[lg policy] Hungarians Perplex World With Weird Language Policy

Tue Aug 23 13:27:04 UTC 2011

Don and others:

France is one country that attempts to get its young people to study
languages other than English, giving them incentives (maybe even
financial incentives) to do so.  But there are drawbacks.  We hosted
an au pair one summer, a girl whose mother was a long-term friend of
my wife's, who had opted to study German instead of English,
and then found herself at a great disadvantage among her English-knowing friends
and age cohort.  So then she  felt forced to try to catch up on
English, having "lost"
time studying German.

On the other hand, I often wonder whether the fact that over 50% of
all foreign language students in the US are studying Spanish, when we
have great need for
people knowing Arabic, Pushto and other less commonly taught
languages, is a sensible policy.  But even with incentives like NDEA
Title 6 fellowships, you sometimes can't get students to bite.

HS

On Mon, Aug 22, 2011 at 6:42 PM,  <dzo at bisharat.net> wrote:
> Or is it really so weird? I've sometimes wondered why countries with essentially one "national language" (mother tongue) don't seek to distribute second language learning more often. Arguably it could have benefits in terms of external trade and relations, and facilitate a kind of "crossroads" effect to the extent that it facilitates selective borrowing (and "digestion" in the nationally spoken language) from diverse other parts of the world.
>
> Not sure if Hungary has considered that aspect, but could there be any merit to this position? Examples? (Japan from the late 1800s to WWII??)
>
> Could this be an advantage of more or less monolingual states that Hungary has stumbled upon withou knowing it?
>
> Don
>
> Sent from my Verizon Wireless BlackBerry
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Harold Schiffman <hfsclpp at gmail.com>
> Sender: lgpolicy-list-bounces+dzo=bisharat.net at groups.sas.upenn.edu
> Date: Sun, 21 Aug 2011 13:48:35
> To: lp<lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu>
> Reply-To: Language Policy List <lgpolicy-list at groups.sas.upenn.edu>
> Subject: [lg policy] Hungarians Perplex World With Weird Language Policy
>
> Hungarians Perplex World With Weird Language Policy
>
> Ann Althouse picks up one of the oddest reports of the week: the
> Hungarian government wants to discourage students from taking English
> as their first foreign language because it is so easy!  The original
> article in The Wall Street Journal is a head-scratcher:
>
>    Hungary’s government wants to dethrone English as the most common
> foreign language taught in Hungarian schools. The reason: It’s just
> too easy to learn.
>
>    “It is fortunate if the first foreign language learned is not
> English. The initial, very quick and spectacular successes of English
> learning may evoke the false image in students that learning any
> foreign language is that simple,” reads a draft bill obtained by news
> website Origo.hu that would amend Hungary’s education laws.
>
>    Instead, the ministry department in charge of education would
> prefer if students “chose languages with a fixed, structured
> grammatical system, the learning of which presents a balanced
> workload, such as neo-Latin languages.”
>
>    Besides giving a deceptive sense of achievement, English learning
> also makes acquiring other languages more difficult, the ministry
> argues. Reversing the order, on the other hand, makes learning English
> essentially effortless, it added.
>
> The mystery deepens as the WSJ reporter, Gergo Racz, tells us that
> Hungary’s real problem isn’t that too many Hungarians take the wimpy
> way out and learn English; it is that most Hungarians don’t learn any
> foreign language at all.  In fact, 75 percent of Hungarians say
> (presumably in Magyar) that they don’t speak any foreign language at
> all, and only six percent claim to speak one well.
>
> Surely a government in this situation would go for the easiest
> language on offer?
>
> Few countries need foreign language fluency more than Hungary.  The
> Magyar language is distantly, very distantly related to Finnish, but
> otherwise Hungarian is in a world of its own.  A traveler in Europe
> who has even a smattering of familiarity with a Romance, Germanic and
> Slavic language will generally get around pretty well; the language
> roots allow you to decipher some of the basics: words like
> ‘bookstore’, ‘toilet’, ‘train station’ and ‘trolley’ don’t vary all
> that much within the language families.  Be able to sound out the
> Cyrillic and Greek alphabets and you can survive if not always thrive
> from Vladivostok to Valencia.
>
> In Hungary you can forget that; when I first visited Hungary about
> twenty years ago, even a word like ‘restaurant’, which is pretty
> recognizable all across Europe, was no use. The Magyar word for
> ‘restaurant’ is (if I still remember this correctly) ‘etterim’. At
> that time, Germany was the English of Budapest, and English was the
> French.  That is, if you needed to discuss directions or money with a
> taxi driver or a news vendor, German was the language to use.  If you
> wanted to talk literature with a journalist or professor, English was
> the way to go.
>
> Poland was a different case back then.  Everybody over fifty spoke
> German and everybody under fifty spoke Russian — but given the
> circumstances attending the introduction of those languages in Poland,
> nobody wanted to admit a knowledge of either.  Almost nobody spoke
> English there back then — the Soviets discouraged English study even
> more than the Hungarians.  If you asked for directions in the former
> occupation languages people pretended they didn’t understand you; the
> only way out was to be able to say in both German and Russian, “Excuse
> me, please.  I’m an American and I don’t speak Polish.  Can you tell
> me…” and then you ask your question.  Once the ice was broken, people
> were happy to help.
>
> None of this explains the mysteries of Hungarian language policy;
> perhaps some Hungarian bureaucrats have a little too much time on
> their hands?
>
>
> http://blogs.the-american-interest.com/wrm/2011/08/20/hungarians-perplex-world-with-weird-language-policy/
>
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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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