“Transparent” languages, learning with dyslexia and losing your accent
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Ever heard of “transparent” languages? They’re the ones you can read out loud – without knowing a word of it – and get away with being understood (more or less). Spanish, Italian, German, and Finnish are all transparent languages, in which the relationship between letters and sounds is pretty straightforward. On the other hand, “opaque” languages are those where the pronunciation does not follow a consistent pattern. Yes English, I’m looking at you. Getting your head around how to pronounce (and spell) words like “yacht” and “queue” is a real challenge for new learners. Studies have shown that learning to read in an opaque language takes longer which, interestingly, can also affect children with dyslexia. According to researchers, in transparent languages like Spanish or Finnish, some problems associated with dyslexia can be less pronounced than in opaque languages like English or French.
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Thanks to AI, researchers have made breakthroughs in decoding the secret language of dogs, and thanks to TikTok, English-language books are proliferating in European bookshops. As we mentioned a couple of newsletters ago, Spanglish is booming and considered the “fastest-growing hybrid language in the world” according to El País, with 35 to 40 million speakers in the US. Multilingualism is obviously great, but could it be dying in the EU? Is it even possible to forget your native tongue? In this piece in the New York Times magazine, the writer found that moving to France meant suddenly struggling to remember terms like “conveyor belt” in English, and coming up with unexpected alternatives such as “supermarket treadmill”.
Losing your mother tongue is one thing, but a much more common experience is losing your accent. Journalist Rhys Thomas writes about how he ditched his Welsh accent at university and has recently started to reclaim it. Research has shown that accent discrimination has a significant impact on people’s experiences in education and the workplace. In fact, France banned accent discrimination or glottophobie in 2020 after people started commenting on the southwestern accent of former prime minister Jean Castex. One right-wing MEP said it made her “feel like I’m on holiday”.
When it comes to linguistic challenges, schools are often on the front line. In Japan, bilingual education is taking off as children learn more English but the country still lags behind on foreign languages. Van Morrison’s old school could become the first integrated Irish language primary school in east Belfast, and a school in Bristol is helping Ukrainian children stay in touch with their mother tongue as they face setbacks in their education.
What’s the world’s most beautiful language? The Guardian asked its readers recently, and the responses were varied: everything from Italian and Japanese to the Silbo Gomero, the whistling language of the Canary Islands. But I tend to agree with one reader who pointed out that “beauty is in the ear of the listener”. I’ve always been intrigued by how Italian and French are often described as beautiful, while German is seen as ugly. Something makes me think these opinions are not purely based on aesthetics but may have something to do with cultural preconceptions. Anyway, as this reader pointed out, “It’s not a competition.”
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What I’ve been up to:
Writing: Last month I profiled American culinary icon Padma Lakshmi for the Paris-based magazine Semaine. A former model and longtime presenter of Top Chef, Lakshmi is also the founder of the Endometriosis Foundation of America.
Reading: Claire Dederer’s book Monsters, about what we should do with great art by terrible people. It’s a fascinating exploration of our relationship with art in the post-MeToo era, and the internal conflicts that arise when we consume, and love, the work of Roman Polanski, Pablo Picasso or Michael Jackson.
Listening: To a lot of POLITICO’s EU Confidential podcast for analysis on the European elections, and to Semafor’s new podcast Mixed Signals for analysis on the modern media landscape.
Dancing: In the Louvre as part of a special event titled “Courez au Louvre” (Run to, or in, the Louvre”). Ahead of the Olympics, the biggest museum in the world invited people to experience the museum early in the morning, before opening hours, in leggings and lycra. You can read my story for Art Basel here.