Will one researcher's discovery deep in the Amazon destroy the foundation of modern linguistics?

A Christian missionary sets out to convert a remote Amazonian tribe. He lives with them for years in primitive conditions, learns their extremely difficult language, risks his life battling malaria, giant anacondas, and sometimes the tribe itself. In a plot twist, instead of converting them he loses his faith, morphing from an evangelist trying to translate the Bible into an academic determined to understand the people he's come to respect and love.

Along the way, the former missionary discovers that the language these people speak doesn't follow one of the fundamental tenets of linguistics, a finding that would seem to turn the field on its head, undermine basic assumptions about how children learn to communicate, and dethrone the discipline's long-reigning king, who also happens to be among the most well-known and influential intellectuals of the 20th century

Chronicle of Higher Education 

Security guard with 49 languages wins helpfulness award

 John Bowman, of Leaver Road, Henley, says he is able to greet people in 49 languages and is “working on a few more”.

He said: “I’m a walking phrase book. I don’t consider myself clever — I don’t even know my own mobile phone number — I just have a knack for it.”

Mr Bowman, 61, who works for Securitas at Maidenhead business communications company Avaya, has already won the firm’s regional award for the most helpful guard.

Henley Standard

Language: The Cultural Tool by Daniel Everett – review: The bitter arguments about a language instinct

Native speakers of Pirahã, in the Amazon lowland jungle, have no words for left or right, they use the same term for blue and green, and their definitions of red, black and white turn out to be similes, rather than dedicated words. 

These once-isolated people, a tiny group, have no system of numbers; their sentences cannot accommodate subordinate clauses or other forms of recursion (embedding phrases),  not least because it is a story composed by someone they do not know, about someone they have never heard of, in a time and place that has no meaning for them. 

Full article in the Guardian 

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Specialist language teachers 'urgently required'

England's teacher training agency is urgently recruiting modern foreign language teachers to cope with a surge demand for the subject at GCSE.

The number of pupils set to sit language GCSEs next year has increased by 22% to 52%, it said.
The rise is thought to be tied to the English Baccalaureate, which requires GCSEs in language among other subjects.

BBC news

Why ex-Harvard head Larry Summers is wrong to say students don't need foreign languages

Larry Summers Is Wrong About Languages

March 6, 2012 - 3:00am

Michael Geisler

Soon after 9/11, Mike Wallace, then still the most hard-hitting reporter for “60 Minutes,” sat down with several of the heads of the intelligence community to discuss how the worst terrorist attack in United States history could have happened. At the end of the interview, he asked each of the five or six section heads: “So, tell me, how’s your Arabic?”

Not surprisingly, not one of the section heads spoke Arabic although several had some Russian and one offered that he knew some Vietnamese. The story is worth remembering not because of the embarrassment it caused the interviewed section heads but because their helplessness was the result of a similarly misguided policy of linguistic ignorance as the one advocated by Lawrence Summers, former president of Harvard University and former secretary of the Treasury.

Read more: Inside Higher Education 

International landscape for language and culture

The international landscape for languages, linguistics and area studies is changing rapidly. Globalisation is accelerating, but is increasingly counterbalanced by local and regional particularisms. Mobility and trade, together with technological advances, have increased the diversity of languages and cultures in contact in every country and city in the world. But they are also powering the emergence of wide ranging lingua francas, of which English is particularly dominant in business, science and entertainment.

At the same time, the gap is widening between monolingual and multilingual citizens. Those who are fluent and literate in two or more languages can benefit from most of the professional and personal opportunities the world can offer. But those who speak only their mother tongue are limited in their opportunities, especially if they are among the 25% of EU citizens who are not literate in any language.

These contradictions are being sharpened by an economic crisis that is widening social cleavages. As a result, linguistic and cultural differences are increasingly being transformed into political antagonisms. This poses very real challenges to our disciplinary areas. Although they are at the ‘soft’ end of the field of knowledge, language and culture are deeply rooted. We understand that they are often intractable and highly resistant to change, but that they can also be the motor of seismic shifts in economics, politics and society.

We are accustomed to mobilising the expertise we have in teaching and research in language and culture, and directing it towards educating our students who will be the future leaders. However, the time scales of change are ever shorter, and the public needs are ever greater. As a result, we must now face the challenge of bringing our knowledge and understanding to the wider community. LLAS is committed to assisting the academic community in this endeavour, and thereby making our contribution to creating a more humane world in which the values of linguistic and cultural enrichment for all can flourish.

Prof. Michael Kelly
Director of LLAS Centre for languages, linguistics and area studies

How do you become fluent in 11 languages?

Twenty-year-old Alex Rawlings has won a national competition to find the UK's most multi-lingual student.

The Oxford University undergraduate can currently speak 11 languages - English, Greek, German, Spanish, Russian, Dutch, Afrikaans, French, Hebrew, Catalan and Italian.

Entrants in the competition had to be aged between 16 and 22 and conversant in multiple languages.

Alex drew on all his skills to tell BBC News about his passion for learning languages and how he came to speak so many.

BBC news