03/10/2010 01:30 PM

Arabic: Under the big tent

Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the language of written discourse, university courses, academic and scientific texts and conferences, TV and radio news…but it is not how people speak to each other. The language of daily life is conducted in one of many colloquial Arabic dialects, often quite different from MSA, which is adapted from the language of the Koran and written in the dialect of Mecca. So MSA is the big tent, with all these dialect campfires burning brightly under its big top — all the same, but very different too. This diglossia, the co-existence of two separate versions of a language, represents two different levels of education. An Arabic-speaker who does not have a formal education has difficulty understanding the TV news or reading a newspaper. Some villages may only have a [...]

03/08/2010 11:55 AM

Spanglish no more

Last year, the North American Academy of the Spanish Language teamed up with the US government to stamp out Spanglish. The institution — a group of academics who regulate the use of Cervantes’ language in the U.S. — is guiding the government in its quest to supply official information in correct Spanish to the 40 million Hispanics living here. Claudio Torrens at the Daily News as much as called the Academy the Spanish Inquisition. And we all know that nobody expects the Spanish Inquisition. This ʻinquisition,ʼ known in Spanish as the Academia Norteamericana de la Lengua Española (ANLE), is based in New York and is directed by writer Gerardo Piña-Rosales, Professor of Spanish Language and Literature at Lehman College, City University of New York. These Norteamericanos are the newest members of the venerable group [...]