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."

I've got the cover of the new New Scientist:

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.

The archive of almost everything I've written for the Texas Observer is here.

As you might be able to tell from today's slew of nostalgic posts, I'm waiting on some answers, directions, and permissions, and there's nothing more pathetically sentimental than a writer stewed in his own juice.

This is the fourth piece I've published since 1996 about Joe, a friend I made during the summer I lived in Alpine, Texas. It begins like this:

Remember Joe, my old friend from Alpine? He would be 80 years old this year, but he’s long gone. Survived cancer long enough to see the truth of God—he’d finally asked to see a priest after a lifetime of avowed atheism—and watch the twin towers fall. A month later I was driving to Midland for a burial in a place he never wanted. But Joe haunts me still. Especially when the economic news gets bad. I can hear his voice: Do you know what a derivative is, Michael? A liquidity put? Phantom envelopes mailed from Alpine arrived filled with clipped newspaper articles and forecasts of human greed highlighted with yellow marker. The words in my ears: Michael, you need a gun, and cash, small bills.

The New York Times, the Chicago Tribune, the Globe & Mail, New Scientist, and The Texas Observer were all graced with my work in the last two weeks. There are links to it all off the "current" button above.

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.