Spanglish, AI scams and whistling Greeks
The latest language news + what to watch, read and listen to
In journalistic writing, we are often taught to avoid the passive voice in favour of the more direct active voice, which adds clarity and vigor. In On Writing Well, a guide to writing non-fiction, William Zinsser advises to “use active verbs unless there is no comfortable way to get around using a passive verb”. But in this piece for Time Magazine, Elena Dudum argues that in the news cycle on Gaza, the passive voice is everywhere, and it’s problematic: Palestinians are “displaced”, “shot at” or “found dead”. They “die” but they are not “killed”, because that would beg the question: by whom? “At this moment,” she writes, “grammar has the indelible power to become a tool of the oppressor, with the passive voice the most relied-upon weapon of all”.
Languages are living things that evolve, transform and sometimes also merge, as shown in this piece about the evolution of Spanglish. In places where Spanish is regularly mixed with English, such as the United States, new dialects are emerging and linguists are getting excited about how “the two languages are shaping one another in both directions”. I love that people in San Antonio have started saying lonche for lunch (instead of almuerzo) and troca for truck (instead of camioneta). This really resonated with me as a native speaker of Catalanglish, a language I speak with my siblings. In a recent call, my brother asked (in Catalan) what the word for those large metal boxes for transporting goods on ships was. “Ah, vols dir un shipping container,” I replied. Yes, that’s what he meant. Never mind that neither of us could come up with the Catalan term (contenidor de transport).
Guess how many words the English language has for getting drunk? No less than 546. As this article puts it, “if there’s one thing the Brits are exceptionally good at it’s getting totally trolleyed – and expressing it in endlessly creative ways”. After stand-up comedian Michael McIntyre pointed out that posh people like adding “-ed” to any word to create new synonyms of “drunk”, two German linguists actually took it upon themselves to research the phenomenon. Speaking of inventing new words, this piece in the New Yorker delves into the delicate art of creating fictional languages for sci-fi movies (dream job) such as Dune, whose characters speak a strange tongue with traces of Arabic.
In this fascinating Guardian long read about the disappearance of languages, Ross Perlin, a linguist, says there are a few dozen dominant or “killer languages” like English, Spanish, Nepali or Brazilian Portuguese that are constantly spreading, while smaller languages are shrinking, with speakers “abandoning not just words, but vast traditions of gesture, intonation, facial expression, conversational style and perhaps even the culture and character behind all these”. Representing these languages accurately in popular culture is therefore all the more important. In the recent Bob Marley biopic, Jamaican linguist Dr Joseph Farquharson was brought in to avoid “globalising” Jamaican Patois, particularly since the controversy surrounding Cool Runnings, a 1993 film about the Jamaican bobsleigh team in which actors were told “to sound like Sebastian the Crab”.
If you’ve come across videos of people speaking multiple languages fluently on TikTok, they may be using these incredibly freaky AI video translation tools, which are now being used in misleading ads promoting language-learning apps, as the journalist Sophia Smith Galer reported. It’s often difficult to tell if what you’re watching is real or not, but if you look closely you can see that there’s something wrong with people’s lips. I translated a video of myself into Danish and the result was pretty bad if you know what my real voice sounds like, but it’s probably enough to mislead anyone who doesn’t.
But let’s move away from the creepy depths of the internet and out into the Greek sunshine. This piece is from a few years ago but a friend shared it the other day and I loved learning about the Sfyria whistling language. In the village of Antia in Greece, people have been whistling messages to each other from across the hills for centuries, from emergency calls to coffee invitations. The arrival of the telephone contributed to its decline, and while the language is now slowly dying out, it’s still used by some of its older residents.
What I’ve been up to:
Writing: About comic books for various publications. I went to the Angoulême Comic Book Festival to find out about how the industry is doing in France, and the short answer is extremely well. You can read my report in Monocle’s March issue here.
Reading: Bonnie Tsui’s book Why we swim, an exploration into our love of water, from swimming pools to the open ocean, despite its dangers. Even though humans are not natural born swimmers, we go back to swimming again and again to test our limits, improve our health and find community.
Listening: To Ma Tonkinoise, a podcast (in French) about a woman’s journey to try to understand her Vietnamese grandmother’s past. Like many people of her generation, she left her country behind during the First Indochina War, a dark period in France’s history that still takes up just a small chapter in history books. It was extremely eye-opening.
Watching: C’è ancora domani (There’s Still Tomorrow) an Italian comedy drama by Paola Cortellesi set in post-war Rome. It tells the story of Delia, a housewife in a working-class family plagued by domestic violence who receives a mysterious letter. It was a massive hit in Italy, overtaking Barbie at the box office, and is now being released around the world, starting with France today.
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Aisling O’Leary is an Irish freelance journalist based in London. Her writing has appeared in Vogue, The Times, The Irish Independent and The Irish Times. You can follow her on Instagram @itspronouncedashling
Julia Webster Ayuso is a Spanish-British freelance journalist based in Paris. Her writing has appeared in Time, The Guardian, The New York Times and Monocle. You can follow her on Instagram @jwebsterayuso