http://www.npr.org/blogs/codeswitch/2013/04/13/177126294/five-reasons-why-people-code-switch?utm_source=NPR&utm_medium=facebook&utm_campaign=20130414

A Bit of Fry and Laurie - Tricky Linguistics

Occupy's the Word

"Occupy" is 2011's word of the year. That's according to the American Dialect Society whose linguist members voted at the organization's yearly conference. I won't comment more because I find this rather frivolous, especially given that nominees included "kardash" - a unit of measurement that includes 72 days - in reference to some famous porn star's short-lived marriage. Read more about it here.

Conservative

In linguistics, a conservative form is one that has undergone little change. For example, it is said that writing is a more conservative form than speech. With words, a word is conservative if it is closer to the older form from which it derived in comparison to cognate forms from the same original word. For example, the Spanish word caro and the French cher evolved from the Latin word cārum. Since the Spanish word is more similar to the common source, it is more conservative than its French counterpart.

The Indefinite Article & Juncture Loss

The English indefinite article "a(n" is derived from the same root as "one." (Think of how in Romance languages, the indefinite article is the same as the word for "one," e.g. "un" in French.) Originally, the article was "an" but the "n" would be dropped before a word beginning with a consonant. In Medieval English, the word "napron" existed. Yes, "napron." But, the use of both forms of the indefinite article led to the formation of the word as we know it today: "apron." This phenomenon is referred to as "juncture loss" in the field of historical linguistics and it occurs in other languages as well. A notable example in French is "une norenge" which eventually became modern French's "une orange."

Endangered Languages in Metropolitan New York

A recent article from The Economist on New York-based Endangered Language Alliance. The ELA has volunteer speakers of endangered languages; the Alliance works on figuring out each language's phonology and syntax, and in turn, help volunteers work on projects such as children's books in their language. Many endangered languages lack alphabets, or systems of writing, so the ELA also works to create sound-symbol systems for these languages using the International Phonetic Alphabet.

In order to determine whether a person is fluent in one of the endangered languages before taking him on as a volunteer, he is tested with a Swadesh List, a set of 207 high-frequency, slow-to-change words including body parts, colors and basic verbs such as eat, drink, and sleep.

According to the website, the ELA "...estimates that there may be as many as 400 endangered languages spoken in the metro area. If this is true, New York City could be the most diverse linguistic area of the planet, and have the highest density of endangered languages per square mile on earth. "

NYTimes: "My Family's Experiment in Extreme Schooling"

the New Humanitarian School in Moscow
While I found this article to be interesting, I also found the whole privileged slant of "oh, I left the comforts of Park Slope for the comparably comfortable life of a Times journalist in Russia" slightly irritating. Either way, these children are very lucky to have had this experience; hopefully they will maintain their Russian fluency now that they are back in the States.