15 February 2011 Last updated at 00:10 GMT, By Geeta Pandey, BBC News, Banka village, Uttar Pradesh
A new goddess has recently been born in India. She’s the Dalit Goddess of English.
The Dalit (formerly untouchable) community is building a temple in Banka village in the northern Indian state of Uttar Pradesh to worship the Goddess of the English language, which they believe will help them climb up the social and economic ladder.
About two feet tall, the bronze statue of the goddess is modelled after the Statue of Liberty.
“She is the symbol of Dalit renaissance,” says Chandra Bhan Prasad, a Dalit writer who came up with the idea of the Goddess of English.
“She holds a pen in her right hand which shows she is literate. She is dressed well and sports a huge hat – it’s a symbol of defiance that she is rejecting the old traditional dress code.
“In her left hand, she holds a book which is the constitution of India which gave Dalits equal rights. She stands on top of a computer which means we will use English to rise up the ladder and become free for ever.”
Considered to be at the bottom of the traditional Hindu caste system, the Dalits have been oppressed and discriminated against for centuries.
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Tags: English
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(AFP) – 8 hours ago
JAKARTA — Indonesian is the top Asian language used on Facebook and the fifth most popular in the world, according to a new study of languages used on the social networking site.
More than 20 million Bahasa Indonesian speakers are now Facebook members, the survey by research company Inside Network found.
English is the most common language, with over half of Facebook’s 400 million-plus users — followed by Spanish, French and Turkish.
But Indonesians are way ahead of the Asian pack, despite patchy communications infrastructure and little computer access for many of the country’s 234 million people.
And it could lead to money-making opportunities, according to the California-based research company’s Inside Facebook site, which tracks the social networking giant’s rapid spread across the planet.
“As Facebook continues to grow around the world, and add the bulk of its new users in countries outside of the United States, users? language may become an increasingly important factor for marketers and developers,” the report said.
It underlined the importance of tailoring the site to different cultures and localities.
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Tags: Indonesian
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Posted on Wed, May. 12, 2010 By Kathryn Canavan, For The Inquirer
Scholarship America, the administrator for some of the country’s largest scholarships, receives a few applications each year that really stand out – because they use a language other than English.
It’s not Spanish. And it’s not Chinese.
Tucked into their pleas for $10,000 packages rewarding academic prowess is text-speak, said spokeswoman Janine Fugate.
“OMG,” you say. “Dat dznt sound 2 gd :(”
(Translation: Oh, my God. That doesn’t sound too good.)
It’s enough to make teachers and professors across the country retreat under their dictionaries. But the ubiquitous language – a creative shorthand that results from typing on a minuscule keypad – is a hard habit to break for students who sometimes text more than they talk. As the most prevalent communication used by anyone age 12 to 22, text-speak is seeping into the most formal of correspondence on college campuses: e-mails to professors, tests and term papers, and recommendation requests.
“They’re much more careless with how they write,” said Cheryl Copeland, associate professor of English at Camden County College, who sees evidence of texting in e-mails, in quizzes, in homework, and sometimes in papers. Although she always reads them, to reinforce the need for proper grammar Copeland tells students she won’t answer any e-mails with nonstandard abbreviations.
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Robert McCrum. The Observer, Sunday 9 May 2010
‘Throw away your dictionaries!’ is the battle cry as a simplified global hybrid of English conquers cultures and continents. In this extract from his new book, Globish, Robert McCrum tells the story of a linguistic phenomenon – and its links to big money.
Globalisation is a word that first slipped into its current usage during the 1960s; and the globalisation of English, and English literature, law, money and values, is the cultural revolution of my generation. Combined with the biggest IT innovations since Gutenberg, it continues to inspire the most comprehensive transformation of our society in 500, even 1,000, years. This is a story I have followed, and contributed to, in a modest way, ever since I wrote the BBC and PBS television series The Story of English, with William Cran and Robert MacNeil, in the early 1980s. When Bill Gates was still an obscure Seattle software nerd, and the latest cool invention to transform international telephone lines was the fax, we believed we were providing a snapshot of the English language at the peak of its power and influence, a reflection of the Anglo-American hegemony. Naturally, we saw our efforts as ephemeral. Language and culture, we knew, are in flux. Any attempts to pin them down would be antiquarianism at best, doomed at worst. Besides, some of the experts we talked to believed that English, like Latin before it, was already showing signs of breaking up into mutually unintelligible variants. The Story of English might turn out to be a last hurrah.
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Tags: English, Globish
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By Erin McKean, May 2, 2010
The eruption of the Eyjafjallajökull volcano in Iceland has disrupted the journeys of tens of thousands of travelers, cost airlines more than $2 billion so far, and, quite possibly, altered the ecosystem of the entire planet.
But it has also been a magnificent spectacle, not least for its sudden effect on the language. Unless you just happen to be an Icelandic volcanologist who also maintains jet engines, everything about Eyjafjallajökull has been new and surprising. The most obvious new ”word,” of course, is the name of the volcano itself, a gorgeously unpronounceable (for non-Icelandic speakers) arrangement of vowels and consonants. On the website I run, Wordnik, the page for Eyjafjallajökull was visited more than 10,000 times during the first few days of the eruption, making it our top word for the week.
Bloggers and other news sources have taken up the challenge of steering English speakers toward the best possible approximation of the volcano’s name. ”AYE-yah Fyat-lah Yir-kutl” is the one that I’ve found easiest to use — although I still can’t say it quickly. Pronunciations by news reporters varied so much that one Icelandic website ran an article titled ”Múhaha” about how funny (to Icelandic ears) the mispronunciations were. Spelling it isn’t any easier — Eyjafjallajökull has been called, with only a bit of overstatement, the most cut-and-pasted word ever.
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Project aims to provide Bible in every one of the world’s languages.
By Krista Kapralos. Published: April 19, 2010 06:49 ET
SANGHA, Mali — It had been more than 50 years since the first Christian missionaries came to Dogon Country, so it was hard for many to remember the words they once used to describe how to sacrifice a goat to an animist god.
Josue Teme, 39, became a Christian as a teenager and spent years avoiding animism. But when he took a job translating the Bible’s Old Testament into Toro So, one nearly two dozen Dogon languages, Teme and his translation partner, Timothee Kodio, knew there was only way to learn the words they needed to translate ancient Israelite practices.
The men left Sangha, a small town perched atop a nearly 100-mile-wide cliff, and inched down to visit animist leaders in the villages carved into the rock.
The animists are used to questions. European anthropologists who traveled here last century reported that Dogon holy men had long known about stars unseen by the naked eye, among other cosmic and biological wonders. Since then, scientists and tourists have swarmed the cliff villages, craving an audience with a holy man or a glimpse of an animist ritual.
Some holy men rejected Teme’s questions, suspicious of the religion that drew thousands of Dogon from the beliefs of their ancestors. Others welcomed him, grateful that their words would live on, even if through Christianity.
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04:44 PM CDT on Friday, April 9, 2010. By TOM MAURSTAD / Media Critic
Let’s say you have a bit of good news you want to share with someone and you’re tapping out a text (because, seriously, who does phone calls anymore?). Or perhaps you’ve just received a good-news e-mail and you want to respond with some sort of quick-and-easy affirmation.
At some distant point in our communication-technology evolution – say, a couple of years ago – you might have gone with something like “hooray!” in the first instance and a cheery “congrats!” in the second. But we’ve come a long way on our less-is-more learning curve. Today you would just issue a three-tap “yay.”
For all of its instant ubiquity in the electronic environs of texting and e-mail, “yay” is a relatively new word – a variation on the very old word “yea.” Instead of being pronounced like its one-letter-longer cousin “yeah,” it rhymes with its opposing counterpart “nay.”
Do a Google search, now the definitive tool for perusing online culture, and you’ll find it all over the place.
So why would a word that’s been around a few centuries suddenly go from “yea” to “yay”? The answer simply could be that it looks the way it sounds.
“Language is inseparable from the means by which we communicate,” says Bryan Crable, a rhetoric expert and professor of communications at Villanova University in Pennsylvania. “Until recently, standardized grammar and spelling have been important to America because of its investment in printed culture.
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07-26) 04:00 PDT Prague, –
Lucie Kundra is something of a feminist rebel – not because she wouldn’t take her husband’s name when they got married in 2008, but because she did.
She adopted his surname exactly as it was and in doing so defied centuries of tradition and the wishes of her own mother. That’s because she refused to add the customary feminine suffix “ova” to the end of her husband’s name, as the Czech language normally dictates; she answers to Lucie Kundra, not Lucie Kundrova.
The three letters were a step too far for the 27-year-old charity worker.
“I really didn’t want ‘ova’ because (it means) you are owned by your husband,” Kundra says. “Language is a huge part of culture and socialization, and if we want to change relations between women and men and promote equal opportunities, this is something we have to deal with.”
Though still a small minority, more and more young Czech women are grappling with that question as women make further inroads in Czech society and inch closer to parity with men.
But it’s a tough row to hoe when the entire structure of the Czech language is stacked against you, when deviating from the linguistic norm not only can raise eyebrows but even get you fired. Self-expression still has its limits here in a country that was under the thumb of Soviet totalitarianism until 20 years ago.
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Tags: Czech
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