BSJ

The Butler Scholarly Journal

Category: Languages

  1. Polari: How Bona to Vada Your Eek!

    After the global media caused uproar at the Sochi Olympics regarding Russia’s new legislation condemning non-traditional relationships, almost an echo of the English 1885 Labouchere Amendment, Ireland has become the newest country to vote for the freedom to marry among homosexual couples by a popular vote. Occurring less than a year apart, both events have shown how complex the ongoing debate about the role and the rights of homosexuality is in today’s society. In linguistic terms, however, homosexuality seems to be old news. Deemed an ‘endangered language’ in 2010 by the World Oral Literature Project established between Yale University and…

  2. La France en crise

    Alexis de Toqueville once wrote of France, “Has there ever been any nation on earth which was so full of contrasts, and so extreme in all of its acts, more dominated by emotions, and less by principles; always doing better or worse than we expect, sometimes below the common level of humanity, sometimes much above it.” The tale of François Hollande as president is extreme, emotional and overwhelmingly negative. Hollande’s economic programme has been a big volte-face, illustrated in the replacement of left-wing finance minister, Arnaud Montebourg. Montebourg described the efforts to reduce budget deficits in the Eurozone as Kafkaesque,…

  3. Lost in Translation

    Until around 400 years ago translators were commonly strangled or burned at the stake. These were mundane occurrences at the time; William Tyndale, for instance, the seventeenth century translator of the Bible into English, met this unsavoury fate since his translation was seen as a direct challenge to the hegemony of the Roman Catholic Church. Thus, for obvious reasons, it was then common for translators to be anonymous, and still today the name of the translator is often neglected in publications. It is almost as if the publishers want to hide the fact that the text has been mediated or…

  4. Pardon my French

    Over the summer a French media storm involved the Minister for Culture and Communication, Aurélie Filippetti, after a misspelt tweet on her official account. A corrected tweet was posted and Filippetti blamed an aide. Fairly unremarkable news: evidence, perhaps, of the ‘silly season’ in France, except in France language is a sensitive topic and Filippetti’s position means she is in charge of language policy. Her mistake is symbolic of perceived wider threats to le français. Since World War Two, French has been under continuous assault from franglais, or perhaps more accurately franricain (français et américain), as American cultural influences have…

  5. Languages of Spain: Unity, Independence and Conflict

    Due predominately to Spain’s aggressive colonisation of Latin America and the Caribbean in the 17th century, today the Spanish language holds a key position in the world. With 329 million native speakers it ranks as the world’s second most prevalent native language, just ahead of English, while in terms of its geographic span it is fourth in the world; not to mention its growing importance in the USA where Latinos represent 16% of the population. Given this dominance, it can come as a surprise to many non-Spaniards that for much of the country, the language we know and learn internationally as…