Starting Points: language

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Jul 26, 2010

Indonesians’ Focus on Language Is Often English

Kemal Jufri for The New York Times

Children learning to prepare coffee at Kidzania, an amusement park in Jakarta that lets children try out jobs; both Indonesian and English are used there

By NORIMITSU ONISHI

JAKARTA, Indonesia — Paulina Sugiarto’s three children played together at a mall here the other day, chattering not in Indonesia’s national language, but English. Their fluency often draws admiring questions from other Indonesian parents Ms. Sugiarto encounters in this city’s upscale malls.

But the children’s ability in English obscured the fact that, though born and raised in Indonesia, they were struggling with the Indonesian language, known as Bahasa Indonesia. Their parents, who grew up speaking the Indonesian language but went to college in the United States and Australia, talk to their children in English. And the children attend a private school where English is the main language of instruction.

“They know they’re Indonesian,” Ms. Sugiarto, 34, said. “They love Indonesia. They just can’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. It’s tragic.”

Indonesia’s linguistic legacy is increasingly under threat as growing numbers of wealthy and upper-middle-class families shun public schools where Indonesian remains the main language but English is often taught poorly. They are turning, instead, to private schools that focus on English and devote little time, if any, to Indonesian.

For some Indonesians, as mastery of English has become increasingly tied to social standing, Indonesian has been relegated to second-class status. In extreme cases, people take pride in speaking Indonesian poorly.

The global spread of English, with its sometimes corrosive effects on local languages, has caused much hand-wringing in many non-English-speaking corners of the world. But the implications may be more far-reaching in Indonesia, where generations of political leaders promoted Indonesian to unite the nation and forge a national identity out of countless ethnic groups, ancient cultures and disparate dialects.

The government recently announced that it would require all private schools to teach the nation’s official language to its Indonesian students by 2013. Details remain sketchy, though.

“These schools operate here, but don’t offer Bahasa to our citizens,” said Suyanto, who oversees primary and secondary education at the Education Ministry.

“If we don’t regulate them, in the long run this could be dangerous for the continuity of our language,” said Mr. Suyanto, who like many Indonesians uses one name. “If this big country doesn’t have a strong language to unite it, it could be dangerous.”

The seemingly reflexive preference for English has begun to attract criticism in the popular culture. Last year, a woman, whose father is Indonesian and her mother American, was crowned Miss Indonesia despite her poor command of Indonesian. The judges were later denounced in the news media and in the blogosphere for being impressed by her English fluency and for disregarding the fact that, despite growing up here, she needed interpreters to translate the judges’ questions.

In 1928, nationalists seeking independence from Dutch rule chose Indonesian, a form of Malay, as the language of civic unity. While a small percentage of educated Indonesians spoke Dutch, Indonesian became the preferred language of intellectuals.

Each language had a social rank, said Arief Rachman, an education expert. “If you spoke Javanese, you were below,” he said, referring to the main language on the island of Java. “If you spoke Indonesian, you were a bit above. If you spoke Dutch, you were at the top.”

Leaders, especially Suharto, the general who ruled Indonesia until 1998, enforced teaching of Indonesian and curbed use of English.

“During the Suharto era, Bahasa Indonesia was the only language that we could see or read. English was at the bottom of the rung,” said Aimee Dawis, who teaches communications at Universitas Indonesia. “It was used to create a national identity, and it worked, because all of us spoke Bahasa Indonesia. Now the dilution of Bahasa Indonesia is not the result of a deliberate government policy. It’s just occurring naturally.”

With Indonesia’s democratization in the past decade, experts say, English became the new Dutch. Regulations were loosened, allowing Indonesian children to attend private schools that did not follow the national curriculum, but offered English. The more expensive ones, with tuition costing several thousand dollars a year, usually employ native speakers of English, said Elena Racho, vice chairwoman of the Association of National Plus Schools, an umbrella organization for private schools.

But with the popularity of private schools booming, hundreds have opened in recent years, Ms. Racho said. The less expensive ones, unable to hire foreigners, are often staffed with Indonesians teaching all subjects in English, if often imperfect English, she added.

Many children attending those schools end up speaking Indonesian poorly, experts said. Uchu Riza — who owns a private school that teaches both languages and also owns the local franchise of Kidzania, an amusement park where children can try out different professions — said some Indonesians were willing to sacrifice Indonesian for a language with perceived higher status.

“Sometimes they look down on people who don’t speak English,” she said.

She added: “In some families, the grandchildren cannot speak with the grandmother because they don’t speak Bahasa Indonesia. That’s sad.”

Anna Surti Ariani, a psychologist who provides counseling at private schools and in her own practice, said some parents even displayed “a negative pride” that their children spoke poor Indonesian. Schools typically advise the parents to speak to their children in English at home even though the parents may be far from fluent in the language.

“Sometimes the parents even ask the baby sitters not to speak in Indonesian but in English,” Ms. Ariani said.

It is a sight often seen in this city’s malls on weekends: Indonesian parents addressing their children in sometimes halting English, followed by nannies using what English words they know.

But Della Raymena Jovanka, 30, a mother of two preschoolers, has developed misgivings. Her son Fathiy, 4, attended an English play group and was enrolled in a kindergarten focusing on English; Ms. Jovanka allowed him to watch only English TV programs.

The result was that her son responded to his parents only in English and had difficulties with Indonesian. Ms. Jovanka was considering sending her son to a regular public school next year. But friends and relatives were pressing her to choose a private school so that her son could become fluent in English.

Asked whether she would rather have her son become fluent in English or Indonesian, Ms. Jovanka said, “To be honest, English. But this can become a big problem in his socialization. He’s Indonesian. He lives in Indonesia. If he can’t communicate with people, it’ll be a big problem.”

Jul 1, 2010

In Japan but surrounded by U.S. influence, Okinawa struggles with split identity

In Okinawa, once an independent kingdom, pay is low, jobs are few and many are angry about a liberation that's turned into an endless American military occupation. For Okinawans in America, many feel a desire to stay tied to their roots.

By Chico Harlan
Thursday, July 1, 2010; A01

CHATAN, JAPAN -- These days, when Melissa Tomlinson describes her fraught relationship with the United States, she speaks in English, the language she once rejected.

She grew up here on the island of Okinawa. Her mother was Japanese, and her father was an American who served in the U.S. Army, came to Okinawa, fell in love, fell out of love, then fell out of touch.

"I had plans to track him down, find him and punch him in the face," said Tomlinson, 22. "I just wanted to figure out my identity."

Tomlinson's family tensions illustrate the complex cultural clashes that dominate the politics of Okinawa and, lately, relations between what have been the world's two largest economies as they cope with a rising China and a belligerent North Korea.

For the more than 60 years since the end of World War II, native Okinawans and U.S. troops stationed on nearby bases have developed deep, passionate and generation-spanning ties that complicate political and diplomatic debates about the future of the U.S. military here.

Those passions have recently claimed the head of one Japanese prime minister, Yukio Hatoyama, who had called for the Americans to be booted off Okinawa, and caused his successor to sharply tone down his party's assertive stance toward the United States.

A vocal majority of Okinawans still demand closing the Futenma Marine Corps Air Station. American officials, citing proximity to North Korea, China and Southeast Asia, insist it remain in Okinawa. Japan, in its attempt to mediate, has only frustrated both sides.

The current resolution, which Prime Minister Naoto Kan says his government will honor, calls for Futenma's eventual relocation to a less populated region in the north of the island. Kan apologized last week for the "heavy burden" facing Okinawans.

Many locals on this Pacific island hosting more than half of the 47,000 U.S. troops stationed in Japan complain most commonly about the noise, congestion and crime. But emotional blood ties and cultural confusion amplify those concerns. Tormented by her identity, Tomlinson said she has tried to kill herself "a couple times" in the past two years.

Tomlinson said she struggles to convince herself -- and others -- that she is truly Japanese and Okinawan. She called her identity "ambiguous" and said her feeling of being an incomplete person has sometimes led to deep depression.

A generation of biracial Okinawans know about intercultural relationships, writ small. They know about romance and separations, child-support battles and reunions. They know that Japanese children refer to their biracial peers as "halfs," and nowadays, they know of the local American-Asian school, for biracial children, where those kids are taught to call themselves "doubles."

Okinawa's demographics separate it from mainland Japan. Here, the rates of single-parent households and divorce are twice the national average. At the American-Asian school, 70 percent of the 80 students come from single-parent households, Principal Midori Thayer said.

"Unfortunately, some kids never live with their father, but they cannot lose their DNA," she said. "Their body shows that they are not 100 percent Japanese."

Denny Tamaki, 50, the local representative to the Japanese parliament, knows only that his father, an American serviceman whom he has never met, was named William.

When William returned to the States and Tamaki's mother decided not to follow, she burned his photos and letters. When they moved to a new home, she didn't give him their new address. When Tamaki turned 10, his mother took him to a government office, where they officially changed his first name to Yasuhiro.

Tamaki knows little English and wants Futenma moved off Okinawa because "it feels like we're living under occupation." But he has a passion for American music -- Aerosmith, for instance -- and American television shows.

A decade ago he tried to track down his father, with no luck. When his kids ask about their grandfather, he tells them that it would take the detectives from "CSI: Miami" to find him.

Search for a father

Tomlinson's mother and father were married on Okinawa, and then moved together to Georgia after his tour on the island ended in 1975. Tomlinson was born in Hinesville, Ga., while her father was stationed at Fort Stewart.

Tomlinson's parents separated when she was 3; she returned to Okinawa in 1990 with her mother. Her father retained custody of their two older children, who stayed in the United States with him.

Growing up, Tomlinson said, she remembered nothing about the separation, and never spoke to her father or siblings. "I've had to live with some tough decisions," said Melissa's father, who requested that his name not be used.

Tomlinson said her conflicted feelings were often fueled by her mother, who told her she looked "like an American" and tried to hide her from her co-workers. She said they fought frequently, and she told her mother: "Why did you have me? I want to be a Japanese, but I don't get to choose."

In school, her dual identities battled. Sometimes she was an American who didn't speak proper English. Sometimes she was a Japanese who didn't look Japanese. For several years, she tried to forget every English word she knew.

During high school, she said, a teacher encouraged her to learn English because she would need it if one day she wanted to track down her father. "Maybe you can hear the truth," the teacher told her. "You should know both sides."

At the University of the Ryukyus, Tomlinson tried to find English-speaking friends. She watched American television without the subtitles. Still, she confided to friends that she felt depressed.

From her mother, Tomlinson had heard only nasty tales about her father, who was once stationed at the Army's Torii base. After her junior year in college, in spring 2009, she decided to try to find him and left school for a time.

In March, her U.S. military ID card, a privilege from a relationship she never had, was expiring. The Army passed along her father's address. She e-mailed him, asking for him to sign the required forms for a new ID.

Weeks later, she heard back from the father who had not seen her since she was 3.

"Hi Melissa, Hearing from you, to say the least, came as quite a shock," he wrote. "I was not aware that you could speak English let alone read or write it. The last time we had contact, and I am sure you do not remember it, you could only speak Japanese. Trying to bridge the gap with words after all this time would be futile. In life sometimes we have to make decisions that we don't know if they are right or not, but we have to live with them."

Tomlinson read and reread the e-mail. She discussed it with friends, and together they parsed the words. Their relationship continued, e-mail by e-mail, and she learned that he liked fishing, and that he missed Okinawa, and that he says he has thought about her every day.

For all these years, he wrote, he avoided contact because he didn't want her to be torn between parents.

"It would have made your life miserable," he wrote.

Jun 14, 2010

Belgian Vote Widens Divide Between Flemish- and French-Speaking Regions

Francois Lenoir/Reuters

Bart de Wever's Flemish nationalist party won the most parliamentary seats, putting Belgian unity at risk.

By STEPHEN CASTLE and STEVEN ERLANGER

BRUSSELS — The move to break up Belgium gathered pace on Sunday as a separatist won an emphatic election victory in Flanders, the more prosperous Dutch-speaking region of the divided nation.

A stunning electoral success for Bart de Wever’s Flemish nationalist party, which won the most parliamentary seats, is a significant new challenge to the fragile unity of a federal country where tensions between French and Dutch speakers run deep, and where voters in one region cannot vote for parties in the other.

It has also injected a new element of uncertainty into Europe at an especially difficult time for the European Union, struggling with serious problems over its finances and currency.

Belgium is due to assume the rotating presidency of the European Union in less than three weeks. But it is likely to take months to negotiate a new coalition, raising the prospect that Belgium will be struggling to assemble its own government at precisely the time it is supposed to be steering Europe out of a deep crisis.

In 2007, after the last general election, it took the Belgians roughly nine months to form a coalition government, a measure of the centrifugal forces threatening to destroy the already-loose federal state, or to make it even less relevant than it is today.

“We are close to the abyss,” said Lieven de Winter, professor of politics at the Université Catholique de Louvain. “Whether we are five meters or five centimeters away is difficult to say. But Belgians are at a crossroads where they are making a choice on whether they want to live together or not.”

Claiming victory on Sunday evening, Mr. de Wever said that it was too soon for independence, which he favors, for Flanders, the northern part of the country where 60 percent of the population lives. He promised to reach out to French speakers, even as he demanded radical reform of the federal state.

“Don’t be afraid,” he told Belgians. “Have faith in yourselves.”

Mr. de Wever, a 39-year-old political writer, said he would not seek the post of prime minister, which might frighten Francophones, but preferred to concentrate on negotiating “a deal” to reform the state and its finances.

Final results early Monday gave his New Flemish Alliance 27 of the 150 seats in Parliament, a gain of 19 seats, just ahead of the French Socialists, with 26 seats, a gain of six. The Flemish- and French-speaking voters elect different parties, but there is a Flemish Socialist Party as well.

In addition to Mr. de Wever’s party, which got nearly 30 percent of the vote, Flanders gave 12.5 percent of its vote to the far-right separatists of Vlaams Belang and about 4 percent to another populist party, meaning that nearly half of the Flemish electorate voted for separatists. Mr. de Wever’s success appeared to come at the expense of the Christian Democrats of the current prime minister and his Liberal allies.

In French-speaking Wallonia and the capital, Brussels, the French Socialists won about 36 percent of the vote. Their leader, Elio di Rupo, may be asked to become prime minister, which would make him the first Francophone prime minister since 1974.

Perhaps Mr. de Wever’s greatest success has been to make the cause of independence respectable. Other separatist parties like Vlaams Belang were identified with the extremist and xenophobic far-right, which limited their appeal.

By contrast Mr. de Wever is a mainstream politician who argues for the gradual, slow death of Belgium, rather than its immediate dismemberment. “We do not want a revolution,” he said in Brussels last week. “We do not want to declare Flanders independent overnight. But we do believe in a gradual evolution.”

Belgium’s 180-year history contains many of the seeds of today’s difficulties. French-speakers in Wallonia dominated the country for much of the last century. The resentments of Dutch speakers in Flanders, who remember being treated as second-class citizens, run deep. As Wallonia’s traditional industries like coal and steel have declined, the Flemish increasingly feel that they are subsidizing the less productive south.

The parallel political system, in which each region has its own parties, reinforces the divisions. Politicians on either side increasingly have little in common, but have to form a federal coalition anyway.

Though the Czech Republic and Slovakia managed a “velvet divorce” in 1993, such a feat would be more difficult for Belgium, which would have to find a solution for Brussels, a largely French-speaking city that is also the capital of Flanders. Brussels is home to the headquarters of the European Union and of NATO.

While the two regional governments have considerable autonomy, the Flemish parties want to decentralize authority over justice, health, social security, taxation and labor, while the poorer French speakers fear losing federal social security protections.

Few symbols of Belgian unity remain, other than the royal family, the cartoon character Tintin and Brussels itself. There is a national soccer team, but it did not qualify for the World Cup.

Stephen Castle reported from Brussels, and Steven Erlanger from Paris.

Jun 9, 2010

Tweets on Languages

Image via Wikipedia

JohnAMacDougall

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BBC News - Life in #Spanglish for California's #young #Latinos: http://bit.ly/a9RXP7 via @addthis #language #spanish #english #us about 1 hour ago via web

May 20, 2010

Guitar Heroes

Can a battle of the bands help end a brutal insurgency in India?

By Jeremy Kahn

Image credit: Sanjit Das

The young man warming his hands over a bucket of coals looks nervous. He opens his mouth wide, like a python swallowing a deer, then snaps it shut. “I’m trying to relax my jaw,” Lui Tzudir says. Tzudir is the 26-year-old front man for an alternative-rock band called Original Fire Factor, or OFF. Huddled nearby, the band’s two guitarists—one with dreadlocks, the other with headbanger-long hair—tune and retune their instruments while the drummer beats out a rhythm on the back of a chair. In little clusters around the cold, concrete room, other bands perform similar preshow rituals. The air smells of adrenaline, like a locker room before a high-school track meet.

The members of OFF look like the sort of Asian cool kids you might find jamming in a garage in Palo Alto or Seoul—but those places are worlds away. I am backstage at the Hornbill National Rock Contest, a battle of the bands held each December in Kohima, the capital of Nagaland, a forgotten corner of northeast India near the border with Burma. The contest seeks to crown India’s best unsigned rock act. For OFF and the other bands, winning means $10,000 and a chance at national recognition—perhaps even a record deal. But the stakes are higher for the state government, which set up the competition. It is betting that rock and roll might help end one of the longest-running insurgencies in Asia.

The rock contest is a modern addition to the larger Hornbill cultural festival, a kind of anthropological fair designed to showcase the folkways of the Nagas, the 30 or so related tribes that inhabit this region of mist-and-jungle-clad hills. The Nagas once had a fearsome reputation as warriors and headhunters. (At the festival, men of the Konyak tribe wear distinctive family heirlooms called yanra—necklaces strung with little human heads made of brass, one for every enemy decapitated in battle.) They resisted British rule until 1880, when they reached an uneasy accommodation with the colonial administration. As the British prepared to leave after World War II, the Nagas sought to establish their own country, and when neither London nor the newly independent India consented, they started an armed insurrection that has lasted 55 years, claiming thousands of lives. Today, convoys of the Assam Rifles—the Indian paramilitary force whose heavy-handed tactics have turned its motto, “Friends of the Hill People,” into an Orwellian joke—patrol Kohima with their faces hidden by black scarves, assault rifles at the ready.

Ending the insurgency is a priority for New Delhi. Naga tribes have become involved in rebellions in other northeastern states, and their example has encouraged other ethnic groups in the region to take up arms. India’s strategic rivals, Pakistan and China, have at times helped to arm and train the Naga rebels, using them as proxy fighters.

But a lasting peace settlement has proved elusive, and with the conflict deadlocked, the rebels have resorted to drug-running, kidnapping, extortion, and fratricidal killings among splinter groups. The violence has scared off desperately needed outside investment. The state’s only heavy industry, a paper mill, shut down in 1992, and nothing has taken its place. (Signs lining the route to the festival promote gathering honey from the forest as “sustainable development.”) With a population of just 2 million, Nagaland has 40,000 unemployed secondary-school graduates—offering the rebels a pool of angry young men without other prospects. In rural villages, the insurgents simply draft farmers’ sons into their ranks.

The members of OFF claim to care little about the separatist movement or its dream of an independent Greater Nagaland. “We are meant to believe certain things,” Tzudir says. “But the younger generation are not interested.”

Nagaland’s popular chief minister, Neiphiu Rio, wants to give these young Nagas alternatives. He has quixotic dreams of turning Kohima into India’s answer to Nashville or Motown. The rock contest is part of that plan. It is designed to connect Nagaland’s musicians to the outside world and, just maybe, to help reconcile feuding Naga tribes. “Any festival brings people together,” Rio tells me. “And when they start working together, moving together, doing things together, that brings people closer and brings understanding and unity.”

Tzudir and his band mates remain cynical. (“It’s nonsense,” Akum Aier, OFF’s long-haired bassist, says when I ask him about a new peace overture from the Indian government.) And yet, in one respect, Rio’s plan is already working. The guys in OFF don’t feel compelled to join an underground faction, and they are beginning to see rock and roll as a ticket out of Nagaland.

The question is: Where to go? Young Nagas feel alienated from “mainland India,” as they call the rest of the country. Most Nagas look East Asian, not South Asian, and those who travel to other Indian cities for education or work sometimes face discrimination or assault. Nagas speak English or Nagamese, not Hindi. They prefer Korean pop or American death metal to Bollywood or Bhangra. In a nation of Hindus, Jains, and Muslims, most Nagas are Baptist, thanks to American missionaries who ventured here in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

“Every morning, I get up wishing I had been born somewhere else,” a 31-year-old engineer confesses to me during a party one night in Kohima.

OFF opens its first set at the festival with “Free Me,” a song that captures this longing for escape and the impossibility of realizing it: “Take me to some place where I can never be / Where I’ll become who I was meant to be,” Tzudir sings, his face aglow in multicolored stage lights. “Politics and sermons, you can’t move me.”

It is sometimes said that the Nagas have lived “10,000 years in a lifetime.” And on the competition’s last night, all 10,000 years seem to go by in a glance: girls in skinny jeans furiously thumb text messages while rubbing shoulders with guys in loincloths and headdresses who carry machetes and wicker baskets decorated with monkey skulls. Thousands of teenagers pack the outdoor amphitheater. The crowd is raucous, fueled by copious local rice beer. A wave of delighted screams washes over OFF, among the hometown favorites, as they take the stage. Throughout their set, fans in the front leap up and down like the colored balls in a toy corn popper.

When the machine-generated fog of rock war finally lifts, OFF emerges as the winner. “We still can’t believe it,” Tzudir texts me from backstage. The next morning I ask him what the band plans to do with the prize money. “Most will go to paying off the loans on our instruments,” Tzudir says, his voice still hoarse. “Then to make a recording of our songs and maybe upload it to the Net, or something like that.”

For a moment, it is easy to believe in the transformative power of rock and roll. The leaders of the largest Naga rebel faction recently met with top Indian officials, and both sides say they are serious about reaching a settlement. But they remain far apart on the details—and in Nagaland, gunfire has a way of drowning out a rocking bass line.

This article available online at:

http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2010/06/guitar-heroes/8108/

Apr 17, 2010

Tensions over renamed Pakistan province overshadow government reforms

Image via Wikipedia

By Karin Brulliard
Washington Post Foreign Service
Saturday, April 17, 2010; A06

HARIPUR, PAKISTAN -- This nation's squabbling lawmakers celebrated a rare moment of unity this week, easily approving constitutional changes to empower Parliament and dump dictator-era rules that stacked control with the president.

But that cohesion was quickly overshadowed by seething protests that laid bare the deep cleavages in a multiethnic country that was cobbled together 60 years ago and has struggled for a common identity ever since.

As politicians hailed the reform package, bloody riots erupted over a provision changing the colonial-era name for the volatile North-West Frontier Province, where this town sits, to Khyber Pakhtunkhwa, a nod to the nearby mountain pass and to the area's Pashtun majority.

The change delighted Pashtuns, who had pushed for it for decades. But it outraged the Hindko-speaking minority that dominates in this small district, Hazara. What was intended as an official acknowledgment of Pashtun identity is prompting calls for a breakaway Hazara province -- and concern that a wave of dormant demands for minority-run regions is on the way.

"This has actually opened a Pandora's box, because of Pakistan's very tenuous polity," said Arif Nizami, former editor of the Nation newspaper in Lahore. "Now, on one side, there are identity issues and ethnic issues and provincial autonomy issues. The other side is religious issues and terrorism. It's a very explosive situation."

Pakistan's population has soared in recent decades, so new provinces could be helpful, Nizami said. But the angry scenes and ethnic tensions evident this week did not portend that such changes would occur smoothly.

Security forces in the city of Abbottabad opened fire on demonstrators, killing at least seven. In Haripur, south of the city where the demonstrations were largest, protesters burned tires, felled trees to block roads and rolled around in packed pickups shouting, "Down with Pakhtunkhwa! We will get our province!"

Hindko-speaking residents -- many of whom identified themselves as ethnic Pashtuns -- said the province's new name would sideline them, further empowering the Pashto-speakers who make up about 70 percent of the province. "If there are any jobs, they are being given to Pashtun people," said Mohammed Azar Khan, 38, a teacher who was chatting with friends in a Haripur sugar shop. "Why should we be ignored? What will be our fate?"

That sounds ironic to Pashtuns, who are Pakistan's second-largest ethnic group but say the Punjabi majority has long oppressed them. The new name, they argued, would fit a pattern: There are minorities throughout Pakistan, but Punjabis dominate in Punjab province, Sindhis in Sindh province and Baluchis in Baluchistan.

For decades, Pashtun nationalists campaigned for an autonomous state, called Pashtunistan, for the Pashtun region straddling the Afghan border. Analysts say the Punjabi-dominated military establishment, which ruled Pakistan for half its existence, came to view the renaming push as one dangerous steppingstone toward secession.

Calls for Pashtunistan weakened over time as a Pashtun presence in the government and military grew and Pashtun regions in Afghanistan became engulfed by a raging Taliban insurgency. But renaming North-West Frontier Province remained a key platform of the Awami National Party, whose stronghold is in the northwest. "It's a symbolic victory for them," said Imtiaz Gul, a Pashtun who chairs the Center for Research and Security Studies in Islamabad. "The dream for Pashtunistan is sort of done. It's not on anymore."

But resentment was palpable this week in the Hazara district, even among those who watched rioters from fields where donkeys grazed or from rusty minibuses stopped by the protesters' roadblocks. The new provincial name should be Hazara-Pakhtunkhwa, some said. Others said the name should not be touched -- colonial or not, people were used to North-West Frontier Province.

Lawmakers had "failed" to gauge public sentiment, said Raja Kamran Khan, a Hazara native and Sindh lawmaker who said he had decided the demonstrators were right. Like others, he pointed out that those in Hazara had powerful cards to play: Their district includes a big dam as well as a large stretch of the Karakoram Highway leading to China.

"This is the right time," he said as tires burned in the distance. "These people have always believed in a strong country and one federal government. But the federal government has neglected them."

Special correspondent Haq Nawaz Khan contributed to this report.

Apr 8, 2010

Language proficiency is Foreign Service's 'greatest challenge,' Negroponte says

Image via Wikipedia

By Joe Davidson
Thursday, April 8, 2010; B03

The site at 21st and E streets NW once was a favorite watering hole for State Department employees seeking something harder than the soft drinks offered in the agency's cafeteria.

Workers from State still meet at that location, presumably for more lofty deliberations than those found in most saloons. The American Foreign Service Association owned the Foreign Service Club, but decided to get out of the restaurant and bar business years ago. In that recently renovated space it sponsored a sober discussion Wednesday on challenges facing Foreign Service officers. AFSA did offer chocolates wrapped in the association's shield, but without booze to loosen up the dialogue, it might have been a far cry from the joint's livelier days.

The forum's main attraction was John Negroponte, who has served, sometimes in a storm of controversy, in a wide variety of foreign policy positions, including as the nation's first director of national intelligence. But neither foreign policy nor his controversies were on the minds of those who gathered to hear his take on some of the challenges they face as Foreign Service officers.

Although the quantity of State Department and Agency for International Development officers has increased steadily in recent years, serious gaps in their number and foreign language proficiency remain.

The "greatest challenge," according to Negroponte, is the need for officers who can speak the languages of the world.

"There is no substitute," said the multilingual Negroponte, "for recruiting, training, deploying, retaining and retraining," officers in languages and geography so they "develop the contacts, the knowledge, the insight, the local and area expertise" needed to help develop America's foreign policy.

Image by rita banerji via Flickr

But State isn't meeting that challenge well enough, according to the Government Accountability Office. In September, it said the department needs a comprehensive plan to address "persistent foreign language shortfalls."

According to the GAO, whose study was current as of October 2008, there are "notable gaps" in State's foreign language capabilities that "could hinder U.S. overseas operations."

Worse yet, some of those gaps are in super-critical countries such as Afghanistan and Iraq.

Nearly one-third "of officers in all worldwide language-designated positions did not meet both the foreign language speaking and reading proficiency requirements for their positions, up slightly from 29 percent in 2005," the GAO reported. About 40 percent of officers in the Near East, South and Central Asia, China and places where Arabic is spoken are language-deficient.

As bad as the numbers are in those countries, the language skill set there is better than in America's war zones. In Iraq, 57 percent of Foreign Service officers lack sufficient language skills. Afghanistan trails far behind, with 73 percent unable to directly communicate with the country's people.

State Department officials told the GAO that the language gap could begin to close next year if it gets requested funding, but they did not say when they expect the language staffing requirements to be fully met.

But the GAO also reported that Foreign Service officers have a different take on the problem.

"Another challenge is the widely held perception among Foreign Service officers that State's promotion system does not consider time spent in language training when evaluating officers for promotion, which may discourage officers from investing the time required to achieve proficiency in certain languages," the report said. "Although HR officials dispute this perception, the department has not conducted a statistically significant assessment of the impact of language training on promotions."

The second challenge cited by Negroponte is the need for State to provide a mix of policies and incentives "in order to optimize the deployment of officers and their families for a substantial majority of their careers."

Last year, President Obama took an important step in making international postings more attractive when he signed legislation that begins to close a pay gap for Foreign Service officers, who do not get locality pay as do other federal employees.

Without that law, Negroponte said, there was a "perverse incentive" for Foreign Service officers to serve in the United States. He advocated greater employment opportunities for spouses of officers abroad -- "that effort has faltered at various times" -- and a reduction in postings to which officers can't take their families. At least, he said, State should "find ways of compensating for that problem."

In another report, the GAO said, "State uses a range of incentives to staff hardship posts, but their effectiveness remains unclear." Despite some progress, the GAO said persistent staffing gaps continue to be a problem.

The GAO made clear to Congress the stark result of these deficiencies: "State's diplomatic readiness remains at risk."

Resources of the Week: Voice of America Pronunciation Guide…and a few others « ResourceShelf

Image by CJ Sorg via Flickr

By Shirl Kennedy, Senior Editor

If you want to sound sophisticated and worldly — or just not embarrass yourself — when discussing current affairs, take a look at the VOA Pronunciation Guide. It’s a repository of pronunciation keys and audio files (mp3) for people and places in the news from around the world. The search form is easily understood — use the “Exact Search” box if you’re sure of how to spell the name, the “Near Search” box if you’re not sure, the “List Lookup” dropdown menu if you want to browse through the entire database, or the “Origin” dropdown menu to view names by country. A Help screen and a Pronunciation Key are available.

An addition resource at this site is a Nations and their Languages guide. This information is culled from the World Almanac and Book of Facts, the Information Please Almanac, and the CIA’s World Factbook.

A few other pronunciation guides we like:

+ Asian Names Pronunciation Guide, from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona

Native speakers who were/are Cal Poly Pomona students provided all sound samples (in .wav format) for Cambodian, Cantonese, Mandarin, Filipino, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Thai, and Vietnamese names.

Image by magdalar via Flickr

HearNames.com: The advanced search form is a gem. The dropdown “Category” menu presents a number of interesting options, such as U.S. Presidents, Armenian Surnames, Russian Names, etc. These are also available via the Name Categories link on the top navigation bar.

+ Pronounce Names: The Dictionary of Name Pronunciation

In today’s international business environment, it is exceedingly important to say your clients name correctly, you CANNOT afford to call Dumass, a Dumb-ass. The internet has removed international boundaries and people are making new friends via email and chat every second, would you not want your friends to be able to pronounce your name correctly?

According to the Wall Street Journal:

Pinky Thakkar (silent “h”), an engineer from Mumbai, started the Web site www.pronouncenames.com after she moved to San Jose, Calif., and mispronounced the “J” in “San Jose,” not giving it the “H” sound used in Spanish words. Properly pronouncing person and place names proved nearly impossible for Ms. Thakkar and her friends from abroad, she says.

More than 75,000 entries, including 38,000 audio files, have been submitted to Ms. Thakkar’s Web site since it launched in 2006. She manages the site with six other volunteers.

+ LanguageGuide.org: You’ll find a variety of volunteer-created resources here. The Pictorial Vocabulary Guides are especially charming. Select a language, choose a category, and then roll your cursor over a letter, number or picture to hear its name pronounced, such as the birds (os pássaros) in Brazilian Portuguese, or sea animals (umi no ikimono) in Japanese.

Apr 6, 2010

Indian Tribes Go in Search of Their Lost Languages - NYTimes.com

Image via Wikipedia

By PATRICIA COHEN

As far as the records show, no one has spoken Shinnecock or Unkechaug, languages of Long Island’s Indian tribes, for nearly 200 years. Now Stony Brook University and two of the Indian nations are initiating a joint project to revive these extinct tongues, using old documents like a vocabulary list that Thomas Jefferson wrote during a visit in 1791.

The goal is language resuscitation and enlisting tribal members from this generation and the next to speak them, said representatives from the tribes and Stony Brook’s Southampton campus.

Chief Harry Wallace, the elected leader of the Unkechaug Nation, said that for tribal members, knowing the language is an integral part of understanding their own culture, past and present.

“When our children study their own language and culture, they perform better academically,” he said. “They have a core foundation to rely on.”

The Long Island effort is part of a wave of language reclamation projects undertaken by American Indians in recent years. For many tribes language is a cultural glue that holds a community together, linking generations and preserving a heritage and values. Bruce Cole, the former chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities, which sponsors language preservation programs, has called language “the DNA of a culture.”

The odds against success can be overwhelming, given the relatively small number of potential speakers and the difficulty in persuading a new generation to participate. There has been progress, though, said Leanne Hinton, professor emerita at the University of California, Berkeley, who created the Breath of Life program in California in 1992 to revive dormant languages in the state.

Representatives from at least 25 languages with no native speakers have participated in the group’s workshops so far, she said. Last month Ms. Hinton and a colleague at Yale received a federal grant to create a similar program based in Washington, D.C.

Of the more than 300 indigenous languages spoken in the United States, only 175 remain, according to the Indigenous Language Institute. This nonprofit group estimates that without restoration efforts, no more than 20 will still be spoken in 2050.

Some reclamation efforts have shown success. Daryl Baldwin started working to revive the dormant language of the Miami Nation in the Midwest (part of the Algonquian language family), and taught his own children to speak it fluently. He now directs the Myaamia Project at Miami University in Ohio, a joint effort between academics and the Miami tribe.

Farther east is Stephanie Fielding, a member of the Connecticut Mohegans and an adviser on the Stony Brook project. She has devoted her life to bringing her tribe’s language back to life and is compiling a dictionary and grammar book. In her eyes language provides a mental telescope into the world of her ancestors. She notes, for example, that in an English conversation, a statement is typically built with the first person — “I” — coming first. In the same statement in Mohegan, however, “you” always comes first, even when the speaker is the subject.

“This suggests a more communally minded culture,” she said.

Now in her 60s, Ms. Fielding knows firsthand just how tough it is to sustain a language effort over time, however. She said she was still not fluent.

“In order for a language to survive and resurrect,” she said, “it needs people talking it, and for people to talk it, there has to be a society that works on it.”

Chief Wallace of the Unkechaug in Long Island already has a willing student from a younger generation. Howard Treadwell, 24, graduated from Stony Brook in 2009 with a linguistics degree. He will participate in the Long Island effort while doing graduate work at the University of Arizona, where there is a specialized program researching American Indian languages.

Mr. Treadwell is one of 400 registered members of the tribe, which maintains a 52-acre reservation in Mastic, on the South Shore. The Shinnecocks have about 1,300 enrolled members and have a reservation adjacent to Southampton.

Robert D. Hoberman, the chairman of the linguistics department at Stony Book, is overseeing the academic side of the project. He is an expert in the creation of modern Hebrew, the great success story of language revival. Essentially unspoken for 2,000 years, Hebrew survived only in religious uses until early Zionists tried to update it — an undertaking adopted on a grand scale when the State of Israel was established.

For the American Indians on Long Island the task is particularly difficult because there are few records. But Shinnecock and Unkechaug are part of a family of eastern Algonquian languages. Some have both dictionaries and native speakers, Mr. Hoberman said, which the team can mine for missing words and phrases, and for grammatical structure.

The reclamation is a two-step process, the professor explained. “First we have to figure out what the language looked like,” using remembered prayers, greetings, sayings and word lists, like the one Jefferson created, he said. “Then we’ll look at languages that are much better documented, look at short word lists to see what the differences are and see what the equivalencies are, and we’ll use that to reconstruct what the Long Island languages probably were like.” The Massachusett language, for example, is well documented with dictionaries and Bible translations.

Jefferson’s Unkechaug word list was collected on June 13, 1791, when he visited Brookhaven, Long Island, with James Madison, later his successor in the White House. He wrote that even then, only three old women remained who could still speak the language fluently.

Chief Wallace said he had many more records, including religious documents, deeds and legal transactions, and possibly a tape of some tribal members speaking in the 1940s.

“When we have an idea of what the language should sound like, the vocabulary and the structure, we’ll then introduce it to people in the community,” Mr. Hoberman said.

While it may seem impossible to recreate the sound of a lost tongue, Mr. Hoberman said the process was not all that mysterious because the dictionaries were transliterated into English.

“Would someone from 200 years ago think we had a funny accent?” Mr. Hoberman asked. “Yes. Would they understand it? I hope so.”