Tag: language and languages

Lost in translation: How New Zealand’s plan for bilingual road signs took an unexpected turn | CNN

CNN
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It was meant to be an inclusive gesture to New Zealand’s indigenous Maori community. But plans to introduce bilingual road signs featuring both the English and te reo Maori languages have sparked a divisive, racially charged debate ahead of the country’s looming general election.

New Zealand – or Aotearoa as it is known to the Maori – recently hosted a public consultation on whether to include te reo Maori on 94 types of road signs, including for place names, speed limits, warnings and expressway advisories.

The idea, according to the national Waka Kotahi NZ Transport Agency (whose name means “traveling together as one”), is to promote “cultural understanding and social cohesion” with the Maori community, which makes up almost a fifth of New Zealand’s population of 5.15 million.

But the idea hasn’t gone down well with right-wing opposition parties, who have attacked the signs claiming they will jeopardize road safety. An extra language will mean less space for the English words, the theory goes, and smaller type will be harder for motorists to read.

“Signs need to be clear. We all speak English, and they should be in English,” the main opposition National Party’s spokesman Simeon Brown told reporters, insisting the signs could confuse people “traveling at speed.”

That claim prompted criticism from the ruling Labour Party government, with Prime Minister Chris Hipkins accusing the opposition of thinly disguised racial politics. “I’m not entirely sure where they are going with this unless it’s just an outright dog whistle,” he said.

While the National Party has since insisted it is not opposed to bilingual signs “per se” – rather, it says, it wants the government to prioritize other things like fixing potholes and improving traffic networks – the issues has sparked heated debate in the run up to the vote in October where Labour are facing a tough fight to hold onto power.

For many in the Maori community, the plan is as much about signposting and preserving their cultural heritage as it is about understanding road directions.

Slightly less than a quarter of New Zealand’s 892,200 Maori speak te reo Maori as one of their first languages, according to the latest government data.

While opponents use this as an argument against the signs – pointing out that 95% of New Zealanders speak English according to the most recent census in 2018 – supporters use the same data as an argument in favor.

Part of the reason that te reo Maori is not so widely spoken is that back in New Zealand’s colonial era there were active efforts to stamp it out. The Native Schools Act 1867 required schools to teach in English where possible and children were often physically punished for speaking te reo Maori.

That led to a decline in the language that the New Zealand government of today is trying to reverse. It wants to preserve the language as part of the country’s cultural heritage and sees bilingual signs as one way of encouraging its use.

As Maori language expert Awanui Te Huia, from the Victoria University of Wellington, put it: “Having bicultural signage allows us to see our language as part of our daily surroundings and contributes to the development of a bilingual national identity.”

To this end the government in 2018 launched a five-year plan aimed at revitalizing the language. Five years ago just 24% of New Zealanders were able to speak “more than a few words or phrases” of te reo Maori; by 2021 that had risen to 30%.

Over the same period, support for bilingual signs rose from 51% to 56%.

The longer term vision is that by 2040, 85% of New Zealanders will value te reo Maori as a key part of their nationality; 1 million people will be able to speak the basics, and that 150,000 Maori ages 15 or above will use it as much as English.

For Professor Tania Ka’ai, director of The International Centre for Language Revitalisation at Auckland University of Technology, bilingual signs are at least a move in the right direction.

“I would describe it as a ‘work in progress’ because the language is still at risk of dying and it does not deserve to die – no language does,” Ka’ai said.

While the transport agency acknowledges some people have “safety concerns” over the plan, it points to the example of Wales in the United Kingdom, where it says signs featuring both English and Welsh have managed to “improve safety” by catering to speakers of the two most common local languages.

It also says the parallel between New Zealand and Wales will be “particularly salient if te reo Maori becomes understood more widely in the future” – as the government is hoping.

Several other experts have downplayed the suggestion bilingual signs pose a hazard. Even so, the issue is not entirely clear cut.

Kasem Choocharukul, an engineering scholar who specializes in traffic behavior, told CNN there is no evidence that bilingual road signs in themselves negatively impact a driver’s comprehension.

However, design and placement of road signs, as well as the languages and the context in which they are used, have to be treated with care, said Kasem, associate dean of the engineering faculty of Chulalongkorn University in Thailand.

Research by the University of Leeds suggests road signs consisting of four lines, or more, are likely to slow drivers’ response time significantly.

Kasem said that in cases where signs featured multiple languages all based on the same alphabet – for instance, both Welsh and English are based on the Latin alphabet – greater care was needed to differentiate them, such as by using different colors or font sizes.

“The primary objective of these standards is to guarantee that all road signs are unambiguous, uniform, and legible to all,” he said.

Essentially, poor design can be dangerous, not multiple languages, if done badly.

The example of Wales – situated more than 10,000 miles away from New Zealand – isn’t as random as it may seem.

Commentators say there are a host of uncomfortable parallels between the fortunes of te reo Maori and Welsh, which was also once in danger of dying out but has since witnessed a resurgence.

At the same time as 19th century European settlers in New Zealand were punishing students for speaking te reo Maori, the British government was actively discouraging the use of the Welsh language, or Cymraeg, in the wake of widespread social unrest.

In 1847 (20 years before New Zealand’s Native Schools Act) a British government report into Welsh linked the language to stupidity, sexual promiscuity and unruly behavior, prompting a drive to remove the language from local schools.

This led to the notorious punishment known as the Welsh Nots. These were planks of wood with the initials W.N. on them that would be hung around the necks of students caught speaking the language in school.

The turning point for Welsh came a century later, following a series of civil disobedience campaigns by the Welsh Language Society in the 1960s. One of these campaigns involved activists defacing and removing English-only signs on streets and roads. Bilingual road signs began to spring up.

Three decades later, and the British Parliament was actively encouraging the use of Welsh.

In 1993, it passed the Welsh Language Act to ensure the language shares the same status as English during day-to-day business in Wales. The language is now spoken by more than 900,000 people in Wales, out of a population of more than 3 million.

James Griffiths, author of “Speak Not: Empire, Identity and the Politics of Language” and a former CNN journalist, said Wales was a prime example of how sound policies could revive a native language, but he noted that, as in New Zealand, there had been resistance from some quarters.

“I think for a lot of people, if they speak the language of the majority, they don’t appreciate the type of recognition and representation of having it on road signs,” he said.

Across the Irish Sea, bilingual signs bearing both Irish Gaelic and English have existed in the Republic of Ireland dating back to the start of the 20th century.

Other commentators draw parallels to how the US state of Hawaii has used road signs to encourage use of Olelo Hawai’i which, like te reo Maori, is a Polynesian language.

Before the passing of the Hawaii State Constitutional Convention in 1978, which made Hawaiian an official language of the the state, there had been concerns it might go extinct.

In the 1980s, teaching of Hawaiian in schools began to pick up momentum and parents began making greater efforts to pass the language on to later generations, said Puakea Nogelmeier, professor emeritus of Hawaiian Language at the University of Hawaii.

This momentum continues to build to this day, with Hawaii’s Department of Transportation last year moving to introduce diacritical markings such as the okina and kahako – dots and lines that indicate glottal stops or longer vowels – to its road signs to help non-native Hawaiian speakers grasp correct pronunciations.

According to a local government survey in 2016, about 18,000 residents now speak Hawaiian at home in a state with a population of more than 1.4 million.

But Nogelmeier says that while it has become more common to hear conversations conducted in Olelo Hawai’i, the battle to revive the language is far from over.

Unlike in New Zealand, where the Maori people reached an agreement with the New Zealand government to preserve te reo Maori under the Maori Language Act 2016, he says the movement in Hawaii is driven primarily by the community, making the cause “more decorative than functional” and akin to “a bit of a hobby.”

Nogelmeier also says that efforts in Hawaii are largely limited to using Olelo Hawai’i for place names, rather than more complicated linguistic uses.

He should know: On Hawaiian buses, it is Nogelmeier’s voice that calls out the names of stops in the local language.

Using indigenous place names also allows outsiders to have a better understanding of how to pronounce words and boost tourism.

Both Wales and New Zealand have some famous tongue-twisters for those unfamiliar with the local language.

Llanfairpwllgwyngyll – or to give it its full title Llanfair-pwllgwyngyll-gogery-chwyrn-drobwll-llan-tysilio-gogo-goch – is a little village on the Welsh island of Anglesey and lays claim to being the longest town name in Europe.

That however it is dwarfed by New Zealand’s own Taumatawhakatangihangakoauauotamateaturipukakapikimaungahoronukupokaiwhenuakitanatahu, a hill near Hawke’s Bay which prides itself as the world’s longest place name.

With New Zealand having wrapped up its public consultation on the signs at the end of June, one other challenge remains should the plan go ahead: ensuring there aren’t any translation bloopers.

One road sign in Wales made national headlines in 2008 when local council officials sought a translation for a road sign that was meant to say: “No entry for heavy goods vehicles. Residential site only.”

Their mistake was to email the in-house translation service and not scrutinize its reply too closely.

Officials requested a sign that read: “Nid wyf yn y swyddfa ar hyn o bryd. Anfonwch unrhyw waith i’w gyfieithy.”

Only later did they realize that is the Welsh for: “I am not in the office at the moment. Send any work to be translated.”

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July 29, 2023
Why are far-right parties on the march across Europe? | CNN

CNN
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While the Anglosphere was wracked by a burst of populism in 2016, most European countries proved remarkably resilient. Long-held grievances in the United Kingdom and United States fueled Brexit and took Donald Trump to the White House, but Europe – seeming at times to look aghast across the Channel and Atlantic – appeared largely immune. Brussels had fretted about a “Brexit domino effect.” In reality, the opposite came to be.

In the five years from 2016, French centrism spurted out a new political party led by Emmanuel Macron that quelled the National Front. Angela Merkel’s resignation passed without populist fanfare and delivered a moderate successor. Mario Draghi, the technocrat par excellence, slid seamlessly from the European Central Bank to Italy’s premiership. Spain even went left.

There were outliers: Jaroslaw Kaczynski in Poland and Viktor Orban in Hungary continued to shape their nations in their populist parties’ image. The far-right Alternative for Germany (AfD) surged to third place in the 2017 federal elections. The billionaire tycoon Andrej Babis gained power that same year – but told CNN at the time he was more like the Czech Michael Bloomberg than the Czech Donald Trump. The story of that period was the so-called populist “wave” cresting early, and not sweeping much away. Voters in European nations largely toed the line.

Today, there is not that same cohesion. The far right is on the march across the continent. Italy’s government under Giorgia Meloni is further to the right than at any point since the rule of Mussolini. The AfD recently won a district council election for the first time, with more victories expected to follow. In France, the perma-threat of a Marine Le Pen presidency grows with every protest against Macron’s government, whether over police violence or pension reform. Far-right parties are propping up coalitions in Finland and Sweden. Neo-Nazi groups are growing in Austria.

And in Spain, the center-left coalition looks set to crumble after elections this weekend, paving the way for the far-right Vox party to enter government for the first time as part of a coalition.

Why did Europe largely avoid the sort of populism that took root in the US and UK in 2016? And why are populist parties now steadily marching into the mainstream across the continent?

It is often said that majoritarian electoral systems – as in the US and UK – help to shut extreme views out, while proportional systems – more common in Europe – welcome them in. Proportional systems give a louder legislative voice to parties like the AfD and Vox; winner-takes-all systems keep them quiet.

For example, the UK Independence Party (UKIP), despite winning more than 12% of the vote, secured only one seat in Parliament in the 2015 general election. Thanks to the UK’s first-past-the-post system, while there was significant support for UKIP’s anti-European Union, anti-immigration platform, it was not concentrated enough in any single constituency to deliver many seats. Nigel Farage, the former leader of UKIP, ran in seven elections but never won a seat – a supposed benefit of majoritarian systems.

But it’s not that simple. Afraid of losing voters to UKIP (and other far-right parties), the governing Conservatives ended up adopting many of its positions. First, holding a referendum on Brexit – then pursuing a hardline form of it. Middle-of-the-road Conservatives found they had to make room in their party for more extreme views, or face losing electoral ground to parties that championed them. The system that was meant to shut extremists out of the building ended up welcoming in their ideas. Farage saw many of his policies implemented without having to win a seat.

By contrast, despite often having extremist parties in the building, almost all mainstream European parties would simply refuse to consider them as potential coalition partners, under the principle of the “cordon sanitaire.” For instance, when the then-National Front leader Jean-Marie Le Pen (father of Marine) unexpectedly defeated the Socialist candidate Lionel Jospin in the 2002 French Presidential election, the Socialists swung their weight behind the center-right candidate Jacques Chirac, delivering him a landslide in the second-round runoff. Despite their ideological differences, the mainstream parties simply refused to cooperate with extremists.

Now, that dynamic has been reversed. Extremist parties that were once excluded from governing coalitions are increasingly propping them up, and the membrane separating the far and center right is proving increasingly permeable.

In Finland, Petteri Orpo – largely seen as dependable and level-headed – only replaced Sanna Marin as Prime Minister in April after allying with the nationalist Finns Party. The party’s Vilhelm Junnila lasted barely a month as finance minister before resigning after allegations he had joked about Nazism at a far-right event in 2019. Swedish Prime Minister Ulif Kristersson relies on the votes of the increasingly Euroskeptic, anti-immigrant Sweden Democrats.

One peculiar feature of this new dynamic is how the far right and center right increasingly use each other’s language. Mainstream center-right parties, fearful of losing votes to more extreme groups, have increasingly begun to adopt their policies. In the Netherlands, Mark Rutte’s run as the second-longest serving leader in Europe ended this month after his new, hardline stance on asylum seekers proved too extreme for his more moderate coalition partners, causing his government to collapse.

Conversely, far-right parties have attempted to sanitize some of their rhetoric, hoping to appear a more credible electoral prospect. After the fatal police shooting of an unarmed teenager, which sparked huge protests in France, Marine Le Pen’s response was markedly restrained.

Philippe Marlier, a professor of French politics at University College London, told CNN that rather than seizing on traditional far-right rallying calls of “riots, ethnic minorities, rebelling against public authorities,” Le Pen’s “low-key” response was tempered “to appeal to a much broader audience than typical far-right voters.” This is part of a “long-term strategy of coming across no longer as a far-right politician, but as someone who eventually – in four years’ time – could be seen as a credible replacement for Macron.”

Italy’s Meloni provided the model for this. When Lega leader Matteo Salvini, a long-term admirer of Vladimir Putin, planned a trip to visit the Russian President in June last year, Meloni took the opposite stance, restating her support for Ukraine and pledging to uphold sanctions against Russia if she was elected, as she then was in September. Using more moderate rhetoric is reaping electoral success for far-right politicians across the continent.

Similarly, Germany’s AfD has begun to speak more seriously about economic policy, echoing traditional conservative values of fiscal prudence. While its flirtation with anti-vax politics may have cost it votes in the 2021 election, it has since enjoyed success in the east of the country, arguing that the government’s commitment to climate policies and supporting Ukraine’s war effort are placing overly burdensome costs on the German taxpayer. These moves suggest far-right parties, while not abandoning their extremist positions, are learning to speak the language of the mainstream to great effect.

All this is to say that the “supply side” of populism warrants as much attention as its “demand side.” It matters not just what voters want to buy, but what – and how – parties are selling. A bottom-up theory of populism suggests that dramatic shifts in public opinion create irresistible “waves” of support that mainstream parties are unable to resist. But, as the American political scientist Larry Bartels points out, there is also a top-down theory: Rather than an unexpected “wave,” there has long been a “reservoir” of populist sentiment in Europe. What matters is how politicians draw on it.

The “demand side” often attributes the rise of populism to economic grievances and a cultural backlash. Financial crises, like that of 2008-2009, or big social shifts, like the European migrant crisis of 2015, are said to provide fertile ground for the seeds of populism to take root. Often the two factors can complement each other: The AfD, for instance, was founded during the Eurozone crisis in opposition to the common currency, but gained more support after adopting anti-Islamic policies following Germany’s welcoming of migrants mostly from the Middle East.

The early 2020s, then, may seem to provide ground more fertile than the previous decade for these sorts of sentiments to grow. The continent has seen the return of inflation and the soaring cost of living; the end of quantitative easing and rising interest rates; increased tax burdens as government balance sheets recover from the Covid-19 pandemic and look to fund net-zero policies and increased defense spending. Recent opinion polls show the issue of immigration is also increasing in salience, as migrants continue to turn up on Europe’s shores.

And yet, recent Eurobarometer polling shows that the public’s perception of the European economy is less bleak than we might expect – and far better than during previous crises. Negative perceptions of Europe’s economy rocketed after the financial crisis, and rose again after the start of the pandemic, but are now net positive. Similarly, trust in the European Union has been on an upward trend since 2015, and trust in national governments has remained broadly constant, but improved since the financial crisis.

And so the recent successes of far-right parties cannot be explained by dramatic shifts in public opinion. Europe has weathered financial and migrant crises before, which did not translate into widespread support for populism.

Instead, what we are seeing is a different sort of populism to the one that wracked the US and UK in 2016: A populism fueled by the collapse of the cordon sanitaire between mainstream conservatives and the far right, and one which may have learned the lessons of its short-lived predecessors.

The defenestration of Boris Johnson and legal travails of Donald Trump perhaps offered the comforting conclusion that populism will inevitably implode: Its policy failures will be too great, the personal foibles of its leaders too unbearable, crass – and potentially criminal.

But, on the continent, there is a newer, smarter brand of populism taking root. Whereas the UK has been content to break international law in pursuit of Brexit and its crackdown on asylum seekers, populist leaders in Europe are taking greater care not to renege on their international commitments. Many are content to wage culture wars at home, while remaining reliable partners abroad.

Orban, then Kaczynski, provided the model for this. Meloni, since, has taken quickly to the craft: Remaining responsible on the continental stage while coldly implementing far-right policies on the domestic one. This weekend, Spain may also set out on this path. After Rutte’s resignation, the Netherlands may too.

A lot depends on the ability of mainstream parties – particularly on the left – to build tents big enough to accommodate their differences, rather than compromising with far-right parties to prop up their coalitions. Spain’s Prime Minister Pedro Sanchez has managed this since 2018, though with dwindling success. His ability – or otherwise – to do so again this weekend may serve as a harbinger of the continent’s future.

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July 21, 2023
Italian government seeks to penalize the use of English words | CNN

Rome
CNN
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Italians who use English and other foreign words in official communications could face fines of up to €100,000 ($108,705) under new legislation introduced by Prime Minister Giorgia Meloni’s Brothers of Italy party.

Fabio Rampelli, a member of the lower chamber of deputies, introduced the legislation, which is supported by the prime minister.

While the legislation encompasses all foreign languages, it is particularly geared at “Anglomania” or use of English words, which the draft states “demeans and mortifies” the Italian language, adding that it is even worse because the UK is no longer part of the EU.

The bill, which has yet to go up for parliamentary debate, requires anyone who holds an office in public administration to have “written and oral knowledge and mastery of the Italian language.” It also prohibits use of English in official documentation, including “acronyms and names” of job roles in companies operating in the country.

Foreign entities would have to have Italian language editions of all internal regulations and employment contracts, according to a draft of the legislation seen by CNN.

“It is not just a matter of fashion, as fashions pass, but Anglomania has repercussions for society as a whole,” the draft bill states.

The first article of the legislation guarantees that even in offices that deal with non Italian-speaking foreigners, Italian must be the primary language used.

Article 2 would make Italian “mandatory for the promotion and use of public goods and services in the national territory.” Not doing so could garner fines between €5,000 ($5,435) and €100,000 ($108,705).

Under the proposed law, the Culture Ministry would establish a committee whose remit would include “correct use of the Italian language and its pronunciation” in schools, media, commerce and advertising.

This would mean that saying “bru-shetta” instead of “bru-sketta” could be a punishable offense.

The move to safeguard the Italian language joins an existing bid by the government to protect the country’s cuisine.

It has introduced legislation to ban so-called synthetic or cell-based cuisine due to the lack of scientific studies on the effects of synthetic food, as well as “to safeguard our nation’s heritage and our agriculture based on the Mediterranean diet,” Meloni’s Health Minister Orazio Schillaci said in a press conference.

Last week, Italy’s ministers of Culture and Agriculture officially entered Italian cuisine into candidacy for UNESCO World Heritage Site status, which will be decided in December 2025.

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April 1, 2023
US defense secretary tells CNN he hasn’t spoken to Chinese counterpart for a ‘couple of months’ | CNN Politics

Washington
CNN
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US Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin told CNN that he and his Chinese counterpart have not spoken for a “couple of months,” with Chinese Minister of National Defense Wei Fenghe refusing to take a call in the wake of the US shootdown of the suspected Chinese surveillance balloon.

“The last time that I talked to him was a couple of months ago,” Austin in an interview with Kaitlan Collins for “CNN This Morning” on Thursday.

“I think we’ll continue … to stress how important it is and hopefully Minister Wei will schedule that call,” Austin added. “He knows where to find me.”

The confirmation leaders of the two largest militaries in the world are not in direct contact comes as the two countries continue to build up their forces in Asia. CNN reported Thursday that the US is planning to increase the number of US troops training Taiwanese forces on the self-governing island in the coming months, something Austin declined to confirm. In recent weeks China accused the US of undermining peace and stability in the region after it strengthened its posture around Taiwan by bolstering forces in nearby Okinawa and Guam.

And tensions significantly escalated at the beginning of the month when a suspected Chinese surveillance balloon was drifting tens of thousands of feet up across the continental United States. President Joe Biden eventually ordered it shot down off the coast of South Carolina after officials determined that the risk the balloon would pose to civilians and property on the ground if shot down outweighed the intelligence collection risk it presented.

Chinese officials claimed that the balloon was a “civilian airship” for research and weather purposes which had drifted off course, though the US reaffirmed it had surveillance capabilities.

Austin told CNN that it’s possible Chinese President Xi Jinping did not know about the balloon, but he would “let the Chinese speak for themselves.”

Austin did emphasize that that while he and Wei haven’t spoken during that period, it doesn’t mean the US doesn’t have other lines of communications open with different Chinese officials.

“You just saw [Secretary of State Antony Blinken] talk to his counterpart in Munich,” he said Thursday. “And so there are diplomatic lines of communication open. But I think for the military, it’s really, really important that we maintain open lines of communication.”

On top of existing tensions, US officials have begun warning partners and allies of intelligence that showed China could provide lethal military aid to Russia’s military in Ukraine. The issue was even raised at the Munich Security Conference over the weekend in a conversation between Blinken and his counterpart, Wang Yi.

“The Secretary was quite blunt in warning about the implications and consequences of China providing material support to Russia or assisting Russia with systematic sanctions evasion,” a senior State Department official previously told reporters.

Russia’s invasion of Ukraine has been ongoing for a year now, with no signs of slowing. Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Mark Milley said at a meeting of the Ukraine Defense Contact Group in Brussels last week that Russia is “now a global pariah” since its invasion of Ukraine, and has lost “strategically, operationally, and tactically.”

Austin added last week from Brussels that they expect to see Ukraine conduct an offensive in the spring against Russia.

Thus far, China has not appeared to actually go through with sending lethal aid to Russia, Austin said in the interview, but it has not been “taken off the table.”

“[T]here’s reputational risk, and of course, I’m sure China would love to enjoy a good relationship with all the countries in Europe,” he said. “And again, if you just look at the numbers of countries around the world, that really think that what Russia has done is horrible, I mean, adding to that, I think China – it would be a very ill-advised step for China to take.”

China has a “lot of capability in terms of munitions and weapons,” Austin added, “and if they provide the substantial support to Russia, it prolongs the conflict.”

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February 24, 2023
South Korea brought K-pop and K-dramas to the world. The Korean language could be next | CNN

CNN
—

There’s never been a better time to learn Korean.

It’s one of the fastest-growing languages in the world, outpacing traditionally popular rivals like Chinese in multiple markets – reflecting the global phenomenon many call the “Korean wave.”

In 2022, Korean was the seventh most-studied language on the learning app Duolingo, according to the company’s annual language report. And it’s seeing particular success in parts of South and Southeast Asia, as the most-studied foreign language in the Philippines, and not far off the top spot in Thailand, Indonesia and Pakistan.

Although Chinese – which for years has been considered as the business language of the future – remains the second most spoken language in the world, thanks in part to the sheer size of China’s population, it has sat in eighth place on Duolingo for the last several years, lagging behind Korean.

Korean is the second most-studied Asian language on Duolingo, only narrowly behind Japanese, according to the language report. Duolingo, which has more than 500 million users internationally, ranks Korean ahead of Chinese, Russian and Hindi, and behind Italian. English and Spanish still sit comfortably in the top two spots.

This rise in interest, experts and teachers say, is thanks to the Korean wave, or “hallyu” – the proliferation of Korean culture internationally.

The last two decades have seen South Korean exports sweep the world, from K-pop and Korean TV dramas to beauty products, fashion and food. The country has become an international cultural juggernaut – so much so that the Oxford English Dictionary added more than 20 words of Korean origin in 2021, saying in a statement, “We are all riding the crest of the Korean wave.”

This phenomenon has been aided by South Korea’s own government, which has worked to spread the country’s cultural influence through music and media since the 1990s. Now, the Korean language could be the next export to go global.

“Compared to the time I started my career, the perceptions of Korea as a nation, Korean culture and society, and the Korean language have gone through a significant, positive change,” said Joowon Suh, director of the Korean Language Program at Columbia University. “Now it is perceived more modern, advanced, marketable, cooler, and hipper.”

For decades, East Asian language studies overseas have mostly been limited to Mandarin Chinese and Japanese.

But that began to change in the past decade after major hits by Korean artists and directors, such as Psy’s 2012 song “Gangnam Style,” the 2019 thriller “Parasite,” the 2021 Netflix show “Squid Game,” and the emergence of BTS, undoubtedly the biggest global stars of K-pop.

Figures show a surge in interest toward the language in the same period.

The number of students enrolled in Korean classes at higher education institutions in the United States leapt from 5,211 in 2002 to nearly 14,000 in 2016, according to data analyzed by the Modern Language Association.

This jump is striking given Korean isn’t easy for non-native speakers to learn. The US State Department lists Korean as a “super-hard language,” meaning it’s “exceptionally difficult” for English speakers and takes on average 88 weeks to achieve professional working proficiency.

Modern Korean follows a phonetic alphabet called Hangul, meaning the syllables are generally pronounced as they’re written – unlike non-phonetic languages such as Chinese, which uses symbols to represent specific meanings.

Suh, the Columbia instructor, said she first began noticing a rise in interest around 2015 – but it has accelerated in the last three to four years. The number of Columbia students enrolling in Korean courses increased by 50% from the 2017 to 2021 academic years, she said.

Other popular languages have seen numbers either plateau or drop over the last decade. US students enrolled in Chinese classes, for instance, jumped significantly from 2002 to 2013, a period marked by China’s massive economic growth and global influence.

But enrollments in Chinese had dipped by 2016, according to the Modern Language Association – coinciding with the deterioration of US-China relations, and the worsening perception of China in the West due to its alleged human rights abuses.

“Students’ interest in foreign language learning in US higher education tends to depend more on the perception or reputation of a country in terms of economy and geopolitics, such as China, Russia or Portugal,” said Suh.

Similarly, in the United Kingdom, the number of higher education students taking Korean courses tripled from 2012 to 2018, according to the University Council of Modern Languages – compared to just a 5% increase for Chinese, and a decline in several European languages like French and German.

Korean’s newfound popularity was no accident, with South Korean authorities jumping at the chance to promote their language on the back of its more successful exports.

“It is the Hallyu that has persuaded Asian countries at the societal level that Korea is really part of the developed, western world,” said John Walsh in his 2014 book on the phenomenon. This shift in perception has in turn boosted the government’s ability to pursue “national interests in the areas of diplomacy, investment, education and trade,” he wrote.

Over the last decade, the Ministry of Education has sent Korean teachers overseas, including several dozen to Thailand in 2017 to teach the language at middle and high schools.

In more recent years, numerous countries including Laos, Myanmar and Thailand have officially adopted Korean as a foreign language in their school curricula, under agreements signed with the Korean education ministry, according to South Korean news agency Yonhap.

Meanwhile, the King Sejong Institute, a government-founded Korean-language brand, has established 244 learning centers worldwide, according to its website.

These efforts aim to “keep the interest of Korean language abroad, which has become widely popular with the Korean Wave,” said the education ministry in a 2017 press release.

“In the long term, Korean language courses in the local school curriculum will serve as a step to foster Korean experts, and thereby strengthening friendly relationships between Korea and other countries,” it added.

Suh cautioned that the Korean wave runs the risk of oversimplifying nuances of Korean culture and society, such as regional differences or class conflicts, while glorifying “anything (Korean) without fully understanding its history.”

But, she added, this simplification could actually benefit the South Korean government as it expands its influence, as something “any rising soft power might have to go through.”

Experts say students come to the table with various reasons for pursuing the Korean language – though certain trends have emerged among regional and ethnic lines.

“The Korean wave is an important factor for non-heritage students,” said Suh, referring to those without Korean ethnicity or heritage who are simply interested in Korean cultural products like movies and K-pop.

Meanwhile, students of Korean descent tend to take Korean classes for more “integrative” reasons, she said – for instance, wanting to live in South Korea, to better connect with their communities and families, or to explore their own Korean identities.

Jiyoung Lee, an adjunct instructor at New York University’s Department of East Asian Studies, pointed to the rise of social media platforms like Instagram and TikTok. These have facilitated international cultural exchanges and “largely influenced” the number of Korean learners, she said.

But Lee, who previously taught Korean in Indonesia and South Korea, also noticed differences among students in different parts of the world.

US students tend to learn Korean “because they are more interested in enjoying culture … and want to talk to their favorite singers or actors,” she said.

By contrast, students in Southeast Asia mostly study Korean to get a job in South Korea, or at a Korean company in their home country, she said, noting the number of Korean brands “establishing themselves not only in Southeast Asia but also in various countries.”

For instance, the Korean entertainment giant SM Entertainment is expanding into Southeast Asia with new Singapore headquarters. Meanwhile, the Korean convenience store chain GS25 has more than 180 outlets in Vietnam, and is set to break ground in Malaysia this year, according to Yonhap.

The expansion of Korean business and pop culture may also be pushing young Southeast Asians to travel to South Korea. Southeast Asians make up more than 40% of foreign students in South Korea, and 30% of foreign residents in the country overall, according to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.

Jeffrey Holliday, who teaches Korean linguistics at Korea University in Seoul (with classes taught in English), said roughly 40% of his students are exchange students, mostly coming from the US. These students tend to be undergraduates, only in Seoul for a few semesters, and nearly all are avid fans of Korean pop culture such as K-pop, he says.

Meanwhile, his foreign graduate students – who tend to be studying there full-time and are seeking jobs in Korea – largely hail from China and Vietnam.

“To me it’s so surprising because when I was in college (in the US) from 1999 to 2003 … there was no-one learning Korean who wasn’t a heritage speaker. I was the only one who wasn’t Korean American,” he said.

“Whereas now, these students come here, they’re very focused, very determined – they really want to learn Korean and they’re here for that.”

Correction: A previous version of this story misstated the placing of Japanese on the Duolingo report. It is the most studied Asian language on the platform.

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January 17, 2023
Racist rhetoric greets increasing population of Latino students in this Tennessee county | CNN

CNN
—

Sitting in the back of a packed room in the Hamilton County Schools administration complex, Clara fought the urge to leave. She had taken the day off from her factory job to be there but was nervous to see a crowd of people supporting a board member who had referred to Latino students as a burden.

On that fall afternoon, the mother of three felt like she carried the weight of those parents who wanted to defend their children but couldn’t show up out of fear, or could not leave their workplaces early to attend the school board meeting. Latino families who call Chattanooga, Tennessee, and its surrounding towns home are not invisible, and they don’t want to be a regular target of racist rhetoric and unequal treatment, she told CNN.

“It hurts when someone speaks without really knowing our people and uses ill words to humiliate our children. It hurts because it’s hard to try to understand (English), be there, arrive on time and support my kids at school,” said Clara, 52, whose two younger sons attend schools in the district.

“I’m not leaving because I want a much better future for my children,” she said.

CNN agreed to only use Clara’s first name to protect her identity out of respect for her safety concerns.

In the months since a Hamilton County Schools school board member suggested the rising number of Latino students who speak little to no English were overwhelming schools, several activists and educators who spoke with CNN said they received anti-immigrant, racist and hateful messages after condemning the remarks.

In this county near the Tennessee-Georgia border, the growth in the Hispanic or Latino population has outpaced the national average. In the past decade, the number of residents who identified as Hispanic or Latino rose nearly 81% or more than 12,000 people, compared to 23% nationwide, according to US Census data.

While the county’s more than 366,000 residents largely identify as White and about 7.4% identified as Hispanic or Latino in the 2020 Census, their presence has pushed a community with a dark racial history to face the inequalities that persist and adapt to a new normal that goes beyond the fractured Black-White paradigm that has characterized the South for a long time.

Although there are ongoing efforts by the city and school officials to better serve Latino families, the demographic shift has also come with reminders of how heavily divided this region is and the fact that many Latinos live afraid of authorities because of their current or past immigration status.

In an interview with The Chattanoogan in late August, Rhonda Thurman suggested the rising number of Latino students who speak little to no English were overwhelming schools. Thurman is a long-time board member representing schools with a majority White student population. She is known for her conservative views as well as her stance on books that have been deemed “inappropriate” for children by some or labeled “critical race theory.”

“It is mind-boggling to me the burden it puts on the schools, the teachers and the taxpayers,” Thurman told the newspaper about the number of Latino students.

“Teachers tell me they cannot give the attention they deserve to the English-speaking students because they have to devote so much time to try to help the Hispanic students catch up,” she said according to the newspaper.

During the board meeting last month, members briefly discussed resources for Latino students offered by the school district or their interest in new initiatives. That was something that Clara said reinforced her frustration over the lack of support for Latino families and her conviction to overcome the fear that some people of color have toward those with conservative views.

“I’m not afraid of speaking up and share my opinion, it’s where we live. This is the South and this area is absolutely closed (minded) in many aspects,” she said.

The Hamilton County Schools district comprises 76 institutions and serves 45,000 students. About 19% of students, or 8,702, are Hispanic but not all of them have limited English proficiency.

There are 5,039 students considered English Language Learners currently enrolled, data shows. Diego Trujillo, director of the district’s English as a New Language Program, said Spanish is the top language for ELL but students speak more than 100 different languages, including Arabic, Mandarin, Vietnamese and five Mayan dialects.

“When we think about English learners, there’s this association strictly to folks that are Spanish speaking, and when you look across the district we’re seeing a diversity of language,” Trujillo said.

The school district declined to comment specifically on Thurman’s comments. Thurman has denied that she specifically called children a burden. She told CNN the number of Latino students were “burdening the system” and the school district was dealing with things it had not faced before.

“Different people say different words and some people just jump on it because I happen to be a conservative and a Christian and some people just don’t like that,” Thurman said.

Semillas, a non-profit group focused on racial and educational justice for the Latino community, has called for Thurman’s resignation and for a new task force to create an action plan that would better support the needs of Latino students and parents. Their online petition has garnered nearly 1,400 signatures.

“While some programming has been developed over the years, Latinx community members have seen little to no proactive action to actually take a moment to meet and listen to the challenges and barriers Latinx and immigrant students and parents face each and every day,” said Mo Rodriguez-Cruz, the group’s co-founder and field director.

Taylor Lyons, co-founder of the local parent group Moms for Social Justice, said negativity toward Hispanic students is just the latest in a list of “hot button” issues that have been the focus of conservatives who live in the county. Over the past several years, Lyons said, conservatives have flooded school board meetings to fight mask and Covid-19 vaccine mandates as well as books in school libraries, which made her group subject of threats and accusations. In 2018, Moms for Social Justice launched an initiative to help teachers stock classrooms with books.

“What it tells us is that you have a small but very loud minority of extremists, who are very uncomfortable with the cultural change around them. They’re uncomfortable with the demographic change,” Lyons said.

In Chattanooga, the county seat that largely touts itself as progressive, residents are seeing the demographic shift manifest itself in many aspects of their lives.

At The Howard School, a high school that is the pride of the city’s Black community, numerous photos of its Black alumni decorate the hallways, but most of its current students speak Spanish and are of Guatemalan descent. Most evenings, families can sit on wooden bleachers at amateur soccer matches and cheer as Spanish-language music blasts on speakers. In the city’s Rossville Boulevard, there has been an influx of Guatemalan restaurants and other businesses that proudly display the country’s flag or its national soccer team jersey.

As the tensions spurred by changes in the student body came to light in recent school board meetings, students and teachers at two schools (Howard and East Side Elementary) in the district opted to keep focusing on creating an inclusive environment around them.

When Daisy Hernandez walked to her first class at The Howard School three years ago, she heard the chatter of her peers in English, Spanish and Mam, the Mayan language spoken in Guatemala and by her parents. There, the 17-year-old said she doesn’t see or feel the animosity that families like hers often experience while living in the South.

“I see Howard as a school that helps us out in knowing other people. I’ve seen Black students talk to Hispanic students. I think that’s beautiful because we are becoming one,” said Hernandez, who is the high school’s student body president.

The Howard School is the largest high school in the county and one of 10 schools in the district where Hispanic students surpass the number of students of any other racial or ethnic group. The number of English Language Learners at those schools this year represents 56% of all ELL students in the district.

For decades, the school was known for predominantly serving Black students, but enrollment data shows that at least half of the student body has been Hispanic in the past five school years.

At the start of the day, students listen to Assistant Principal Charles Mitchell read announcements in English and then in Spanish. The tradition, which began five years ago and required him to learn a new language, is one of the many ways “we go beyond our means just to include everybody,” Mitchell said.

Jose Otero, an English as a New Language teacher who has been at the school for the past four years, said most Hispanic students at Howard are Guatemalan and fall into two major groups. Like Hernandez, some children were born and raised in Chattanooga to immigrant parents, and others recently migrated from Guatemala, El Salvador or Mexico along with their families or by themselves.

All students, Hispanic or Black, have different realities and different experiences, Otero said, and one thing that helps them connect with each other has been sports, especially soccer.

Most of the 40 soccer players at Howard are Guatemalan and the larger school community has taken an interest in the team because they’ve been district champions in recent years, said Otero, who is also the school’s head soccer coach.

“The kids are starting to appreciate each other’s culture and want to be a part of it. I think with time, there’s gonna be more Guatemalan kids playing basketball and baseball and football, and there’s gonna be more Black kids playing soccer,” Otero said.

About two miles east of the high school, teacher Amanda Edens and her fifth-grade students at East Side Elementary finished reading “Esperanza Rising” by Pam Muñoz Ryan, a novel about a young girl who flees Mexico and settles in a farm camp in California.

Edens, whose Spanish is limited, said she used the book to teach her students the curriculum while also connecting with them. They are mostly Hispanic, she said, and they enjoyed giggling every time she pronounced the Spanish phrases and words scattered throughout the book.

The 37-year-old teacher is facing the challenging task of navigating a state law that requires public schools to teach only in English and serving a fast-growing number of students who are not fluent in the language.

But it’s something that Edens and other teachers in Hamilton County told CNN they embrace and said it’s far from being a burden.

“There’s obviously the challenge of how am I going to help a child attain educational success when we don’t speak the same language and I’m giving them complex fifth grade texts in English,” Edens said.

“It’s not necessarily an easy thing, but it is super rewarding when that child starts asking: ‘can I go to the restroom?’ in English, or when they’re speaking Spanish to me and I recognize what they’re saying well enough to communicate back,” she added. “But I’ve never felt burdened by that.”

At the elementary school, English as a New Language teachers “push in” or join the general education classes and work with small groups to reduce the time the students are away from their classroom. Trujillo, the director of the district’s English as a New Language Program, said that type of language acquisition model is part of the work he hopes to achieve at more schools as the district works to have ENL programs at most campuses. In the past, he said, students were taken to a different campus to get language instruction if their schools did not offer the program or had ENL teachers.

Andrea Bass, one of the ENL teachers at East Side Elementary, said the school staff respects and actively honors their students’ first language and culture. Many of the students are from Guatemala, and their families, who speak Spanish or Mayan dialects, are constantly engaged in their education despite the language barriers, she said.

When Edens, Bass and other teachers heard their students might have been referred to as a burden, they signed a letter calling the remarks “offensive to those students, their families, and those of us who teach them.”

“Our students don’t always have a voice and neither do their families,” Bass said. “I felt like it was my duty to speak up for them.”

That sense of duty comes from seeing how many parents are afraid to speak up or advocate for themselves but nonetheless put a lot of their trust in educators, Bass said.

The Latino or Hispanic community in Hamilton County, including Chattanooga, has grown and changed since Clara moved there nearly two decades ago. Yet, the challenges many families face remain the same.

When Clara left her hometown in central Mexico, she went from working a desk job that required her to wear high heels and suits to factory jobs in Chattanooga, where sneakers and jeans are the norm. A change that was even more demoralizing, she said, would come on her son’s first day at school when she “realized that I had become illiterate.”

“I could not speak English, I couldn’t have a conversation with my son’s teacher. It was very frustrating,” she said.

Not much has changed for the increasing number of Latino families in the county, many who relocated from the neighboring state of Georgia after a state law that authorized police to investigate the immigration status and arrest undocumented immigrants went into effect in 2011. But city and school officials have launched initiatives in the past year hoping to address their needs.

The city created the Office of New Americans last year to connect immigrant and refugee communities with city resources, including translation services and helping them with citizenship and naturalization paperwork.

“It’s a way to make sure that we are empowering the people who are coming to Chattanooga and empowering our immigrant community to really be able to flourish,” said Esai Navarro, the office’s director.

Navarro said the key is “emphasizing inclusion versus assimilation.”

Meanwhile, the school district opened its International Welcome Center to assist international students with enrollment and connect them with support services. The center has helped 224 families since it opened last year.

The melting pot of races, languages and cultures that Hamilton County and Chattanooga are seeing is everything Hernandez, the high school student, has known ever since she was born. What some see as a new normal is simply her reality – something she recently wrote about in a poem:

“My left starred shoulder: red, white, blue”

“My right striped shoulder: Quetzal white, light blue..”

“A girl: two countries, one world, growing stronger, forever longer”

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December 3, 2022
Charlize Theron faces backlash after saying Afrikaans, her mother tongue, is dying out | CNN

CNN
—

Oscar-winning actress Charlize Theron is facing fierce criticism in South Africa after saying her mother tongue, Afrikaans, is “a dying language.”

The “Monster” and “Tully” star made the comments on Monday’s episode of the “Smartless” podcast, saying that the language that she grew up speaking was fading out.

Theron, 47, who revealed she only learned to speak English fluently when she moved to the United States at 19, said there’s “about 44 people still speaking” Afrikaans.

“It’s definitely a dying language, it’s not a very helpful language,” she told hosts Jason Bateman, Sean Hayes and Will Arnett.

Theron’s remarks soon sparked a social media debate in South Africa. While some branded her ill-informed, others agreed that Afrikaans was a “dead language.”

“Charlize Theron is a legend!” one Twitter commentator wrote. “Indeed Afrikaans is a dead language. It belongs in the past. It’s a tool once used to oppress Africans.”

Another Twitter user said: “This statement was made by Charlize Theron to appease Hollywood. I do not concur with her. As with all other languages, the Afrikaans language must be preserved.”

Tim Theron, a South African actor and director of no relation to Theron, commented under a clip of the podcast shared on Instagram: “We’re extremely proud of Charlize and everything she has achieved … but we’re also very proud of our diversity and our amazing and beautiful official languages, of which Afrikaans is one.

“It’s not a ‘dying language’, and it’s not only spoken by 44 people. It’s spoken by millions of people, there are new songs and poems being written every day, movies made etc.”

CNN has contacted Theron’s representatives for further comment.

On Thursday, the Pan South African Language Board (PanSALB), which was set up to promote multilingualism in the country, responded with a statement calling Theron’s comments “disturbing,” adding that stats show Afrikaans is the third most spoken language in the country.

“These comments made by Ms Theron perpetuate the persistent misconception that Afrikaans is only spoken by white ‘boere’ South Africans, which could not be farther from the truth as 60% of the people that speak the language are black,” the statement said.

The PanSALB went on to add that Theron was held in high regard by South Africa and needed to “continue the commendable work of using her platform to highlight some of the critical socioeconomic issues that affect the continent including the importance of participating in public life using one’s mother tongue.”

Afrikaans, a language first introduced by Dutch colonial settlers and imposed on non-whites by the apartheid regime, is one of 11 official languages recognized in South Africa. It includes words from Asian Malay, Malagasy, Khoi, San, Xhosa, French and Portuguese.

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November 18, 2022
Chinese are criticizing zero-Covid — in language censors don’t seem to understand | CNN

Hong Kong
CNN
—

In many countries, cursing online about the government is so commonplace nobody bats an eye. But it’s not such an easy task on China’s heavily censored internet.

That doesn’t appear to have stopped residents of Guangzhou from venting their frustration after their city – a global manufacturing powerhouse home to 19 million people – became the epicenter of a nationwide Covid outbreak, prompting lockdown measures yet again.

“We had to lock down in April, and then again in November,” one resident posted on Weibo, China’s restricted version of Twitter, on Monday – before peppering the post with profanities that included references to officials’ mothers. “The government hasn’t provided subsidies – do you think my rent doesn’t cost money?”

Other users left posts with directions that loosely translate to “go to hell,” while some accused authorities of “spouting nonsense” – albeit in less polite phrasing.

Such colorful posts are remarkable not only because they represent growing public frustration at China’s unrelenting zero-Covid policy – which uses snap lockdowns, mass testing, extensive contact-tracing and quarantines to stamp out infections as soon as they emerge – but because they remain visible at all.

Normally such harsh criticisms of government policies would be swiftly removed by the government’s army of censors, yet these posts have remained untouched for days. And that is, most likely, because they are written in language few censors will fully understand.

These posts are in Cantonese, which originated in Guangzhou’s surrounding province of Guangdong and is spoken by tens of millions of people across Southern China. It can be difficult to decipher by speakers of Mandarin – China’s official language and the one favored by the government – especially in its written and often complex slang forms.

And this appears to be just the latest example of how Chinese people are turning to Cantonese – an irreverent tongue that offers rich possibilities for satire – to express discontent toward their government without attracting the notice of the all-seeing censors.

In September this year, US-based independent media monitoring organization China Digital Times noted numerous dissatisfied Cantonese posts slipping past censors in response to mass Covid testing requirements in Guangdong.

“Perhaps because Weibo’s content censorship system has difficulty recognizing the spelling of Cantonese characters, many posts in spicy, bold and straightforward language still survive. But if the same content is written in Mandarin, it is likely to be blocked or deleted,” said the organization, which is affiliated with the University of California, Berkeley.

In nearby Cantonese-speaking Hong Kong, anti-government demonstrators in 2019 often used Cantonese wordplay both for protest slogans and to guard against potential surveillance by mainland Chinese authorities.

Now, Cantonese appears to be offering those fed-up with China’s continuous zero-Covid lockdowns an avenue for more subtle displays of dissent.

Jean-François Dupré, an assistant professor of political science at Université TÉLUQ who has studied the language politics of Hong Kong, said the Chinese government’s shrinking tolerance for public criticism has pushed its critics to “innovate” in their communication.

“It does seem that using non-Mandarin forms of communication could enable dissenters to evade online censorship, at least for some time,” Dupré said.

“This phenomenon testifies to the regime’s lack of confidence and increasing paranoia, and of citizens’ continuing eagerness to resist despite the risks and hurdles.”

Though Cantonese shares much of its vocabulary and writing system with Mandarin, many of its slang terms, expletives and everyday phrases have no Mandarin equivalent. Its written form also sometimes relies on rarely used and archaic characters, or ones that mean something totally different in Mandarin, so Cantonese sentences can be difficult for Mandarin readers to understand.

Compared to Mandarin, Cantonese is highly colloquial, often informal, and lends itself easily to wordplay – making it well-suited for inventing and slinging barbs.

When Hong Kong was rocked by anti-government protests in 2019 – fueled in part by fears Beijing was encroaching on the city’s autonomy, freedoms and culture – these attributes of Cantonese came into sharp focus.

“Cantonese was, of course, an important conveyor of political grievances during the 2019 protests,” Dupré said, adding that the language gave “a strong local flavor to the protests.”

He pointed to how entirely new written characters were born spontaneously from the pro-democracy movement – including one that combined the characters for “freedom” with a popular profanity.

Other plays on written characters illustrate the endless creativity of Cantonese, such as a stylized version of “Hong Kong” that, when read sideways, becomes “add oil” – a rallying cry in the protests.

Protesters also found ways to protect their communications, wary that online chat groups – where they organized rallies and railed against the authorities – were being monitored by mainland agents.

For example, because spoken Cantonese sounds different to spoken Mandarin, some people experimented with romanizing Cantonese – spelling out the sounds using the English alphabet – thereby making it virtually impossible to understand for a non-native speaker.

And, while the protests died down after the Chinese government imposed a sweeping national security law in 2020, Cantonese continues to offer the city’s residents an avenue for expressing their unique local identity – something people have long feared losing as the city is drawn further under Beijing’s grip.

For some, using Cantonese to criticize the government seems particularly fitting given the central government has aggressively pushed for Mandarin to be used nationwide in education and daily life – for instance, in television broadcasts and other media – often at the expense of regional languages and dialects.

These efforts turned into national controversy in 2010, when government officials suggested increasing Mandarin programming on the primarily-Cantonese Guangzhou Television channel – outraging residents, who took part in rare mass street rallies and scuffles with police.

It’s not just Cantonese affected – many ethnic minorities have voiced alarm that the decline of their native languages could spell an end to cultures and ways of life they say are already under threat.

In 2020, students and parents in Inner Mongolia staged mass school boycotts over a new policy that replaced the Mongolian language with Mandarin in elementary and middle schools.

Similar fears have long existed in Hong Kong – and grew in the 2010s as more Mandarin-speaking mainlanders began living and working in the city.

“Growing numbers of Mandarin-speaking schoolchildren have been enrolled in Hong Kong schools and been seen commuting between Shenzhen and Hong Kong on a daily basis,” Dupré said. “Through these encounters, the language shift that has been operating in Guangdong became quite visible to Hong Kong people.”

He added that these concerns were heightened by local government policies that emphasized the role of Mandarin, and referred to Cantonese as a “dialect” – infuriating some Hong Kongers who saw the term as a snub and argued it should be referred to as a “language” instead.

In the past decade, schools across Hong Kong have been encouraged by the government to switch to using Mandarin in Chinese lessons, while others have switched to teaching simplified characters – the written form preferred in the mainland – instead of the traditional characters used in Hong Kong.

There was further outrage in 2019 when the city’s education chief suggested that continued use of Cantonese over Mandarin in the city’s schools could mean Hong Kong would lose its competitive edge in the future.

“Given Hong Kong’s rapid economic and political integration, it wouldn’t be surprising to see Hong Kong’s language regime be brought in line with that of the mainland, especially where Mandarin promotion is concerned,” Dupré said.

It’s not the first time people in the mainland have found ways around the censors. Many use emojis to represent taboo phrases, English abbreviations that represent Mandarin phrases, and images like cartoons and digitally altered photos, which are harder for censors to monitor.

But these methods, by their very nature, have their limits. In contrast, for the fed-up residents of Guangzhou, Cantonese offers an endless linguistic landscape with which to lambast their leaders.

It’s not clear whether these more subversive uses of Cantonese will encourage greater solidarity between its speakers in Southern China – or whether it could encourage the central government to further clamp down on the use of local dialects, Dupré said.

For now though, many Weibo users have embraced the rare opportunity to voice frustration with China’s zero-Covid policy, which has battered the country’s economy, isolated it from the rest of the world, and disrupted people’s daily lives with the constant threat of lockdowns and unemployment.

“I hope everyone can maintain their anger,” wrote one Weibo user, noting how most of the posts relating to the Guangzhou lockdowns were in Cantonese.

“Watching Cantonese people scolding (authorities) on Weibo without getting caught,” another posted, using characters that signify laughter.

“Learn Cantonese well, and go across Weibo without fear.”

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November 11, 2022
Soccer lexicon: ‘Squeaky bum time’ and ‘park the bus’ added to Oxford English Dictionary | CNN

CNN
—

Soccer’s lexicon is a rich reservoir of often curiously contorted cliche and phrasing, frequently the subject of parody.

Now, the linguistic ingenuity of two of the most influential coaches in modern football – Alex Ferguson and Jose Mourinho – have been officially recognized by the Oxford English Dictionary (OED).

Ferguson’s phrase “squeaky bum time” and Mourinho’s “park the bus” comment were two of 15 football-themed OED additions ahead of the World Cup in Qatar later this year.

“While the OED already covered a large number of football terms, from catenaccio to nutmeg to water carrier, this select batch of additions fills a few gaps in our formation,” the dictionary said in a statement.

The term “squeaky bum time” originated in a 2003 media conference when Ferguson was looking to heap pressure on Manchester United’s English Premier League rival Arsenal.

“They have a replay against Chelsea and if they win it they would face a semifinal three days before playing us in the league,” said Ferguson.

“But then they did say they were going to win the treble, didn’t they? It’s squeaky bum time and we’ve got the experience now to cope.”

The OED defines Ferguson’s phrase as a “a reference to the sound of someone shifting restlessly on plastic seating during tense closing stages of a contest.”

Current AS Roma coach Mourinho, who is famed for his influence on British culture – including a cameo appearance in English rapper and singer Stormzy’s latest music video – has also made the OED cut.

The OED’s definition of the former Chelsea manager’s “park the bus” is “to play in a very defensive way, typically by having the majority of outfield players close to their own goal and showing little attacking intent.”

“As we say in Portugal, they brought the bus and they left the bus in front of the goal,” Mourinho said after Chelsea’s 0-0 draw against Tottenham in 2004.

“I would have been frustrated if I had been a supporter who paid £50 [around $56] to watch this game because Spurs came to defend. I’m really frustrated because there was only one team looking to win, they only came not to concede. It’s not fair for the football we played.”

Some of the other football-related OED entries are: “Total Football” (a brand of attacking, possession-based football often credited to the Netherlands), “Row Z” (the furthest seat from the sideline in a stadium), “False No. 9” (a player who starts in the striker position but drops deeper in the field) and “Trequartista” (an Italian expression describing a player who plays in the spaces between the midfield and strikers).

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October 5, 2022