin
alphabet, like Malay and Swahili, are cases in point. Malay is the lingua franca across several
southeast Asian countries; Swahili is the trading language of East Africa (as a
second language) with a rich Arabic vocabulary, sharing our Latin alphabet. Indonesian also uses Latin script and has a simple
grammar.
Since the first century BCE, Swahili has served 50 million
people as it developed as the lingua franca of trade and the national language
of Kenya and Tanzania, influenced by Arabic (Swahili means “coastal “) widely
used in Uganda, Burundi, DRC, and the islands of Zanzibar and Comoros—the
standard version is based in Zanzibar City.
Because pronunciation is regular and the alphabet Roman, Swahili is one of
the exotic easy language to approach and acquire. It has a wide range across several cultures
and a long history. It can also be heard in south Ethiopia and Somalia and
northern Zambia and Mozambique, and even Madagascar (Lonely Planet
phrasebook, 2008).
Then there is the cultural aspect: what does the language afford as access to
the richness of history, literature, religion, art traditions, and connections
with other cultures within the language and beyond? French and English have been historically
important in the West because of their status and portability in
diplomacy. As the world turns
increasingly toward the Eastern cultural dimension (India, China, Japan) this
ratio is shifting from Atlantic to Pacific Ocean.
Proximity to English is one index of easiness. Frisian is the most similar to English, but
has just a half-million speakers in northwest Europe. Spanish, however, has over 534 million speakers
worldwide, and is the official language of 21 countries. English speakers already have the greatest
range as the language of business, science, and world politics in the form of “Globish,”
basically acting as the universal auxiliary language. Legacy of the British Empire, it is already
the official language of 29 countries. Considering
the time-intensive demands of learning a completely new tongue, there is little
incentive to acquire one. From an English-speaking perspective,
most Romance and Indo-European languages take about 600+ hours to learn, while
tonal languages or those from the Sino-Tibetan language family can take 2000+
hours to learn. (ScienceABC).
Unless language links you to your family’s heritage. Our
research director has become an Italian “citizen living abroad” (in the US for
now) through his mother’s ancestry, an option that several other countries
(like Ireland and Mexico) are introducing with the goal of attracting Americans
back to the mother country to live with their incomes. The European Union opens the borders
dramatically, since citizens of one member country can live and work in any of
the current 27.
Some of these languages are close to English (like the
Germanic family members Frisian, Dutch, Norwegian, and Swedish); others seem
far afield (Romanian, Afrikaans, Indonesian) (FSI source) .
Of course there are constructed languages and ancient languages that are
mostly academic, not spoken, or extinct, like Gothic. These open out to other cultural worlds,
peoples, histories, a kind of hyperreality across time. Ancient languages are
still spoken or written today, or are direct ancestors of those spoken today,
like modern Greek, the easiest to learn with a non-Latin script (already
familiar through science), and a basic medium of Western Civ. A more familiar example is modern Hebrew,
based on the ancient model but updated.
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The US Foreign Service Institute, beginning with its mission in language training after WWII for its in-country staffing, has been a good source of language manuals and tapes available free online.
