This year, I decided to study the Russian Language. I have always been, at the very least, marginally interested in Russian society and Russian culture, I find the language to be beautiful sounding, and I found its features to be sufficiently complex (and interesting). But one of the reasons I decided to study Russian was because of how polarizing the language is in large parts of the Earth today. The Russian Language is polarizing in North America because of the aftereffects of the Cold War, and because of recent allegations of Russian collusion in North American elections; the Russian Language is polarizing in Western Europe because of the influence of Russian oil and of Russian oligarchs in places like London or Berlin, and the Russian Language is polarizing in Eastern Europe because of the lasting legacy of Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe, and most recently because of the annexation of the Crimean Penninsula in 2014.
The history of Crimea is long and complex. The Penninsula has exchanged hands between Greeks, Italians, Tartars (Turkic nomads), and Slavs (of Russian and of Ukrainian stock) countless times throughout history. The Russian empire incorporated Crimea after a war with the Turkish Ottoman Empire, after which the demographics of the peninsula would shift to Russian after decades of resettlement. The Russian Black Sea fleet was based out of Crimea, and Crimea became a place as Russian as any other part of Russia. Then, things changed, when under Soviet control the Crimean Penninsula was given to the Ukrainian SSR as a gift to celebrate 400 years of Ukrainian incorporation within Russia; this move was intended to be purely ceremonial and no one foresaw that in a few short decades the Soviet Union would collapse and Crimea would join a freshly independent Ukraine.
Despite joining Ukraine, Crimea and the rest of Eastern Ukraine remains predominately Russian. Russian is spoken as the native language of the vast majority of Crimeans and Eastern Ukrainians, therefore many of them choose to identify with the nationality tied to their language rather than the nationality tied to their nation. This is what essentially gave Vladimir Putin the confidence to annex the Crimean Penninsula, and to start a civil war between East and West within Ukraine, because he knew that the Crimean people wouldn't resist Russian expansion into their country.
Anecdotally speaking, I have more evidence to back this up. Yulia Belopolsky, my Russian professor, is from Crimea and affectionally reflects upon the annexation of Crimea as the time when Crimea "returned to Russia." Additionally, my Russian history Professor last year reflected on his friends' experience in 2014 when they were visiting Kazakhstan and heard people marching through the streets yelling, "Crimea is ours!" as the news spread that Russia had annexed Crimea. This offers some interesting insight as to how the post-soviet block views itself in relation to Russia. A lot of people, it would seem, in post-soviet countries across Eurasia still feel a close affinity to Russian culture and to the Russian language. People still identify with their former Russianness despite having been politically isolated from Russia for decades now, demonstrating the lasting impact language has on how one views themselves. Nationality has a very close relationship with language, and one is likely to identify with the people who are like them and share their language before they group themselves with another group of people with whom they might share a nation but not a language.
Wednesday, March 18, 2020
Online Language Learning SUCKS!
We have all had a very, very, very busy week or two. A lot of us traveled for Spring Break, and then we were all informed that we would be expected to return home as quickly as possible after our break, due to the hastily spreading Corona Virus (COVID-19). We quickly said goodbye to those friends and colleagues that we could, before being ushered off-campus by our parents. But alas, it gets worse: not only do we miss out on spending time with many of our friends and loved ones, but now we are being told to continue classes digitally from the security of our own homes. Being forced to take online classes is a huge bummer for most students, but it is even worse than it might first seem for those of us who are studying a foreign language.
Learning a foreign language is really hard work, especially when you're just starting. Those of us who decided to start learning a new foreign language this year find ourselves buried in the complexities of grammar, learning pronunciation, learning to read and write, and learning basic vocabulary. The difficulties we experience are compounded by the difficulty in picking up a new foreign language and the difficulty in transitioning to an online environment in which instructor feedback is less in-depth. This is sure to dampen the language learning experience and limit the benefits of learning a new foreign language. Without a doubt, students are going to struggle to keep up with rapidly ongoing new content and with students being scattered across different time zones, students are having to make massive adjustments to ordinary life in order to accommodate for their new schedules. Worst of all, students are losing access to their professors and to each other, decreasing access to practice materials with practices like simple oral or listening drills being much harder to coordinate.
Language learning is by definition not a passive process, it takes a lot of time, motivation, and practice in order to excel. The problem with moving classes online for foreign language students is that it affects how much time you can put in, it can diminish motivation, and it makes practicing much more difficult; it takes an active learning process and makes it pacific. This is dangerous for a foreign language learner, as it makes it much easier to fall behind, the effect of which being that catching back up will only become harder and harder the further behind you fall. It is unfortunate that we have to be put in such a situation, but of course, it goes without saying that we have no other choice given the rate at which COVID-19 is spreading. It is important to stay safe and to stay indoors, despite the difficulties that might pose on your language learning journey, and at the end of the day if you are dedicated and passionate enough about your foreign language of choice the hurtles presented to you today will be easily surmountable.
Learning a foreign language is really hard work, especially when you're just starting. Those of us who decided to start learning a new foreign language this year find ourselves buried in the complexities of grammar, learning pronunciation, learning to read and write, and learning basic vocabulary. The difficulties we experience are compounded by the difficulty in picking up a new foreign language and the difficulty in transitioning to an online environment in which instructor feedback is less in-depth. This is sure to dampen the language learning experience and limit the benefits of learning a new foreign language. Without a doubt, students are going to struggle to keep up with rapidly ongoing new content and with students being scattered across different time zones, students are having to make massive adjustments to ordinary life in order to accommodate for their new schedules. Worst of all, students are losing access to their professors and to each other, decreasing access to practice materials with practices like simple oral or listening drills being much harder to coordinate.
Language learning is by definition not a passive process, it takes a lot of time, motivation, and practice in order to excel. The problem with moving classes online for foreign language students is that it affects how much time you can put in, it can diminish motivation, and it makes practicing much more difficult; it takes an active learning process and makes it pacific. This is dangerous for a foreign language learner, as it makes it much easier to fall behind, the effect of which being that catching back up will only become harder and harder the further behind you fall. It is unfortunate that we have to be put in such a situation, but of course, it goes without saying that we have no other choice given the rate at which COVID-19 is spreading. It is important to stay safe and to stay indoors, despite the difficulties that might pose on your language learning journey, and at the end of the day if you are dedicated and passionate enough about your foreign language of choice the hurtles presented to you today will be easily surmountable.
Monday, March 2, 2020
Language or Dialect? And Whats the Difference?
Just like the rest of us, the creation of my Essay 2 Language Research Paper is well under-way. In my paper, I am looking at different features of different languages in order to better understand what makes certain languages more difficult to learn. One such language I am looking at is the Arabic Language. What makes the Arabic language so notoriously difficult to learn?
There are a number of reasons why Arabic is such a hard language to learn; two of the main reasons I've discovered are the divergent nature of Arabic dialects from one another, and the difficulty non-native speakers face when reading the unstressed vowels in Arabic writing.
When learning Arabic, generally students have to learn the standard variety of Arabic called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is very distinct from most of the modern dialects of Arabic; it is based on Biblical Arabic whereas the other forms of Arabic are simply based on the Arabic spoken in a given region (the Levant, Egypt, Gulf, North Africa, or Iraq just to name a few places associated with a dialect). The different dialects vary greatly from one another, and from MSA in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, and inflection. This begs the question then, if the different forms of Arabic can vary so greatly from one another, why are they all considered to be the same language instead of different languages?
The dialects of which the modern Arabic language consists all share a common lineage in Quranic Arabic (which is very similar to MSA, which is still used today). This strikes me as being similar to how French, Spanish, and Italian all share a common lineage in Vulgar Latin. French, Spanish, and Italian exist on a linguistic continuum, meaning that speakers of all three languages can understand one another to varying degrees based on natural proximity to one another; this is similar to the relationship between all the different modern dialects of Arabic. The different Romance Languages spoken in Western Europe today share similar vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but as you travel around the areas in which these languages are spoken you can clearly see vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation shift from country to country, or from municipality to municipality; and the same is true with the modern dialects of Arabic. So why are Spanish, French, and Italian considered languages but all the dozens of varieties of Arabic are considered one language? This comes down to the way in which languages are defined by linguistics.
In the field of modern linguistics, there is no one universal, solid definition for what exactly a language is. As in biology with the classifications of Organisms, in linguistics, the dividing lines between languages are totally arbitrary. Something is considered a language because enough people all decide it fits the broad, negotiable criteria suited to define a language. Arabic is considered one language and not several because it is what Arabic speakers, and linguists, have decided to believe. French, Spanish, and Italian are all different languages, again, because it is a commonly held belief. The dividing lines between languages and dialects are totally subjective, and can easily be argued in the present and renovated throughout time.
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There are a number of reasons why Arabic is such a hard language to learn; two of the main reasons I've discovered are the divergent nature of Arabic dialects from one another, and the difficulty non-native speakers face when reading the unstressed vowels in Arabic writing.
When learning Arabic, generally students have to learn the standard variety of Arabic called Modern Standard Arabic (MSA). MSA is very distinct from most of the modern dialects of Arabic; it is based on Biblical Arabic whereas the other forms of Arabic are simply based on the Arabic spoken in a given region (the Levant, Egypt, Gulf, North Africa, or Iraq just to name a few places associated with a dialect). The different dialects vary greatly from one another, and from MSA in terms of pronunciation, vocabulary, spelling, and inflection. This begs the question then, if the different forms of Arabic can vary so greatly from one another, why are they all considered to be the same language instead of different languages?
The dialects of which the modern Arabic language consists all share a common lineage in Quranic Arabic (which is very similar to MSA, which is still used today). This strikes me as being similar to how French, Spanish, and Italian all share a common lineage in Vulgar Latin. French, Spanish, and Italian exist on a linguistic continuum, meaning that speakers of all three languages can understand one another to varying degrees based on natural proximity to one another; this is similar to the relationship between all the different modern dialects of Arabic. The different Romance Languages spoken in Western Europe today share similar vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation, but as you travel around the areas in which these languages are spoken you can clearly see vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation shift from country to country, or from municipality to municipality; and the same is true with the modern dialects of Arabic. So why are Spanish, French, and Italian considered languages but all the dozens of varieties of Arabic are considered one language? This comes down to the way in which languages are defined by linguistics.
In the field of modern linguistics, there is no one universal, solid definition for what exactly a language is. As in biology with the classifications of Organisms, in linguistics, the dividing lines between languages are totally arbitrary. Something is considered a language because enough people all decide it fits the broad, negotiable criteria suited to define a language. Arabic is considered one language and not several because it is what Arabic speakers, and linguists, have decided to believe. French, Spanish, and Italian are all different languages, again, because it is a commonly held belief. The dividing lines between languages and dialects are totally subjective, and can easily be argued in the present and renovated throughout time.
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