Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4674 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali
| Message 9 of 22 18 September 2013 at 1:42am | IP Logged |
I'm With Stupid wrote:
My experience is that if people can get by in English in their professional life and personal life (i.e. hanging out with other international students) then they won't learn the local language. |
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The India's example proves the contrary. English is the language of education, science, business,
but it's not the language of art and culture, the percentage of movies shot in English is < 1 %,
all you get are movies in Hindi, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Malayalam, Bengali, Punjabi, Assamese, Marathi...
English is used informally only if there is no common Indian language people communicating can understand.
English-medium schools may be popular but no Indian speaks with their partner or children in English.
Sociolinguistically:
H (acrolect): English
M (mesolect): Hindi, local language (in Tamil Nadu, English is preferred to Hindi)
L (basilect): local language (Tamil in Tamil Nadu, Malayalam in Kerala, Hindi in the Hindi belt, Punjabi in Pujab, Marathi in Maharashtra...)
Edited by Medulin on 18 September 2013 at 1:48am
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orion Senior Member United States Joined 7027 days ago 622 posts - 678 votes Speaks: English* Studies: German, Russian
| Message 10 of 22 18 September 2013 at 4:56am | IP Logged |
I work in life sciences and the overwhelming majority of the literature in the field is published in English. The journals in my area with the highest impact factors are in English, no contest.
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Henkkles Triglot Senior Member Finland Joined 4259 days ago 544 posts - 1141 votes Speaks: Finnish*, English, Swedish Studies: Russian
| Message 11 of 22 18 September 2013 at 9:34am | IP Logged |
German is the lingua franca of linguistic studies.
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beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4628 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian
| Message 12 of 22 18 September 2013 at 7:12pm | IP Logged |
Cavesa wrote:
And we have still got a lot of original Czech medical textbooks, some of which are better than the English
ones (but most are average or worse of course) and the publishers still find it worth the trouble to translate
some books. Because of unexpected stupidity of many students of course.
Many classmates of mine are unable to use the original version despite the advantages. For example, I got a
beautiful and awesomely writen biochemistry textbook today in original for 2/3 of the price of Czech
translation. Why do people not learn? It's not that hard and it pays off a thousand times.
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It's not necessarily stupidity. Maybe some Czech citizens simply expect that if they enrol for a university
course in their own country, materials will be available in the national language.
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patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4539 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German
| Message 13 of 22 19 September 2013 at 12:27pm | IP Logged |
beano wrote:
I can see that people in non-English speaking countries might be concerned if universities actually start teaching courses in English. I think this already happens in some of the smaller states. I mean courses aimed at the general intake from the native population, not a special stream for international students. But then again, there are always two sides to the equation. You could argue that courses in English attract students from different countries, the vast majority of whom will also become proficient in the national language. |
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I was the admins officer for an international doctoral program here in Berlin. Basically if any international academic program has English as it's base. We didn't get that many non-German students, but those that we did get were even split between native English speakers and others.
I completely understand wanting to teach university courses in the native language, what is difficult is that it also then forces local hiring practices, which means that non-english speaking universities can't compete for the best academics globally. UK/US universities are full of the best German, French etc researchers; unfortunately language barriers stop this this being a symmetrical situation.
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patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4539 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German
| Message 14 of 22 19 September 2013 at 12:28pm | IP Logged |
Henkkles wrote:
German is the lingua franca of linguistic studies. |
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Really are the top linguistics journals published in English or German?
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Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4674 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali
| Message 15 of 22 19 September 2013 at 7:43pm | IP Logged |
Top journals are indeed published in English-mostly,
but some medical books are not readily translated into English, especially those written by Austrian and Swiss psychiatrists.
I haven't been able to find the English translation of Viktor Frankl's Ärztliche Seelsorge. Grundlagen der Logotherapie und Existenzanalyse 2. Auflage, so I had to buy it in German.
Edited by Medulin on 19 September 2013 at 7:47pm
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Teango Triglot Winner TAC 2010 & 2012 Senior Member United States teango.wordpress.comRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5562 days ago 2210 posts - 3734 votes Speaks: English*, German, Russian Studies: Hawaiian, French, Toki Pona
| Message 16 of 22 19 September 2013 at 7:54pm | IP Logged |
Some of the older international articles in the field of Second Language Studies have an abstract in French and German at the beginning (e.g. Selinker's paper on Interlanguage, 1972). However most of what I read now is just published in English.
When I studied philosophy and theology for my first degree, things were quite different. Most of the papers for theology were originally published in German (e.g. Boltzmann, Schleiermacher) and occasionally Danish (e.g Kierkegaard), whilst many philosophy papers were originally either in French (e.g. Descartes, Derrida) or German (e.g. Frege, Kant) due to the huge wealth of literature from these countries. This is not to mention all the translations of Ancient Greek (e.g. Plato, Thales) and Latin (e.g Cicero, Heraclitus).
I think the real question for me is not which languages papers are published in generally, as we have lots of contributions from recent and modern antiquity (and Latin used to be the academic lingua franca anyway right up until the 18th century), but how much new research is originally published in languages other than English in the 21st century ?
Edited by Teango on 19 September 2013 at 7:55pm
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