From Congressional Quarterly:

“The FBI uses a combination of Special Agents, Language Analysts, and Contract Linguists to address its foreign language translation requirements, all with tested foreign language proficiency as determined by the Interagency Language Roundtable,” FBI spokesman Richard Kolko said.

The number of FBI Special Agents who could speak at least some Arabic had increased from 29 to 46 since Sept. 11, 2001, he said. The number of Contract Linguists and Language Analysts “who meet FBI Arabic language test standards” has ballooned from 70 to 285 in the same period.

“The FBI also has access to the National Virtual Translation Center, which serves as the clearinghouse to provide timely and accurate translation of foreign intelligence for Intelligence Community agencies,” Kolko added. “Although we always look to increase the numbers through our recruiting efforts, we have the tools available to do our job.”

This would mark the first time I'd seen a spokesman talk about contract linguists (perhaps it was the first time a reporter had asked). To see in-house analysts, contractors, and the NVTC mentioned in the same rebuttal shows that the FBI is presenting its "we have the tools, stop criticizing us" message better than before.

Then there's the whole phenomena of getting yourself tattooed in a language you don't speak, a script you don't read, which often goes bad. From the BBC:

When teenager Joanne Raine had her boyfriend's nickname "Roo" tattooed on her stomach it was supposed to be a sign of her undying love.

The 19-year-old from Darlington paid £80 for the Chinese artwork in 2004 and was delighted with the results.

That was until she showed it off in a Chinese takeaway and found out it actually spelled "supermarket."

The helpful blog Hanzi Smatter disputes that the characters mean "supermarket." Commenters have fun trying to figure out what it does mean, until someone writes in to say it's the name of a Chinese supermarket chain (without corroboration).

Update: changed the typo on the hanzi blog, got the joke. Thanks to the king of closed captions.

On this blog I feel as if I'm mostly moving information around, which isn't that satisfying to write, and it's no fun to read, I admit. So I'm going to work harder to add some value to what I put here. But for right now, I wanted to pass on several Our Fathers written in some pidgin Englishes, which are collected here.

Here's the Gullah version:

We Papa een heaben,
leh ebrybody hona you nyame
cause you da holy.
We pray dat soon you gwine
rule oba all ob we.
Wasoneba ting you da want,
leh um be een dis wol,
same like e be dey een heaben.
Gee we de food wa we need dis day yah an ebry day.
Fagibe we fa de bad ting we da do.
Cause we da fagibe dem people wa do bad ta we.
Leh we don't habe haad test wen Satan try we.
Keep we from e ebil.
Amen.

Then there's this one, from Middle English. Familiar, isn't it?

Oure fadir that art in heuenes, halewid be thi name; thi kyngdoom come to; be thi wille don, in erthe as in heuene. Yyue to vs this dai oure breed ouer othir substaunce, and foryyue to vs oure dettis, as we foryyuen to oure dettouris; and lede vs not in to temptacioun, but delyuere vs fro yuel. Amen.

Pinyin News mentioned the College Board's Mandarin AP test results from 2007: 81.1 % of those taking the test got a 5, and 88.9% test takers said they "regularly speak or hear the foreign language of the examination at home."

The real story here is that the weekend Chinese school system must be doing something right. When I was talking to Gaston Caperton in 2005 for my Mandarin article, the College Board fully expected the first couple years of the test to be dominated by native speakers. Chinese parents had been pushing for an AP test in the language for a while, so their kids could get academic credit for all the work they'd put in (and so the parents could vindicate themselves in their kids' eyes, no doubt). In the early years of the AP curriculum, there just wasn't going to be enough support early enough in the public schools to give non-heritage speakers the background they'd need to do well on the exam.

The challenge will be for schools that have touted their new Mandarin AP classes to duplicate these test scores.

At a Superbowl party, I met a psychiatrist who asked me (we were talking about Um...) if I believed in the unconscious. If you mean the semiotic detritus of life that's lying around and can be borrowed, deployed, or shanghaied for acts of interpretation, sure, I replied (or something like that -- it was the Superbowl). Here's a perfect example. I sent Misty an email talking about a conversation yesterday, in which I'd been worrying about the social dynamics in various workplaces. But instead of "handwringing" I wrote "handwriting." Ah, beautiful. Dr. Freud?

I can't think of anything that would have led me to write "writing" instead of "wringing," except maybe that I was thinking about the email I had just written to someone else. But since the content of my worrying was about writing, broadly construed (both as an act and as my future doing it), this is an opportunity for some interpretation, some meaning making. That's what I think a Freudian slip is -- not a bald linguistic error, but one with an opportunity for poetry. Or at least self-examination.

A short piece I did for the Texas Observer is here.

If you think people in America should speak only English, maybe Texas isn’t the state for you. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of people who reported speaking a language that’s not English at home rose by 860,000 to 6.86 million. They now make up 33 percent of the state’s population. (Come to think of it, maybe the U.S. isn’t the country for you: In 2005, 52 million people reported speaking another language, up 5 million since 2000.)

The Modern Language Association has just released colorful charts, based on data from the 2005 U.S. Census American Community Survey, that allow you to pull out data by state for the 30 most frequently spoken languages in the U.S. (All the data and maps are at www.mla.org/map_data.) It’s worth noting that these stats only cover speakers of languages other than English, not their fluency in English, so they capture seventh-generation, bilingual German families in New Braunfels as well as newly arrived Farsi speakers in Houston.

Spanish speakers account for the larger part of the increase in the population of non-English speakers. In Texas, they added about 737,000 non-English speakers. Texas had the second-largest increase, behind California. Even with anti-immigrant sentiment a major concern for the GOP, Spanish speakers gained in 44 states in the same period; only in Mississippi, Wyoming, Alaska, Montana, Maine, and Vermont did their numbers drop. That’s a 4.1 million-person increase nationwide.

The polyglotting of Texas and the nation seems so inevitable that true connoisseurs of xenophobia should rejoice about the boost in Spanish speakers. Spanish, after all, is a European language. It’s the only European language on the rise; the numbers for French, German, Italian, Greek, and Polish, all spoken by older generations of immigrants, are dropping. Spanish is written in the Roman alphabet, so you can sound out written words even if you don’t know what they mean. And the language has thousands of words recognizable in English because of a shared heritage. MALDEF or LULAC aren’t likely to adopt this as a slogan, but we’ll say it here: Compared with Chinese, Thai, or Urdu, Spanish is practically English.

Four years ago, I published a story in Technology Review about the National Virtual Translation Center, an FBI project to use technology to link contract linguists and give them tools to do translation and analysis jobs for the 16 intelligence agencies. I recently discovered that this piece (which to date is the only piece of journalism written about the NVTC) is finally available for free online here. I also looked at the FBI's 2009 budget justification, which contains more info about the NVTC than documents from previous years (even Secrecy News calls the document "remarkably detailed"), which provide a scope of how much the NVTC has grown:

--"Since 2003, the NVTC has accepted over 1,200 requirements in 60 difference languages. In FY 2007 NVTC translated over 350,000 text pages and 350 hours of audio material, a 40% increase over FY 2006. With regard to translations, in 2003 the NVTC performed 20 translation jobs for its customers. In FY 2007 performed approximately 5,500 translation jobs for its customers. A 64 percent increase is expected between FY 2007 and FY 2008 based on the volume of incoming material from active military campaigns and the expansion of incoming Asian- and African-language materials."

--"Over 73 percent of material collected by the IC and stored in the HARMONY database is untranslated. HARMONY is the IC’s centralized database for foreign military, technical
and open-source documents and their translations. Overall, the IC backlog of untranslated material is growing exponentially, with an estimated five petabytes backlogged."

--There are 54 full and part-time independent contract linguists all over the country, connected virtually to the NVTC HQ and working through backlogged material. In 2009 the FBI wants to add 8 more contractors.

--These linguists are linked through TONS (Translator Online Network Support), which is an enterprise-scale computer system that gives them access to A variety of language processing capabilities to language software (automatic optical character recognition, machine translation, named entity extraction, and transliteration) and other language tools for translators. The FBI wants $1.2 million to support TONS.

--Though the NVTC is under the FBI, the director is paid by the NSA, and four other employees are either paid by the NSA or CIA. Five others are FBI employees, which makes for a total management staff of 9, but in 2009 they want to add 2 more. These employees do "outreach, coordination, quality control and...provide agency-unique
expertise in supporting IC clients.

--The NVTC was mandated by Congress to be a "clearinghouse" for language resources for the intelligence community; the portal was built in 2006 but it has no content. the FBI wants $166,000 to support the portal.

All of which is interesting, and more detail than I was able to get four years ago (obviously, since they'd just opened their doors, they had no track record to refer to). In the budget justification, there's no reference to past successes, only to imminent gaps if funding isn't grown. (The 2008 justification is more direct: "Failure to fund this initiative could cause serious harm to national security should actionable intelligence remain un-translated.")

A Google search of TONS turned up a more detailed description of TONS and NVTC vendors from 2004:

The FBI will be acquiring an estimated total of $7,000,000 in language software products, as identified by Lockheed Martin, directly from the following companies. BBN, Basis, Stellent, BlueShoe Technologies and Abbysoft will provide ingest, prioritization and retrieval capabilities, including language identification, audio processing, and optical character recognition; Virage will provide video processing; Trados will provide translation memory, translation tools and collaboration; Global Sight will provide task tracking, quality control tools, and workflow management.

Another tidbit from the budget justification: In 2007, the FBI reported over 21,000 "positive encounters" with suspected terrorists. ""A positive encounter is one in
which an encountered individual is positively matched with an identity
in the Terrorist Screening Data Base."

Interesting comment from here about how McCain's campaign placed teleprompters so he would look more natural giving a speech:

I wish that once, just once, the cameras would show us what is really going on in these rooms. It would both legitimate and honest to show the candidate making a speech AND the teleprompters AND the cue cards/big screen TVs etc. Why does the media allow politicians to get away this fiction that they have memorized their speeches and are delivering them extemporaneously?

I'm all for breaking down the fourth wall, but does anyone actually believe this fiction anymore? And if they don't, when did they stop? "They" being American audiences, consumers of political theater? If a scholar of political communication were to take this on as a topic, I would bet they'd look at the construction of extemporaneity as a rhetorical choice -- but not at how people perceived said construction/fiction. Perhaps the fiction is not so much rhetorical as it is ritualistic: a summoning of the order of the universe through the repetition of what has been and what will always be. Which is why it would look strange if the fourth wall were broken, not because the interaction would be less persuasive but because it's a threatening departure.

The official count of the world's languages has recently increased by 96 languages. The steward of this figure, SIL International, released an annual report in January that reviewed changes in three-letter codes that are assigned to languages by the International Standards Organization; these codes are metadata used in information organization and software development.

In the 2005 edition of Ethnologue, SIL's language atlas & gazetteer, there were 6912 languages; this represented 103 languages more than Ethnologue counted in 2000.

On the surface, these increases are interesting, since it appears to contradict the notion that languages are disappearing, and the overall count of languages shrinking. But when you dig more deeply, you see it's how languages are lumped and split.

Of the new codes, 47 were assigned because previously assigned codes were rearranged. The remaining 59 were assigned to languages that apparently had never been described before. Twenty of the new codes were proposed by Jamin Pelkey, a linguistics graduate student from La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia, who "discovered" about half of of those languages in a 2006 language survey in southern China for his dissertation. The other half, more or less, had been previously documented by Chinese linguists or by Pelkey's supervisor at La Trobe, named David Bradley. I went through the change requests to count Pelkey's proposals. Pelkey submitted the highest number of proposals to ISO.

Two of the new language codes were given to artificial languages: Kotava, an artificial language invented in 1978 that has approximately 40 fluent speakers in France and Polynesia, and Lingua Franca Nova, spoken by an online community of 180 people. (I'm quoting from the ISO proposals.)

Three were sign languages, all in south Asia.

The remainder of new codes are "new" by virtue of being recategorized in broad "macrolanguage" families. (That is, they weren't the product of two languages merging or two dialects splitting).

A couple of things are significant about this: one, because people are mapping linguistic diversity more thoroughly, more codes are needed to describe linguistic diversity even as that diversity decreases; two, we'll never really know "how many" language there are (or were) on the planet, given varying ways to distinguish "language" from "dialect."

Would be dumb to call this ironic:

The iPhone kills conversation.

But what a boon for know-it-alls!

Actually, I know I'd use it like this, which is why I've wondered if the touch keyboard would be even more of a social annoyance. On a Blackberry keyboard I could keep eye contact while typing; not so on the touch keyboard.

Why the Times spells "creole language" as "Creole language" is beyond me, using a proper noun to refer to the generic. Will it confuse people? It's not a common spelling. Derek Bickerton (whose memoir I reviewed for the Times) spells it "Creole." Anyway, I pointed it out to the editor. Don't blame me.

I might also add: the Times doesn't allow the word "bullshit," so this charming quote, unfortunately, had to go: "As far as I was concerned, I'd gotten the bullshit out of the way so I could now get on with the serious business of life. Which is, of course, finding out stuff."

My review essay honing in on William Safire's Political Dictionary also showed up on Sunday in the Chicago Tribune, the Baltimore Sun, and the South Florida Sun-Sentinel.

It begins like this:

Words are the most familiar part of language, because it's words we're most conscious of learning and forgetting. Only certain words, though. Your word-of-the-day calendar will never list "the" or "but." You boast about knowing French numbers, not the pronouns. What draws our fascination is the words for things, actions, properties and the other stuff of the world, not archaic prepositions.

A spelling and grammar-obsessed guy travels across the country, searching out typos and correcting them. Here's the blog.

Geoff Nunberg talked about "um" -- and mentioned my book, Um... -- on Fresh Air yesterday; the text of his piece is here.

He invents a term that I particular like: the "umological paradox," which is that why is a word that's communicatively so useful routinely so criticized and battered? I think I provided the answer in the book: a changing technological and media landscape in the early 20th century, as well as new ideals about the presentation of self, more widespread opportunities to speak in public, and the commercializing of broadcast media changed how we judged others' speaking and regulated our own. It's true that some mention against "urs" (as by Oliver Wendell Holmes) appears earlier, but the prescription against "um" just wasn't as widespread then as it is now. Now everybody thinks that umlessness is godliness -- or, at least, the mark of eloquence (or a piece of it).

I know this shift occurred because for the book I looked through as many 18th and 19th books as I thought would contain such finger-shaking. They didn't. That's not to say that people were more lax then. They had plenty of rules about how language should be used, but it was mainly about dialect and pronunciation, not about making uninterrupted utterances.

Somebody once asked me, "How will Um... make me play poker?" Here's one answer: if "um" can be used deliberately (as Geoff points out) as well as unintentionally, then the simple presence of "um" (or some other pause filler) isn't as telling as you might like. Here a tell isn't always a tell.

I am obliged to quote from today's NYT report from the Harry Potter lexicon trial:

It was an emotional culmination to three hours of testimony in which Mr. Vander Ark gushed over Ms. Rowling and her work like the devoted fan that he claimed to be, and disarmingly preceded almost every answer to a question with an “Um.”

Thanks for plugging my book, Steven! The check's in the mail.

“If I was a fish and there was bisphenol-a in the water, I’d be concerned,” he said. “If I was a fetus and my mother was using a plastic water bottle, I wouldn’t be bothered.”

Don't panic.

My essay on "so" for April's Seed just came online. But do see the print version if you can: the graphics, a spill of 70's style loop-de-loops in black and white, is gorgeous.

Misty, meaning to say "rural or urban," instead saying "url and -- " and stopping short of "url and burban."

Last week I appeared with Ammon Shea at Real Art Ways in Hartford, Connecticut, reading and talking about books. (He talked about his, me mine. Maybe next time we can swap.) His is a word book: he spent a year reading the Oxford English Dictionary. But it's not a word book like a lexicographer would do, it's a delightful book about the experience of reading a book that's a list of words (and he's working on another book about reading books that we don't think of as books: phone books, catalogs, etc.).

Anyway, I had a blast, and here are two photos:

It hasn't been a year for much journalism by me, but I do have a piece in the April 17th Science about efforts to identify and survey languages in China (in Yunnan province, specifically), and about the politics involved. In China, as elsewhere, what gets called "a language" (as opposed to "a dialect" or "a speech variety") is an ethnobureaucratic artifact more than a reflection of reality -- though in the Chinese case you see the clash between ethnobureaucracies, with the Chinese government on one side and a global international standard on the other. What makes this case intriguing is that the global regime, along with a definition of "language" that Chinese scholars don't support, is aided by SIL International, not the sort of organization that could have done work in China not long ago.

I'll put up a PDF of the article in 30 days.

Senator Daniel Akaka of Hawaii announced that he's sponsoring the National Language Coordination Act of 2009, which he also sponsored in 2005. The bill would create a cabinet-level language czar to "oversee, coordinate, and implement continuing national security and language education initiatives." Sounds great, but if the czar has no budget control, it probably won't work. As I wrote for the New Republic (the original TNR link is dead),

Akaka's bill gives the czar a budget for p.r. but no oversight over anyone else's budget, so the czar wouldn't set goals and steer a national language strategy to meet them as much as hope for the cooperation of the agencies represented on the council. Akaka's bill doesn't specify to whom the czar would report, either, which leaves no one responsible when the goals aren't met.