MEITS Blog

A few days ago, I was asked whether I thought language learning would become redundant in the foreseeable future because of the development of machine learning and translation technology. Or as some of my, shall we say, slightly less enthusiastic former students might have put it: “But what’s the point in learning languages when we can just use Google translate?”

In a few weeks I’ll be moving to England from my native Northern Ireland. I’m an Irish speaker, and last week, in the library, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t have easy access to a well-stocked library of books written in Irish for very much longer, so I took a quick browse in that aisle to see if there was anything to catch my eye. On one of the shelves there was a thin black hardback with Dónall Mac Amhlaigh in gold lettering on the spine. Apparently, I had written a book.

“Tooor, Tooor, Tooor, Tooor, Tooor, Tooor! I wer’ narrisch!” Cordoba 1978, Austria beats Germany 3:2 – a legendary victory the country still hasn’t quite recovered from (not least because Austria isn’t necessarily spoiled with football victories). 

In a recent speech the Ofsted Chief Inspector, Amanda Spielman, commented that, because of having to take the ‘full brunt of economic dislocation in recent years’, ‘white working class communities’ in England lacked ‘the aspiration and drive seen in many migrant communities’ (1).  

Someone might say ‘Could you lift that box?’. And you would know if this is a request or a factual question, because they are hoovering the floor or they are your physiotherapist assessing your recovery from an injury. The context in which the conversation is taking place often clarifies whatever is not certain.

When the cold winter is well over, I have come to visit 呼和浩特 (Hohhot) in May for my PhD project which investigates the under-researched history of teaching and learning Mandarin Chinese as a second language to Mongolian minority groups in China since 1900. Hohot is the capital of North China’s Inner Mongolia autonomous region. 

Leo is a three-year-old boy who has lived in Hong Kong since he was born. When meeting a new friend, he usually proudly introduced himself as a trilingual and wondered if the kid standing in front of him could also speak different languages. Leo’s parents initially adopted a ‘one parent-one language’ policy in which the mother spoke to the child in Cantonese and the father in Mandarin.

The 5^th of February may have passed you by unnoticed this year, but if you ever happen to be in Finland around this date, you definitely can’t miss it. In Finland, the 5^th February is Runeberginpäivä, (Swe. Runebergsdagen) or Runeberg’s day, a celebration of the birth of the Finnish poet J. L. Runeberg, who penned the lyrics to the country’s national anthem.