HOW DOES THE TREE OF
that the English word was too similar to ‘calculatrice’ (calculator) and it was necessary to choose a “proper French word” like ‘ordinateur’.
LANGUAGES HOLD UP IN 2020
Immigration bring food, music and words. Their children are exposed to multiple languages and cultures, much of which they share with their monolingual peers. This immigration is often a direct result of colonialisation. The British, Spanish, and French Empires all caused an influx of migrants from those empires to the countries responsible for colonizing, and others in the empire.
Ella Bosworth-Gerbino (OHS)
Another example can be found in music. Take French hip-hop. As with all hip-hop, this music is derived from Africa, in this instance, specifically the North. In France immigrants are expected to integrate and assimilate into French culture (intégration). Ironically, this requirement, caused the birth of French hip-hop. It is the two worlds combined, multi-lingual, multicultural. The music is a reflection on the artists and their experiences. Similarly many slang words are derived from Arabic, simultaneously as a result of the music, and parallel with it. Most of the time these words do not share their original meaning, but are altered to fit in with the French surrounding it. France is not the only place where this phenomenon occurs, it is the same all over the world. English has absorbed words from Jamaica, India, The Netherlands and more. This overlap of languages does not quite fit the tree metaphor. Are the branches overlapping and converging? Or perhaps it is more helpful to think of languages developing like flowers, pollinated from a range of sources. Maybe vines connect previously distinct parts of the tree. Whatever conceptual frame we choose, what is clear is that languages continue to evolve. It is for this reason that I find languages so fascinating
The growth and development of a language is often described through the metaphor of a large tree. Different languages are arranged on branches which attach to a single trunk, with Indo-European roots. A much smaller number spring from a separate tree of Uralic descent. The tree metaphor creates a fixed taxonomy of languages in which each one occupies a separate place on a branch. While they may share a trunk, they are presented as distinct outgrowths. In this piece I ask whether this metaphor still holds in a world characterised by mass immigration and popular culture in which geographically unrelated languages increasingly mix? To which branch do these words belong? To answer these questions, I will focus on the impact of the internet and immigration, both of which are changing our world in all sorts of ways.
Bibliography https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/59665/ feast-your-eyes-beautiful-linguistic-familytree#:~:text=When%20linguists%20talk%20about%20 the,Swedish%2C%20Danish%2C%20Norwegian). Nilan, P., Fexia, C. (2006). Global Youth?: Hybrid Identities, Plural Worlds: Routledge
The internet introduces users to words from other countries thousands of miles away. I use Spanish among my English all the time even though I don’t really know anyone who speaks it. All my knowledge comes from streaming. I am not alone, Japanese words like emoji, anime and umami are all in regular use because of their popularity online. The internet has also required the development of a whole new specialised vocabulary, much of which has to be translated into different languages. For instance, in 1955, with the introduction of IBM’s computer, the Académie Française decided
Bauer, J. (2017). Transparent Language [online] Available from https://blogs.transparent.com/french/ the-origin-of-lordinateur-computers-in-french/ [Accessed 3 September 2020] Cheshire, J., Gardner-Chloros, P. (2018). Introduction: Multicultural youth vernaculars in Paris and Urban France, Journal of French Language Studies, 28, 161-164
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