V Международный конкурс научно-исследовательских и творческих работ учащихся
Старт в науке
Могут ли полиглоты и билингвы помочь в сохранении исчезающих языков?
Автор работы награжден дипломом победителя II степени
Полная версия работы доступна во вкладке "Файлы работы" в формате PDF
Introduction
I‟ve been studying English language already for 11 years. It was a difficult line of work and only few years ago I understood that my desire to connect the whole life with languages came from the ability to feel myself comfortable while talking in different languages. When I was 11 years old I decided to take up a new language to study and I‟ve chosen Spanish. I am keen on Latinas culture, so it wasn‟t very difficult to understand language, even if Spanish is not in one language family with English. I didn‟t have enough time to combine my favourite hobby with school work, so I decided to put Spanish language at the second place. This summer I was in another country, which is prefered not only by Russian people but by people from Poland too. I knew that these languages are very similar and I even have Polish surname – Yaderskaya, which means I have some Polish roots. I made up new friend, who lives there, while travelling in summer and now we chat almost every day, trying to understand each other cultures.
Next winter I am going to take the Cambridge Advanced English exam to prove my level of knowledge and in two years I‟m going to study Spanish in the university as the second language. Those facts prove a definition that I‟m not only interested in studying languages but in telling something new about them to others too.
To justify the choice of the theme I would like to demonstrate an example
of language system of the world. According to Ethnologue[1] the 7097 living human languages are distributed in 141 different language families and some of them already are spoken for thousands of years. But in our connected globalized world, the languages which dominate communications and business are placing small languages spoken in remote places under increasing pressure. We study only dominating languages, such as English, Chinese, Spanish, German, French etc., in case of their importance in the 21 century. By the way, such languages as Liki1, Taushiro2 and Dumi3 are exposed to detrimental effect of modern world and going to die out soon. We don‟t talk about those languages in our lessons and even don‟t know history of English language.
To talk about choice of the topic of discussing polyglots, we should refer to the previous information about languages. Nowadays more and more people choose such an effective method of communication as bilingualism, so people won‟t lose the touch with their roots and will be prepared for our contemporary societies. However, the polyglots and bilinguists are natives who can help to save endangered languages [it is discussed in the project work].
The actuality of work: languages and their consequence. Language is thebest way to improve your feelings, so if the language dies out, all the people who speak this language and their culture die too. Nowadays the accent should be done on the studies of history of languages and their structure.
The aim of my project is to create an informative brochure on the subject oflanguages (statics of endangered/extinct languages) and polyglots (advices about studying languages from famous polyglots).
Objects: 1) to investigate the language topic
to learn the history of English language
to find out information about endangered and extinct languages
to define assets about learning English as being a polyglot or a bilingualist
to create an informative brochure “Can polyglots and bilinguists help in saving endangered languages?”
Unit 1. The essence of languages
1.1. Linguistics
Linguistics is the scientific study of language, and involves an analysis of language form, language meaning, and language in context. Linguistics studies not only living or extinct languages but world‟s languages at large.
Branches of linguistics:
Theoretical linguistics (studies language terms and enunciates them as theories)
Applied linguistics (participates in language politics of the state)
Practical linguistics (checks theoretical linguistics by making linguistics experiments)
Empiric linguistics (gains information)
Taxonomic linguistics (describes one concrete language) and comparative linguistics (compares languages with each other)
External linguistics (studies languages in their social structure) and internal linguistics (studies languages as the separate code)
Static linguistics (studies language proficiency) and dynamic linguistics (studies processes connected to language changes)
General linguistics
The subject has become a very technical, splitting into separate fields: sound (phonetics and phonology), sentence structure (syntax, structuralism, deep grammar), meaning (semantics), practical psychology (psycholinguistics) and contexts of language choice (pragmatics). But originally, as practised in the nineteenth century, linguistics was philology: the history of words. Nowadays, the linguistics is one of the most important science in academia.
1.2. Language families
A language family is a set of languages deriving from a common ancestor or "parent." Languages with a significant number of common features in phonology, morphology and syntax are said to belong to the same language family. Subdivisions of a language family are called "branches." (Appendix 2)
"It is estimated that there are more than 250 established language families in the world, and over 6,800 distinct languages, many of which are threatened or
endangered."[2]
Classification of main language families:
The Indo-European family of languages is the family with the biggest amount of languages included. There are such groups as Baltic, Germanic, Celtic, Romance, Hellenic, Indo-Aryan, Albanian, Armenian and Slavic. Slavic group connects Russian, Ukrainian and Belarusian languages which are usually spoken in our mother-land.
Languages from the Sino-Tibetan family of languages are spoken in Asia and the smallest part of Australia. The groups included are Sinitic, Tibeto-Burman, Lolo-Burmese, Bodish, Karenic. This language family has a long history and they are famous for that connection with roots.
Afro-Asiatic languages include languages spoken in West Asia, North Africa, the Horn of Africa and parts of the Sahel. The most famous groups are Chadic, Cushitic, Semitic, Omotic, Berber and others.
Niger-Congo languages and Austronesian languages include such groups as Mande, Katla, Rashad, Atlantic–Congo, Rukai, Tsou, Puyuma.
According to language families description we have an opportunity to see the statistics of languages all over the world.
Chinese is the language with the biggest number of speakers. It contains more than 1,2 billion native speakers and few million speakers all over the world. Chinese language is also one of the most complicated languages to study. It is because of Chinese is a tonal language, in which meaning changes as you change the tone of a word. It has a complex writing system and thousands of characters, which make studying Chinese a formidable task.
Second place by native speakers is taken by Spain. Officially it is used in 31 countries and historically important because of colonizations. Spanish can be referred to the group of languages which are easy to study – only 23-24 weeks to achieve language proficiency. Nowadays, Spanish language can be taken during the Unified State Exam, which shows its importance for future.
English is oficially spoken in 106 countries and appears to be an international language, which we learn as a second language after mother-tongue.
In the 21st century people are under the influence of communicative skills and need to remember lots of information to broaden the mind. We are taught main things –
how to pronounce words correctly, how to write different types of letters or how to write sentences correctly. But we forget the most important part of every studying process – studying history.
To talk about English language roots we have to understand that huge part of English vocabulary is adopted from dialects of other cultures (Appendix 3).
1.3. Endangered languages
According to UNESCO in the near future about half of all languages may lose their last speakers, and then completely disappear. Today, about 40% of the world's languages are on the verge of extinction (Appendix 4). It is important to note that languages die out not only in the modern world, because even in ancient times it happened that they did not leave a trace.
Three main criteria are used as guidelines for considering a language „endangered‟:
The number of speakers currently living.
The mean age of native and/or fluent speakers.
The percentage of the youngest generation acquiring fluency with the language in question.
The disappearance of the language means the loss of knowledge about the culture of the people who speak it. So often the examples of Eskimos having many names of snow, or Africans, giving rice a variety of different definitions, it's quite boring. But did you know that in the language of toratan, whose bearers, inhabiting the Indonesian island of Sulawesi, there are no more than 200 people on the planet, there is a word meaning "Wake up and notice a change in anything"? I open my eyes and find that night has fallen out of bed? Matuwuhou! Graze with the Tuvans-by cogently reindeer in Siberia and want to draw attention to the particularly beautiful five year old neutered male, suitable for rides? The word "Chari" will do the best.
Such languages as Resigaro, Bora, Tikuna have only one native speaker. If something happens to the person, the whole language system disappears. Government of Peru helped to create an app, where you are able to study an endangered language. There you can find some topics on the subject of numbers, colors, food, clothes and others. Scientists say that about 2,500 languages will disappear in the next few decades but studying endangered languages is crucial nowadays and can help in saving our heritage of cultures.
The loss of one more foreign language has consequences much wider than simply losing a vocabulary. Even archived, a dead language may be missing tone, accent, grammar, syntax and context. These verbal traits are often used to reflect a speaker‟s way of thinking as much as the actual choice of words.
Losing a language also can mean losing crucial knowledge about the linguistic group‟s history, culture, or even knowledge about their local environment. For example, being able to choose different words for plants or even the earth they grow in also provides scientists, botanists and academics with
information that might be lost otherwise if these specific descriptions did not have an equivalent word in a more dominant language.
Unit 2. Can polyglots and bilinguists help in saving endangered languages?
2.1. How languages influence on brain
Polyglotism or polyglottism is the ability to master, or the state of having mastered, multiple languages. The word is a synonym of multilingualism, but in recent usage polyglot is sometimes used to refer to a person who learns multiple languages as an avocation. The term "hyperpolyglot" was coined in 2008 by linguist Richard Hudson to describe individuals who speak–to some degree–dozens of languages.
The first known polyglot was Mithridates Eupator, ruler of the Pontic Kingdom. Contemporaries claimed that he knew 22 languages. This helped him to control the army and his subjects, who came from different Nations.
Egyptian Queen Cleopatra is known not only for her beauty and romance, but also as a wise and educated woman, brilliant diplomat and speaker. She knew ten languages.
Giuseppe Mezzofanti, Minister of the Vatican library, read and spoke 60 languages, and wrote poems in 50 of them. According to some reports, he was fluent in 80 languages.
Kato Lomb is a Hungarian writer who became one of the first simultaneous interpreters in the world. Interestingly, in school she was a lagging student. Then she mastered 16 languages, and even wrote a book about her own method of learning languages. The greatest fame was gained as a polyglot. English, Hungarian, Russian, French, German, Chinese – this is an incomplete list of its achievements.
For decades, research into the brain basis of language was limited to the study of the effects of neurological disease and brain lesions on human language processing and production. Nowadays, however, new techniques are allowing researchers to create a picture of a normal brain at work processing language - helping to shed light on the mysteries of language and the brain.
While the practical and social aspects are obvious, multilingualism also has a transformative effect on the brain - improving brain power and changing the way we see the world.
Higher language skills are linked to growth in the hippocampus and areas of the cerebral cortex - associated with memory, thought and action.
A 2012 Swedish MRI study show that learning a language improves cortical thickness - a layered mass of neurons largely responsible for : thought, language, consciousness, memory. This increased size is associated with better memory and sharp thinking in old age. Learning a second language later in life changes the brain in the same way as learning complex motor skills, such as juggling or dancing. A 2013 study by McGill university showed that learning two languages from birth has no effect on the brain.
Polyglots have sharper cognitive skills, keeping the brain persistently alert and active even when only one language is used.
Polyglots are skilled at switching between two systems, writing and structure. The switching between two different structures makes them good multitaskers.
Learning a foreign language involves memorizing rules and vocabulary, which strengthens the mental muscle. This mental exercise improves overall memory, making the polyglots better at remembering lists and sequences.
Polyglots displayed increased concentration on their assignments than their monolingual counterparts. Polyglots are more skilful at focusing on relevant information and removing the irrelevant ones.
Grey matter is responsible for processing language, storing memory and dictating attention spans. Polyglot individuals have denser grey matter compared to monolingual counterparts.
For bilingualists and miltilingualists/polyglots all languages are active. For example, if Russian-German bilingualist is talking to another person in Russian, bilingualists German is competing with Russian. During the conversation person‟s brain suppresses unnecessary language and becomes active.
There is a scientific support to this. When a person tells a monolingual child to give them a marker, monolingual child starts reaching after a marker. Whereas in contrast, bilingual child, who knows Russian too, is looking at some stamps placed next to markers4.
2.2. Can polyglots and bilinguists help in saving endangered languages?
Due to ability of remembering large amounts of information, polyglots are able to save endangered languages.
We have many projects to participate in to save languages but there are some rules which can help the hole planet of languages:
Read a lot of literature to remember classic word formation and vocabulary
Try not to use slang
Don‟t use “bad words” as nowadays speech of teenagers and some adults are even could‟t be heard in classic way
In my opinion, polyglots and bilinguists are able to save languages. But does it matter if we continue killing our languages? Start with yourself and read a history of your mother-tongue.
2.3. The poll
I‟ve asked some people to answer different questions and have analyzed all information I got. The results of the polls showed knowledge of people from 15 to 18 years old in the language sphere.
13 respondents were interviewed
1. What the linguistics is?
1. Science about languages (100%)
Conclusion: linguistics is one of the most popular sciences nowadays.
How many languages do the polyglots know? (Appendix 5)
1-2 (0%)
3-4 (46,2%)
Not less than 5 (38,5%)
Other (15,4%)
43 (17, 6%) of respondents know only one language. More than a half of respondents know two or three languages, which could include as foreign languages as their native. 38 (15, 5%) of respondents know only one language but have an aim to learn others. Only 2 people said they don‟t need languages.
And 18 (7, 3%) of respondents know four and more languages such as Spanish, Italian, German, French, Swedish, Korean, Chinese, Udmurt, Tatar, Kazakh, and others.
Conclusion: topic of polyglots essence is not told to students, so sometimes they are not sure about real facts
What foreign languages do you study? (Appendix 6)
English 100%
German 15,4%
French 30,8%
Spanish 23,1%
Italian 15,4%
Russian 7,7%
Chinese 30,8%
Japanese 7,7%
100% studies English in case of its importance in the 21 century. French and Chinese are studied by nearly the half of respodents - French is usually taught
in many schools as the second foreign language and Chinese is written as the one of the most popular languages to use when going abroad.
Conclusion: topic of studying languages is popular nowadays. Students take up such arduous languages as Chinese and Japanese too.
Is it good to be polyglot? Why?
Yes, it is. You can travel around the world and discover new cultures. (100%) Conclusion: main reason why students study languages is travelling.
What extinct languages do you know?
Latin (53,8%)
Old Church Slavonic (15,3%)
Other (46,1%)
As I investigated, more than 90% of respondents know nothing about linguistics and polyglots. By the way, all of respondents study different languages.
Conclusion
I have come to general conclusions connected with studying languages.
In my work, I showed human‟s influence on languages and languages‟ influence on human‟s brain. It is very important to say that all of my objectives were analyzed and the aim of my project was completed.
The presented work can be used in the lessons of English under the subject
“Languages in the 21 century” or “Endangered languages are closely connected to cultures”.
After the poll was taken, some of my classmates asked the purpose of my work and after presentation of work some of them downloaded an app of Resigaro language!
To sum up, I can definitely say that the work on the project was captivating and I would like to spend some years on studying history of languages, their structure etc.
I‟ve made a booklet in which I wrote the most important information on endangered languages and polyglots. I‟ve spent least costs just about 100 rubles.
All in all, the work of our language system has importance in the 21st century. I hope my project will inspire someone on future research and studying languages.
Read classic literature and remember the roots!
References
https://www.ethnologue.com/
KeithBrown and Sarah Ogilvie, Concise Encyclopedia of Languages of theWorld. Elsevier Science, 2008
https://corp.lingualeo.com/ru/2017/07/10/kak-izuchenie-yazyika-vliyaet-na-mozg/
http://www.bilingualonline.net/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=2060%3Abilin gual-online-princeton&catid=50%3Akabinet-psihologa&Itemid=47&lang=ru
http://community.worldheritage.org/articles/eng/Polyglotism
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polyglotism
Supplements
Appendix 1
Appendix 2
Appendix 3
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Celtic |
bog, clan, crag, glen, pet, slew, slogan, whiskey, trousers |
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Anglo-Saxon |
arm, dark, forgive, house, laugh, man, pillow, read, strong, |
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town, year, woman |
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Latin |
angel, candle, hymn, lobster, martyr, plant, noon, school, |
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sock |
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Old Norse |
bull, club, law, reindeer, wing, slaughter, ransack |
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French |
beef, castle, dragon, judge, market, music, tax, trumpet, |
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war, scarlet, villain, perform |
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Modern English |
avatar [India] |
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kangaroo [Australia] |
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zombie [West Africa] |
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Appendix 4 |
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Appendix 5
Appendix 6
Appendix 7
Appendix 8
1 An Austronesian language spoken on offshore islands of Papua province
2 A language isolate of the Peruvian Amazon near Ecuador (only one native speaker)
3 A language spoken in the area around the Tap and Rava rivers, Thailand
4 Eng. marker ['m:kə] - a pen with a thick writing point for writing or drawing;Rus. марки ['marki] - small pieces of paper with a picture or pattern on it that is stuck onto a letter or package before it is posted, to show that the cost of sending it has been paid