Category: Interesting facts

In general, humans tend to show neural synchrony when they talk, play or sing together. And it has long been recognised that when mothers and their small children play together, their neural activity becomes synchronised.

New research shows that this process takes place between mothers and children even when they are not interacting in their native language, showing that this brain-bonding process is effectively translated along with their thoughts.

By studying mothers and their children at play, first in their native language, and then in another language, and measuring their neural activity, the researchers showed that brain synchrony occurred in either language, as compared to when mothers and children played separately.

The implications of this research are considerable. Parents in bilingual relationships, for example, often acquire their second language later in life, and worry that they will not be able to interact with their children on as emotional a level as the parent using their mother tongue. In fact, the children will experience brain synchrony regardless of the language or languages their parents use with them, and whether or not they are fluent in those languages.

And, of course, motherly love is the ultimate universal language!

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We’ve already written about various different forms of animal communication – and we know that, while animals often communicate in relatively complex ways, they don’t use language as we do.

But when did people actually start to use language?

Shigeru Miyagawa, a linguist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, alongside Rob DeSalle and Ian Tattersall from the American Museum of Natural History have carried out genetic analyses that suggest that our ancestors became cognitively capable of language about 135,000 years ago.

Around that time, the human population started to split, with small groups of people heading off in different directions. Before that happened, there was one small, undivided population of humans. Gradually, as they diverged, the original language they spoke did too, until eventually thousands of languages were being spoken all over the world.

Around 100,000 years ago, we see people starting to express themselves with the drawings and symbols that are a precursor to writing, suggesting further development in language, and also that language enabled the emergence of modern human behaviour by allowing people to discuss things in abstract and conceptual ways using vocabulary and syntax, and to learn about things such as emerging technologies and complex social behaviours from one another.

Today we’re in another period of extremely rapid language development, with images like emojis increasingly communicating complex thoughts and reactions. How will this impact on our behaviour, and on human cultural development, in the future?

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When patients present with conditions like psychosis, their caregivers use language to study their cognitive function and, hopefully, reach a diagnosis that will pave the way to an effective treatment plan.

So far, however, psychiatrists only examine their patients in one language, despite the fact that about half of the people in the world are actually bilingual.

We know that resources are often very tight in medicine, but ideally bilingual patients presenting with psychiatric illness would be assessed in both of the languages they speak, to see if there are any differences between how their illness manifests, depending on the language they are speaking, and whether any future treatment plan can take their bilingualism into consideration.

Also, purely from a research point of view, given that we know that bilingualism offers some protection against age-related cognitive decline, it would be fascinating to explore whether or not – and how – it interacts with the wide variety of psychiatric illnesses people can suffer from.

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Oliver Twist and Sheldon Cooper – two endearing, fictional little boys from very different backgrounds. Oliver, of course, is the brainchild of the great English writer Charles Dickens, and Sheldon, in Young Sheldon, provides the backstory to Sheldon Cooper from popular TV sitcom, The Big Bang Theory. 

From a linguistic point of view, the two characters have one very interesting thing in common. Somehow, neither of them sounds even slightly like the people they’ve grown up with and around. 

The musical Oliver was released in 1968, featuring an adorable little ragamuffin who has had a very difficult start in life. After spending his early childhood in a dreadful orphanage, he is sold into service to an undertaker, and then runs away to join a gang of juvenile pickpockets in London. Tough. And yet, while everyone around Oliver speaks in thick working-class accents, somehow, he speaks in Oxford English with the crisp diction generally used to denote the aristocracy. 

Little Sheldon comes from a much happier background. His blue-collar family loves him, treats him well, and tolerates his extremely irritating idiosyncrasies. Everyone around him, from his family to his preacher, speaks in a broad Texan accent but somehow Sheldon speaks standard American English. 

OK, so maybe Sheldon could have picked his accent up from TV or the radio, or maybe deliberately adopted it, but Oliver certainly couldn’t have. So, what’s going on?

People often associate particular accents with certain social classes and aspirations. The directors of both of the productions under discussion here are cleverly using accent discrimination to make their point. Oliver already sounds like an aristocrat because, although he doesn’t know it, he is one. When his true origins are revealed at the end of the story, he can slide right into his new family already sounding like one of them. And Sheldon can be made to sound ‘cleverer’ because, in the United States, a broad Texan accent is not coded as ‘intellectual’.

We all adjust our accents, unconsciously and sometimes consciously, depending on who we are with and what we are doing. And, whether or not we mean to, in the process we help to reinforce the accent discrimination that is part of almost every language group in the world.

Photo Source: George Cruikshank, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

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When the languages of preliterate peoples die, they disappear forever, leaving at best a trace of themselves in placenames that stay the same even after the dominant language changes.

But what about languages that have a written form, but that are no longer spoken?

Experts may still be able to read these languages, but often they don’t know how they were pronounced, and can only guess.

The Voices of Dead Languages Project at Charles University in Prague is reconstructing what a number of ancient languages, including Akkadian, Babylonian and Hittite, sounded like. They are using AI, alongside traditional linguistic knowledge, to figure out similarities between these dead languages and other living languages that are related to them. By comparing different languages that are all related to the dead language, and finding out what pronunciations they have in common, they can start to see patterns that provide insights into the likely pronunciations of the past.

Of course, the research also poses some interesting linguistic-philosophical questions. Like: can a language truly be ‘dead’ when it lives on in other languages – as, for example, much of Latin persists in the Romance languages? When is a language ‘dying’ and when simply going through a normal process of evolutionary change? Is the difference always clearcut or are there many shades of grey?

Food for thought.

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The many indigenous languages of North America have been under pressure for centuries.

Many are extinct, and many still-living languages are in decline.

One language specialist from Inuvik in Canada’s Northwestern Territories, Lillian Elias, has been working for many years as a translator for the legislative assembly, but she is 82 years old now, and nobody is stepping in to replace her. Just over 400 people speak her language, Inuvialuktun, and as more than half are over fifty, it’s clear that this is yet another sad story of an indigenous language steadily dying out.

The reasons why languages die out are many and complex, with roots in colonial history, social change, and changes to the education system. Government decisions about how experts in minority languages are hired and paid can have an impact too. In Canada, professionals working with indigenous languages are freelancers, while their counterparts providing interpretation and translation services in French (one of Canada’s official languages) are government employees, with better employment and pension rights. It all contributes to an environment that, wilfully or otherwise, treats indigenous languages differently.

It’s a complicated situation, obviously, as many indigenous languages are spoken by relatively few people, who don’t need translation and interpretation often enough to keep someone employed full-time. But there’s more at stake than linguistic human rights, as important as those are. As languages die, so does access to history, culture and traditions that date back through the generations, providing everyone with a fuller, deeper and more nuanced understanding of both the past and the present.

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Whether or not there’s a sort of underlying universal set of rules that governs languages the world over has long been a matter of debate among the linguistics community.

Recently, a team of researchers, led Annemarie Verkerk from Saarland University and Russell D. Gray from the Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, analysed hypotheses about so-called ‘linguistic universals.’ By studying 1700 languages, they figured out that, while languages may sound very different, there are strong recurring patterns among even completely unrelated languages, including preferences for word order, and how grammatical relationships are marked within sentences.

This ongoing research is fascinating not just to linguists and anthropologists but also to researchers working with topics including cognitive development and communication, as they help us to understand which aspects of language are, or could be, truly universal – and therefore part of who we are as a species – and which are influenced by culture and contact.

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Antarctica famously has no permanent human population, and therefore no indigenous ethnicity or language, and yet linguistic researchers have figured out that it has its own dialect, or even several of them.

How could that be?

A 2019 study explored the language use of a team known as ‘the winterers’, scientific researchers spending six months in Antarctica, during which time they lived and worked closely together. While they came from various backgrounds, English was the language of communication. And while they all started out with different accents, over the course of the six months they spent together, their accents gradually became more similar to one another.

Instinctively, we all adjust our speech depending on who we’re talking to, and often adopt aspects of their pronunciation, to make ourselves easier to understand. This is what was happening here, and in a small community of just eleven people, it’s easy to see how they all started to sound more alike.

Another interesting linguistic feature of speech in Antarctica is its slang. The in-group of researchers refer to the cold continent as ‘the ice’ and have coined the term ‘ice shock’ to refer to the experience of having to adjust back to living in the wider world once their research term is over.

Even at the very limits of human existence, language is doing interesting things!

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Great Translators of the World – Sarah Austin

Sarah Austin was born Sarah Taylor in 1793. Her mother, Susannah, ensured that she was educated in Latin, French, German and Italian, among other things. Her husband, John Austin, was a legal scholar and the couple were well-known in London, where they mingled with some of the most noted intellectuals of their day.

Sarah Austin became renowned as a writer and translator, whose work provided much of her family’s income. In 1833, one of her finest works of translation, Characteristics of Goethe, was published, annotated with her notes and criticisms, and in 1840, Leopold von Ranke’s History of the Popes was similarly well-received.

In her later years, Austin argued for the importance of girls’ education, citing as challenges at the time the fact that many female village schoolteachers had not been taught how to deliver a rigorous academic education to girls, despite generally doing their best. Sarah Austin is remembered as the translator who introduced some of Germany’s greatest writings to English audiences. Her approach was strikingly modern; she started each project by communicating directly with the author, inviting them to be actively engaged with her translation work through to publication.

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