7 Bullet Points About Languages - Week 84

Survey, TikTok, How the brain copes with languages, Studying multiple languages, and Khmu!

Hey language lovers,

I hope you all had a magnificent week!

Updates

Mine flew by in an instant.

Between the heavy work I had and moving to the countryside to spend time with my family and feeling sick for the past two days and a half, I barely remember what happened.

Still, I somehow feel quite satisfied with the last week, even though I can’t really pinpoint any specific reason.

This being said, I do think a bit of time off is needed so there won’t be any newsletter for the next two weeks¹ so I can relax a bit and regain more energy to start September.

Well, that’s actually sort of a lie. For two reasons:

1. I’ll be sending the same survey next week (more info right after this)

2. Following talks with my friend Natasha from Theory Gang, I’ve been considering giving more personal updates to my paid subscribers. The first post might be coming later this week!

Now, onto the survey.

I’ve been writing the Lesser-Known Language bullet point for the past month and a half and, with each edition, I’ve seen that part grow longer and nerdier. That’s why I’d like to check if that’s still what you want!

Don’t hesitate to comment—even if you didn’t choose the last option!—to let me know more about what you’re looking for!

PS: This survey lasts 1 week so I’ll send the same one again next week to make sure those of you who missed this one can still answer. (I’ll cross-results to make sure answers from both “results” are counted properly.

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As a reminder, the first two deep-dives of my series about lesser-known languages (LKL) are out and the third one is currently being written.

Dear lovely paid subscribers 🥰, you’ll get an email with another survey early next week to ask you which language you want me to dive into for the fourth deep-dive!²

In this one, you’ll also get to know the next 4 weeks’ lesser-known languages section but don’t tell the others 🤐

Alright, let’s dive into what you came for!

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7 Bullet Points

Each week, I share 7 things about languages.

I hope they can help you improve your journey, tickle your curiosity, and inspire you to keep exploring.

A quick reminder first: I’m not affiliated with any resource so far. Every recommendation you find below comes from my own research and experiences.

🎥 One video

TikTok for language learners and polyglot video creators — By Benny Lewis for the Polyglot Gathering 2021

This talk was incredibly precise and useful for me as someone who doesn’t know much about Tik Tok and tried to stay away from it. Benny gave such good tips to get language-specific videos that I actually got interested and just created two language-specific accounts for German and Mandarin!

It’s a bit inconvenient to not be able to do all with one email address (like I’ve done on YouTube) but luckily I had backup e-mail addresses.

Side note: The video is quite long but the part about consuming content in languages is only 11-minute long (from 12:30 to 23:30)

📚 One article I read

How our brains cope with speaking more than one language — By Nicole Chang on for the BBC

This article was one of the most interesting reads I’ve read on languages this year.

I’ve been asked countless times how I do to not mix my languages when I speak and the answer I usually give is that I do mix them but practice has allowed me to reduce how often it happens.

I figured I had gotten better at “language switching” but it turns out that’s not what I was doing. When switching from language to language, we’re inhibiting the other languages but they are still “active” in our brain. When a mix-up happens, it’s just that the inhibition was not strong enough.

Another surprising fact was to learn the “dominant language” was usually the one more strongly inhibited during these switches, therefore making the speaker slow down in the language they “should” speak “better³.”

If you’re reading this, you’re either already a multilingual person or trying to become one so I highly recommend reading this piece to learn more about what happens in your brain every day!

✍🏽 One article I wrote

How I Balance Learning Multiple Languages At The Same Time

I’ve been studying multiple languages at the same time for so long, it feels normal to me. Fun and frustration go hand in hand to me now.⁴

Still, I love doing it and I understand those who are worried about the mess it could create on the language learning journey. It is possible to do it. And it is possible to stay—somewhat—sane.

And that’s exactly what I tried to share in this piece.

🎧 One podcast episode

The non-native parent - Interview with Misty — The Future is Bilingual

I don’t have any children yet but one thing is sure, I want my future kids to grow up multilingual. For this reason, I’m always interested in other people’s experiences as parents of multilingual children.

In this casual interview, Misty shared her experience with raising her daughter bilingually (French and English) as a native English speaker. Her daughter is still young, under 2, so I reckon the way she deals with it will change later but this is where it all begins.

Misty’s fear of instilling the wrong accent or noun gender to her daughter is a worry I am sure most non-native parents have had. That’s why I found her solution of listening to children's songs with her daughter a particularly good idea.

If you’ve got a very young child, this interview might give you some good ideas!

And if you want to hear another perspective, Heidi Lovejoy’s podcast is filled with those as she has two children she’s been raising in three languages, two of which she’s not fluent in!

🌎 One cultural aspect

Habits at School Around the World

Last week, we talked about cultural traditions around the first day of school. This week, let’s turn to what happens during the school year.

Japanese students have a custom of cleaning their classroom and the school at the end of the day. The goal is to teach the children teamwork and the importance of order. This practice, started from primary school and kept until the end of high school, can also be found in Korea, China, and Taiwan.

How lunch is approached also differs based on the country, as these delicious pictures of school lunches from around the world show. 🤤

In Japan, most students bring a “bento” (弁当) prepared in the morning by their parents, a tradition that has been spreading around the world for the past decade or so.

The Lunch break can vary around the world but the average seems to stand around one hour. As a child growing up in France, I often had 1.5 hours so I was shocked to read that sometimes the lunch period can be a mere 15 minutes in the US!

Most countries in Europe don’t require a uniform anymore but this is still common practice in most countries in Asia, Africa, and South America (except Brazil). This Wikipedia article about uniforms is quite detailed about this.

If you’re more of the visual type of person, you might enjoy this article with many graphics about school times, uniforms, or even hours per day of study

Are there any “uncommon” habits at school in your country? Share them in the comments!

📜 One quote to ponder

“Anything worth doing well is worth doing poorly at first.” — Ray Congdon

🌐 One Lesser-Known Language

Khmu - ພາສຂະມຸ - Language across borders

No, not Khmer! The two languages are just part of the same large family but that’s it.

I fell upon the Khmu through looking at Glossika’s Language Vitality Report and felt I had seen that name before. Digging a bit deeper, it turned out the Khmu ethnicity is one of the 56 minorities in Vietnam I mentioned when I described the Vietnamese culture.

The Khmu people are, however, mostly located in Laos, where they account for 11% of the population, over 700,000 people. They can also be found in Thailand, China, Myanmar, Vietnam, and a few thousand also live in the United States since the Vietnam War. The total population is said to be around 800,000 people.

The Khmu are the indigenous inhabitant of northern Laos, before the Thai and Lao people arrived. Their language had no written form so the culture was passed down through stories told around evening fires.

The Khmu language is a Khmuic language that is part of the Austroasiatic language family. It is the largest language for that family of languages spoken mostly in Northern Laos, Vietnam, and China.

Like other languages that evolved without a script for centuries, the Khmu language has adapted two scripts to survive: the Lao script and the roman alphabet, although the former seems to be the main one used nowadays as the majority of Khmu people speak Lao too. Wikipedia says the Thai script is also used but I haven’t found any proof of that.

There are two main dialects of Khmu, the Western and Eastern ones. The main difference seems to be the tones. There are up to 6 tones in the west, while the east relies on “stops” (voiced, voiceless, aspirated voiceless) and nasal sounds to distinguish words.

An interesting aspect of Khmu is the importance of pronouncing words with either a lax (breathy) or tense (clear) voice. For example:

• /má:n/ (tense) = to bury // /mà:n/ (lax) = to be pregnant

The Khmu language is a Subject-Verb-Object (SVO) language although it seems OVS can also happen. Here’s one of the 117 (!) recordings from the PanGloss project:

Alright, let’s talk grammar. 🤓

Side note: I prefer giving sentences in their original script but the two main resources I used (this book and this book) relied on romanized letters so I’ll do the same for the time being.

The most surprising part of Khmu to me was the existence of “dual pronouns.⁵” I had never heard of such a thing but it seems it also existed in Old English. Taking the first person as an example:

• I (alone): ໂອະ (òɂ)⁶

• We (two people): ອະ (àɂ)

• We (many people): ອິ (ìɂ)

For the second and third persons, you have to add a gender difference (masculine or feminine) for the singular form.

But it doesn’t stop here!

The dual form of You (ສວາ (swáː)) can also imply a third person that isn’t present in the conversation. And this can happen for the dual form of They (ສນາ (snáː)) too! 🤯

Khmu relies heavily on prefixes, infixes, and suffixes.

You’ll also find on page 72 of this PDF a list of 20 final particles indicating all sorts of things like approval, request, negative, invitation, or event emphatic declaration. And that doesn’t include the question markers which are also usually set at the end!

For this week, I’ll leave it at this but I invite you to respond to the survey above so I can make this section all the more interesting to you in the future!

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As always, thanks for reading!
Mathias Barra

1. The next one will be on September 6th.

2. The fourth deepdive will come out on October 3rd, as there will first be the third one coming out on September 5th.

3. I know, that’s a lot of quote marks but these are so subjective I figured I’d leave them in.

4. Probably something I’ll need to look into someday as that’s clearly not a healthy association to make.

5. It’s also the only thing I found written in the Lao script because, for some reason, someone copied the table I had in the Khmu Grammar book but added the script. If only they had done the same with the rest..!

6. The “ɂ” is not a question mark, but the symbol for a glottal stop, ie. cutting the sound with your throat. Think of the some of the British pronunciations of the word “butter” where the “tt” disappears into thin air, like in the Boro accent here