Said & Done

To celebrate the newly-released book, "Language City: The Fight to Preserve Endangered Mother Tongues in New York," we revisit a conversation with author Ross Perlin from 2022. Ross is a Columbia professor, linguist, and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance. In this conversation, he previews several of the fascinating topics which later appear in Language City, such New York's linguistic hyperdiversity and the importance of language preservation, as well as the stories of speakers of endangered languages like Seke and Lenape.

Learn more about Language City here: https://groveatlantic.com/book/language-city/

Learn more about the Endangered Language Alliance Here: https://www.elalliance.org/

Learn more about the Languages of New York City map: https://languagemap.nyc/

Claire-Marie Brisson is a Preceptor in French at Harvard University. In this conversation, she talks about growing up in Michigan in close contact with multiple languages, including French, English, Spanish, German, and Arabic. She discusses her activities as a French language advocate and educator, including a course that she teaches at Harvard titled "Discovering French in North America." This class follows waterways in the US and Canada to explore the history of the French language, minority French literature, and environmental issues. 

Watch this conversation on YouTube: https://youtu.be/J9vlx47f-O0

The North American Francophone Podcast: https://www.thefrancophone.com/

Liam Liesanggoro teaches Indonesian at Columbia University as the Fulbright Foreign Language TA for the 2023-2024 academic year. In this conversation, he speaks about the fascinating connection between language and sports. Liam discusses how language is used in playing badminton and basketball, both in Indonesia and in the US. He also talks about how playing sports can be a good way for a person studying or living abroad to engage with others, acquire new linguistic forms, and become part of a community. 

Timi Odunjo is a senior at Columbia University majoring in Drama and Theatre Arts. In this conversation, he speaks about studying the Yoruba language at Columbia and the cinematic traditions that have inspired him to become a filmmaker. He also discusses his first film, a documentary titled Ballet U.

Richard R. speaks about his journey to and within Tibetan Buddhism, and the central role that the Tibetan language has played in his religious practice and in his life over the past several decades.layed in his religious practice and in his life over the past several decades.

Skye Shannon Savage, a Ph.D. candidate in Columbia's Department of Germanic Languages, discusses a project that involved teaching some Yiddish in a German language class, in order to highlight the relationship between the two languages. Skye situates this experiment of linguistic cross-pollination within the broader context of metalinguistic knowledge, which is rarely taught explicitly in the foreign language classroom.

Simon Zuberek returns to Said & Done to discuss the rise in interest in artificial intelligence, and how it relates to language teaching and learning. We discuss how large language model chatbots like ChatGPT and Google Bard work, and how they might and might not be helpful to a language learner today.

Nandi Sipengane, instructor of isiZulu at Yale University, talks about speaking many different languages at home and at school growing up in South Africa. She describes some of the unique features of isiZulu,  including the famous click consonants. She also discusses how South Africans think about and understand their complex national, cultural, and linguistic identities.

Watch this conversation on Youtube: https://youtu.be/t5jOXjLx_TY

Angelina Craig-Florez of Columbia University, Ann Warner-Ault of the College of New Jersey, and Mike Jones of Swarthmore College are three members of the board of NEALLT, the Northeastern Association for Language Learning Technology.  In this conversation, we talk about the paths that they took to becoming language professionals, the role of technology in language teaching, and how a smaller regional organization like NEALLT can be a big help to graduate students and early-career language professionals as they try out new ideas and build their professional networks. Here’s my conversation with Angie, Ann, and Mike. 

www.neallt.org

https://youtu.be/q09EGrxBx7I

#language #languages #languagelearning #languageteaching 

What challenges do learners face in year 10, year 15, year 20 of studying a foreign language? Chris and Simon talk about their recent victories and ongoing challenges as higher-proficiency learners of English, German, and Italian.

This episode was recorded as a livestream on Youtube. You can watch the video version of this conversation here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bi7lW9yvnpo

Ayomide Tikare, a graduating senior at Barnard College, talks about learning Yoruba over the past four years. She discusses her background as a Yoruba heritage speaker, her language-learning process, and her love of Yoruba-language films and music.

Mentioned in this episode:

O Le Ku - 1997 film by Tunde Kelani
Tunde Kelani, Nigerian film director
Kunle Afolayan, Nigerian film director
Maami - 2011 film by Tunde Kelani
October 1 - 2014 film directed by Kunle Afolayan
Ayinla - 2021 film directed by Tunde Kelani
Tope Alabi - Nigerian gospel singer
Fuji - popular Yoruba musical genre
Oriki - Yoruba praise poetry

Dr. Dwijen Bhattacharya discusses the history and origin of the Bengali language, a related language called Sylheti, and some of the reasons why a language learner in the US might want to study Bengali.

In his second appearance on Said & Done, Yuri Shevchuk recounts a journey to Ukraine that he undertook in August 2022, and describes what he encountered in a country at war. He then speaks more generally about Russia’s war in Ukraine, about what surprised him and what didn’t surprise him about it, and about the evolving role of the Ukrainian language in this war. 

Professor Carol Rounds, lecturer of Hungarian at Columbia University, speaks about some of the unique and challenging ways in which Hungarian is structured, and why it is so interesting to linguists. She discusses how this agglutinative language creates meaning and allows for play in ways that are surprising to speakers of English, as a consequence of its morphological and syntactic complexity.

Professor Millicent Marcus of Yale University speaks about her life and work as a scholar of Italian literature. We focus in particular on her witnessing of and participation in two world-historical events: the 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and the 1966 flood of the River Arno in Florence. She describes her experiences as one of the “Angeli del fango,” the young people who helped to recover books, manuscripts, and works of art from the damage of the floodwaters. 

Chris Kaiser thanks the listeners and guests of the Said & Done podcast and announces a new schedule for 2023.

Professor Jay Ramesh of Columbia University discusses his knowledge of and experiences in three languages of India: Sanskrit, Tamil, and Malayalam. He describes the myths and stories associated with Hindu temples, and in particular a certain kind of text called a Sthala Purana, some of which are written first in Sanskrit and then later given a unique kind of translation into Tamil.

Ross Perlin, professor at Columbia in the Linguistics program and co-director of the Endangered Language Alliance, discusses how large cities are often home to endangered languages from around the world. He talks about the challenges of preserving and revitalizing languages with few speakers, and gives the examples of Seke, a language of Nepal, and Lunaape (also called Lenape or Delaware), a Native American language of the Algonquian family.

Yudis Nugraha, instructor of Indonesian at Columbia University, talks about growing up speaking both Indonesian and Balinese. He discusses the relationship between language, tourism, culture and religion in Bali, focusing in on the unique religion of Balinese Hinduism. Approximately 90% of people living in Bali identify as belonging to this religion, whose origins trace back to traders and priests from India coming to the Indonesian archipelago 2000 years ago.

Felice Beneduce discusses growing up in an Italian family in Providence, Rhode Island and speaking standard Italian at home. He talks about how his love for the Italian language has figured prominently throughout his life, from his time serving in the Italian army, to living in northern Italy, to studying Italian literature, and now to passing this knowledge on to his students and his family as a teacher of the language.