Language is one of the most amazing things we humans do.
It separates us from the animals.
Gives us theatre, poetry and song.
It can make us laugh, it can make us cry.
In this episode, I'm going to look at how our language and our accents
define and shape our identity...
HE SPEAKS HIS OWN LANGUAGE
..and how thousands of languages are now threatened with the rise of the global village.
I've always believed that my language, English,
does the most to define what makes me me.
But my English is wildly different from many other people's across Britain.
The accent we speak in may seem trivial,
but, in fact, it is a vital element of our identity.
Our small country boasts a bewildering and beautiful array of accents and dialects.
I'm going to see just what one county of England, Yorkshire, can offer.
Well, Ian McMillan, hello. Stephen, how are you?
Delighted to be in Yorkshire, home of the famous Yorkshire accent.
The Yorkshire accent, which is a many varied thing, as you can see. I've got a map here. Oh, yes.
Just about every Yorkshire town. Each of these has got their own accent.
From right over here in the east with Hull, where they talk about,
"I'm gonna have a PARNT o' MARLD at FARV to FARV."
And I've got all the STERN RERSES albums. Stern Rerses!
You go west to Leeds and Bradford, where we are now, and where they don't say their T's.
They go, "I GO'A GO A Bradford, GO'A GO A Batley."
And when you go across to Leeds, somehow the E gets lengthened
and they go, "We don't EER accent in LEEEDS."
Oh, that's so Alan BENNEEET.
Yeah, that's right, very slow. It's attenuated.
Then you go down here, through Wakefield to Barnsley, where I live,
which is a very kinda harsh, "Now then, now then."
I think of Geoff Boycott.
Yes, and, "That's proper cricket is that," and it's like that.
I do generally think it's to do with the harsh winds of Yorkshire.
Really? That make your mouth a bit like that.
You don't wanna open your mouth too far!
Then you go further south, to Sheffield.
There's a fantastic difference between Barnsley and Sheffield.
We say, "Now then, now then". As you approach Sheffield, your vowels go, "Nar den, nar den."
They go deep. So we call them deedars, cos they go, "Now den, what dar doin' darn 'ere?"
That's a bit like in the south in America where they say BIDNESS instead of "business", don't they?
Havin' the old biddness.
How extraordinary. Now den. Now den... Chesterfield,
where they call their house their arse!
My Aunty Mabel, who was from Chesterfield, would say things like,
"I've just had double glazing fitted in my arse".
She'd say, "I've got a detached arse." Have you really?! The thing is, they don't think it's funny!
And you go... And they say, "Why you laughing?"
Our accents are shaped by where we were born and raised.
Ian McMillan is a poet,
his language moulded by the area of Yorkshire he has always lived in.
As a poet, do you think there's Yorkshire in your lines?
Obviously, when you read them, there clearly is.
In the end, Barnsley's what I think with.
I think with its history, I think with its culture,
I think with its hills that you walk up and get out of breath. Yes!
I think with its wind that stops me talking in big words, big mouth openings.
I think, in the end, no matter how I write on the page,
it'll always come out with Barnsley cos Barnsley's what I think with.
They used to till the fields
Horses pulled the plough
Corn grew in Barnsley accents
And me father milked a cow
Fool's gold
They used to harvest crops
They used to grind the corn
Fed the bairns turnip tops
"Mine's nesh - how's yourn?"
Fool's gold.
Well, let's have our accent forecast for the British Isles.
It's a small enough country, isn't it, Britain, the UK?
And yet it's rich with teeming micro-climates of accent.
Let's start all the way here in Belfast, now, here it is.
BELFAST ACCENTS: Belfast! There's types of Belfast
and there's the lighter type, too, which is beautiful.
It's a lovely accent - there's nothing wrong with it.
It's beautiful, so it is.
And then move across, a lot of influence comes all the way up from Glasgow, aye.
SCOTTISH ACCENTS: I don't want to be insulting to anybody who comes from these places
but we know there are all kinds of Scottish accents.
And some are very, very refined and some of them slightly less so.
And they're all beautiful and they're different and they're fantastic.
And they're rich. It's like a stew - England's like a stew.
I'm sounding like Billy Connolly, now!
No, no, stop it!
Let's go down to... Well, I guess we'll go down here.
GEORDIE ACCENT: Why aye - what's down here?
It's the Geordies, isn't it?
Traditionally, Geordie has been regarded as the accent of coal pits,
poverty and little fishes on little dishes.
About ten years ago, all that started to change.
and now Geordie tops the polls as one of the most desirable accents around.
I've got your account information here.
You actually made a redemption on the 26th of October...
In popular entertainment, I suppose three of the biggest names you could mention
are Ant and Dec, if you counted that as two names, and Cheryl Cole.
I've heard of those.
They've got very proud, obvious, very clear North Eastern accents.
I couldn't say they were exactly Newcastle or whatever, but they're certainly from round these parts.
And they quite clearly don't try to hide that, and that comes through. Why should they hide it?
Everybody in this centre will be very proud of where they're from and their heritage.
They speak the way they do to their friends as they will to customers. And it goes down very, very well.
It might've been a problem with the time. Would you like me to investigate?
As I say, it's a household account. They're going into the same pool, so to speak, you know?
At this Newcastle call centre, reassuring Geordie voices
deal with thousands of customer calls a day, with remarkably successful results.
In the recent survey that we had commissioned,
it came out that it was the accent most likely to give that feel-good factor to people,
and make people feel happy.
It was very trustworthy.
In addition to that, it was deemed as being very helpful, as well.
OK, put the lady back on.
The human ear is a marvel at detecting the minutest nuances of language
and the differences can have a profound emotional, financial and psychological effect.
Accents are probably one of the most vital parts
of the sensory experience that we have
with speech processing, in particular.
That is why places like this, a contact centre,
are really stuck between a rock and a hard place
in terms of trying to delight a customer that calls in.
Because they have no other aspect of sensory experience.
They don't have visual clues, or anything at all.
They don't know the person they're speaking to on the telephone.
What surprised me most is that when a customer complains,
the call centre falls back on a more traditional English accent.
If it needs to be escalated, we want someone speaking like you speak.
That's an air of authority and it is almost wired into our brain.
That perception that we have.
That's scary. Basically, they make a call to a busy room like this - this one's offline at the moment.
And they get the nice Geordie saying, "Oh, I'm sorry about that.
"We'll try and work it out, I'm sure it'll be fine".
Then there IS a problem - they say, "I'll pass you to the manager."
And then I go, "Hello, how may I help you? I'm so sorry."
The study has shown that is perfect for a resolution - a positive resolution.
Even if you're stating exactly what the call centre operative was stating,
it is much better coming from you.
Moving on, as you see, a slew of accents.
South, we go down.
This used to be so popular in the '60s.
SCOUSE ACCENT: Liverpool. Like that, you know?
The Beatles. The "Beeeea-tles". It's bipolar, Liverpool, isn't it?
DEEP VOICE: There's a sort of Michael Angelis one that's rather depressed all the time.
HIGH VOICE: And there's the perky one. Perky! Like that.
It's really livley.
It's lovely. What a country we live in.
How rich it is.
So many dialects, accents, brogues.
They're all rather wonderful.
WELSH ACCENT: Haven't even touched Wales, have I? Haven't even touched it.
But you've got your own, I've got mine.
Never let it be thought that a BBC accent like mine isn't an accent.
It's just as stupid, just as odd, and, I hope, just as lovable as everybody else's.
So, within our own small nation state,
there is an extraordinary variety in the way we all speak English.
And this determines so much about our perceptions of each other.
Language, of course, is a kind of cocktail, isn't it?
If your accent can have such an impact on your identity,
imagine what a difference the language you speak has!
We commonly say how there are 100 Eskimo words for "snow".
Well, that story sadly turns out not to be true, but it does lead one to think -
does the language we speak actually alter the way we see, interpret and engage with the world?
If I spoke an Inuit language or French, for example,
would I think differently?
All right. Hello.
Sssh.
Lera Boroditsky, Professor of Linguistics
at Stanford University, believes exactly that...
Today we'll be talking about how the languages we speak
shape the way we think.
One of the oldest experiments on this was done a long time ago
by Roman Jakobson, a Russian linguist,
and he asked students at Moscow State University, 1915,
he asked them to personify different days of the week.
So different days of the week have different grammatical genders
in Russian, and so he would tell people, "Act like Monday,
"act like Wednesday." And what he found was these students, these Russian-speaking students,
would act like a man if they're acting like Monday,
but they would act like a woman if they're acting like Wednesday,
because Monday's grammatically masculine and Wednesday's grammatically feminine.
This is a pretty mind-boggling idea. Variations in the languages we speak
affect not only the way we describe the world,
but the way we experience it.
There have been lots of other demonstrations showing...
Oh, yes, le pont, la puento, whatever it was, or is it something similar?
The...for bridge, yes... Yeah.
The word for bridge is different genders in Spanish and German.
Die Brucke. That's right.
And so German speakers, because it's grammatically feminine,
will give more feminine descriptions of bridges.
They'll say things like bridges are beautiful or they're elegant,
or they're fragile, whereas Spanish speakers will say
bridges are strong and they're long and they're towering.
'So how does being bi-lingual affect your view of the world?
'Surely things get very confusing indeed?'
You are bilingual,
so you can perhaps at least swap languages sometimes, cos you must ask yourself,
"Am I thinking this because I'm thinking in English or because I'm thinking in Russian
"or can I rationally think this
"in a pure, almost machine-like, way that is outside language?"
I, of course, think about everything very rationally.
HE LAUGHS You have the best of the Russian side
and the best of the English. That's right.
Actually it's very difficult for me to design experiments comparing English and Russian.
Because I speak both, it seems to me perfectly natural to have both those ideas in mind.
And then when we do the experiment and we find that actually English speakers see it one way
and Russian speakers see it another way, I'm just shocked.
As someone who speaks both, what is there that is
characteristically Russian in the way you feel and experience when you're thinking in a Russian way?
Russian speakers express much more collectivist ideas when they're speaking Russian.
They espouse more collectivist values,
and they espouse more individualistic values when they're speaking English. Gosh.
Even though they're giving an explanation for the same kind of phenomena,
when they do it in one language, they have a different perspective on it
than when they do it in another language. So, it kind of...
Language serves as a cue to the cultural values that... So it's not a miserable, oppressed Russian,
dark Russian soul sort of way of looking at the world then?
Well, yeah, that's a very English way of looking at the Russian souls. THEY LAUGH
I think of that fabulous Chekhov short story, Misery!
Russians love being miserable. They revel in it.
It's the only way to be an intelligent person
in the world - to really appreciate the misery
and the horror that the world has to offer.
I've often wondered if I was a Hungarian like my grandfather,
would I think differently, would I still be me?
If a word doesn't exist in a language, does that imply
the feeling or concept doesn't exist?
So if you don't have a word for evil, does it vanish?
While I understand Lera's position I also agree with the Chomskian view
that all languages have intrinsically the same structures.
But that doesn't mean they're all the same,
especially when it comes to humour.
If Hitler had been British, would we, under similar circumstances,
have been moved, charged up, fired up
by his inflammatory speeches or would we simply have laughed?
Is English too ironic to sustain Hitlerian styles?
Would his language simply run false in our ears?
My own admittedly unscientific research has led me to believe
that some languages are simply intrinsically funnier than others.
My own personal favourite is Yiddish, that marvellous
Jewish mish-mash of German, Russian, Polish, Hebrew words.
You're probably familiar with Yiddish humour
if you know the work of Woody Allen or Mel Brooks
or Larry David in Seinfeld or Ben Stiller or Krusty the Clown.
Their work is deeply rooted in Yiddish tradition.
It's more a mindset than a language, despite the kitsch
and the schmaltz and the shlongs and the schmucks or schmier,
a joke can be Yiddish even when it's told in English.
Guy went to the doctor and said, "I have trouble peeing."
The doc says, "How old are you?" And he says, "I'm 80."
He says, "Well, you peed enough." That's a joke.
The boy's an actor, he's gone to an audition, he comes back,
his mother says, "Well?" He said, "I got the part." She said, "What part?"
He said, "It's the husband." She said, "Go back and insist on a speaking part."
That's funny. THEY LAUGH
But that's so Jewish - you know what I mean? Exactly.
Every... Yhis is like a competition.
You have a bunch of old Jews sitting around a table telling jokes. That's what we do.
But there's no new Yiddish jokes, so it just becomes a competition.
Who'll call the punchline before you get to it?
"It's a schmuck! I know, all right, next."
Because in the end... And it's always the schmuck. It is the same joke, isn't it?
A typical Jewish joke and it's so typically Jewish
and Alan King did it here.
An old man passes out in the street and somebody comes and they open his
collar and they pick up his head and they said, "Are you comfortable?"
And he says, "I make a living." STEPHEN LAUGHS
And Alan King got sick and he passed out at the bar,
right before he passed away.
And they opened his collar, the Maitre d', Frank, and they said,
"Alan, are you comfortable?" And Alan said, "I make a living."
And he said, "I've been waiting 40 years to do that joke." Oh, that's bliss, isn't it?
But in a serious sense, you might argue that Yiddish was,
as it were, you travelled light, all of us, our ancestors
travelled light, because their property would be taken.
But their language, their wit, their learning, they could travel with them.
I always said that Judaism is not a religion, it's a way of life.
It's a way of living your life.
And Yiddish is a way of feeling your life.
I grew up and I was bar mitzvahed, but we didn't talk Hebrew.
We never thought of talking Hebrew.
Cos Hebrew was a language of the Temple. It was a language of the Temple,
it was something we had to learn, where Yiddish,
I would hear my grandparents and my parents talk Yiddish.
But they didn't want me... HE SPEAKS YIDDISH ..the kids are listening.
And we would try and translate what they were saying.
Because Yiddish is the language of emotion and of sex... Emotion. ..and of failure and hilarity.
Hebrew was the language of seriousness and ceremony and solemnity.
There's plenty of failure in Hebrew. Let's not belittle the accomplishment of the Hebrew.
I don't know if you've read the Bible, but we lose a lot. It's mostly failure.
It's mostly failure and guilt and a lot of cursing.
Hebrew comes from the vocal cords and Yiddish comes from the heart.
Well, Yiddish is now on the UNESCO endangered languages list and when
Stewie Stone and other comedians of his generation
are plonked like kneidlach into the great vat of chicken soup in the sky,
Yiddish will pass into oblivion.
There are around 7,000 languages spoken on this planet
and many more thousands of dialects, but it's estimated by some
that by the end of the century there'll barely be a thousand left.
I would argue that linguicide, the death of language,
poses as great a threat to our culture and history as species extinction.
And why is this rich linguistic stew of ours being threatened?
Well, it's to do with globalisation and the rise of the lingua franca,
those national and transnational languages like English
and Mandarin Chinese, which gobble up every language in their path.
The fortunes of small and struggling languages
ebb and flow with the tides of history. I'm off now to find out
about one that survives not far from our own shores.
THEY SPEAK IRISH
I'm here in the beautiful, bracing and chilly Connemara on the west coast of Ireland.
This is what they call the, um, I'll try and get this right...
the Gaeltacht Curraghrua,
one of the central areas for the speaking of the ancient language of Ireland - Irish.
They don't call it Gaelic very often - just Irish.
About 80,000 people still speak this language.
It's taught in school and they have very proud Irish speakers
all around us and in Donegal and in Cork.
But it's here in Connemara, Galway, that we find probably the majority of Irish speakers.
Irish, being a very old language, it doesn't have as many words
as the English language, but its descriptions are very good.
There's a thing called a smugairle roin.
A smugairle roin is a jellyfish.
And jellyfish is, direct
translation smugairle roin into English, is a seal's spit.
Oh, very good.
So you can imagine somebody comes... "What are these things all
"over the...they must be seal spits."
You know, "We'll call them smugairle roins," and that is
one of the beauties of the Irish language is that it has this.
And it would be such a shame to lose.
Would you say you're optimistic for his future as an Irish speaker?
I would be very optimistic for the future of the Irish language.
There was a spell there where it fell out of favour mainly due
to the way it was taught in schools.
It wasn't given the excitement. Yeah.
And nowadays, it's become much more fashionable to speak Irish.
You'll hear, especially if you go to the pubs,
you'll hear people speaking Irish,
young people on the streets speaking Irish,
and it's very important as well because it is our heritage.
SHE SPEAKS IRISH
The English ruled Ireland for centuries.
At the height of their colonial ambitions,
they attempted to suppress Irish culture and identity entirely.
An 1831 act forbade the teaching of Irish in schools.
'This coincided with An Gorta Mor, the Irish potato famine
'of the mid-19th century that killed over a million of the population.'
It was very nearly the death knell of the Irish language.
Thankfully, all that has changed now.
The schools that were the site of linguistic oppression
in Ireland are now the place of the language's revival.
THEY SING IN IRISH
Nowadays at the Connemara Golf Course,
every one of the golfers speaks Irish...
HE SPEAKS IRISH
As well as negotiating the perilous task of keeping their language alive,
they are also dealing with what must be
one of the world's hardest courses...
the holes are literally on different islands!
This is a heck of a place to have a golf course, isn't it? Incredible.
You must just blink your eyes on long June days
when you can be playing till ten at night...
'Imperialist Brit that I am,
'they are kind enough to speak English to me,
'which, given the history, is quite an ask.
'This part of Connemara suffered as much as any,
'but its utter remoteness helped preserve the language.
'History is never forgotten in Ireland
'and this sense of storytelling, be it national or personal,
'the gift of the gab, I suppose you could say,
'is one of the things I love about the country.'
Are there things you could say in Irish that you
couldn't really say in English and vice versa? Absolutely.
I think everybody here thinks through Irish.
And do you find Irish more accurate?
It hits the nail on the head more often,
you use fewer words,
it's cleaner, more poetic? Is there some qualities to it that...
Far more ways of saying the same thing.
There are more ways? It depends who you're addressing...
Oh, so it has a social... Oh, it has.
Your interlocutor... ..Or undressing. Oh, right!
Because you can say it's a fine day
in about four different ways
depending on who you're... Four? ..even more.
Depending on whether you're like,
"I hope to God it rains on that fucker."
You know. Or, "she's a lovely girl".
You know, "I hope the sun shines". You know?
But it depends totally on who you're addressing.
So you find when you switch to English, you're slightly more...
Oh, you have to say, "Well, it's raining.
"It's going to rain," or, you know, "there's rain on the way".
That's about the three way...
You know, if it's raining, it's raining. You know?
But there's rain on the way as well.
But there's 50 different types of rain, John, and you can describe every one of them.
And that description, that wealth of description,
that descriptive quality of the language is something that we
would treasure here particularly.
On behalf of the club here and its manager and director of the company,
we offer you life membership in this golf club.
Oh, what an honour! Thank you so...
You haven't seen me play! You've seen me swing or try to!
That's so kind. You offer me... Oh, that is a fabulous thing.
Thank you so much. This is a truly great honour.
This is one of the most remarkable golf clubs in the world. It is, it's an amazing place.
Going to cost me a lot of balls, because not many of them
will hit land, but it's still fantastic! We'll follow you closely
to see if we can pick up a few! Thank you so much!
Oh, dear! I think I've lost my moment now!
I don't want to waste any more balls!
Agus, action!
How better to get inside a language
than to act in its favourite soap opera?
Action!
THEY SPEAK IRISH
Like the Welsh, Ireland has a TV station in its own language.
The most popular soap is called Ros na Run,
a Connemara version of Coronation Street.
'So I'm about to embark on a daunting task...
'speaking in Irish...'
HE SPEAKS IRISH
Erm...you look hungry. HE CONTINUES IN IRISH
It's here, it's here somewhere. Nil aon ocras orm!
Er...racaigh me go Gallimh.
Huh?
Go raibh maith agat agus slan go fail...
Go foil! That's right! I always get that bit wrong!
THEY ALL TALK AT ONCE
'Our brief is to be as popular as possible.'
We are probably quite important in terms of drawing in
the hesitant Irish speaker as well as the fluent Irish speaker.
THEY SPEAK IRISH
To some people, the creation of TG4
was a kind of a white elephant.
A sop to the Irish language community.
But if you can imagine that when I was growing up, the only cultural
resources in the Irish language that were available to me was
Victorian literature which was about peasant life on the Aran Islands.
Yes, quite. Now for my children, they can watch cartoons dubbed into Irish,
they can grow up and watch a variety of programmes,
which are about Ireland today.
And we've embraced the internet as a way of trying to draw in a new audience.
That's why we've created a Facebook site and a Twitter site,
and we're going to do webisodes next season,
which will be all about a younger generation in the town
of Ros na Run and they will gradually
interact in the broadcast programme and try to draw them across.
Irish might well survive here, but these children
and their children will always need a global language.
So you just change between the two very happily? Yes.
But you think of yourself as an Irish speaker first? Yeah.
Is that true of everybody? ALL: Yes.
Goodness. If you erm, if you text each other, do...
do you do it in Irish or in English?
ALL: English.
Ah, that's interesting, so things like the internet or whatever,
are you on Facebook and things like that? ALL: Yes.
And do you do that in English? ALL: Yes.
So do you think of English as the language of the internet,
but Irish the language of the playground and talking
and friendship and things, when you're with people? ALL: Yes.
You couldn't imagine yourselves only speaking Irish? ALL: No.
You wouldn't cope in the world if you didn't speak English? ALL: Yes.
Yeah. Thank goodness you do speak English, or we would be having an embarrassing time when I...
THEY LAUGH Well, thank you very much.
Mustn't disturb any more of your lessons, thank you.
Was that...go raibh... thank you?
ALL: Go raibh maith agat.
I can't get the pronunciation right! Thank you very much.
Another small language that has battled
to preserve its identity in the modern world is found here in Spain.
One of most remarkable languages in Europe is Basque.
Somewhere between France and Spain lies the Basque region
and has done for thousands of years.
It's been a long and extraordinary struggle to
keep their language alive and their culture and their cuisine...
all the things that make them Basque.
The people here are passionate about their food.
The language is in the DNA of Basque cooking
and preparation techniques, handed down over many hundreds of years.
Wow! Star Trek!
'Juan Marie Arzak and his daughter Elena run one of the finest
'restaurants in the world here in Donostia,
'or what we know as San Sebastian.'
We renovate recently. Really? It's very lovely.
HE SPEAKS BASQUE
Because this restaurant is dated from 1897.
His grandfather, my great grandfather.
HE SPEAKS BASQUE
He's a third generation and me the fourth generation.
Always here in this restaurant.
So this is the tasting menu and this is the a la carte here, is that right?
Would you say that to be Basque is to speak the language
and to eat the food?
Those are the two things that make you Basque, the language and the food?
HE SPEAKS BASQUE
When people ask what type of food do you make?
Now we say Basque with Basque spirit,
because we think in Basque, the taste is from here.
It's the result of our taste cultural that is in our minds,
and that we cook with, with this, with this result...
The Basques defiantly defended their language for 40 years
against the fascist General Franco.
But now there are more than half a million Basque speakers
here in Spain. The language, like this restaurant,
is now confident enough to absorb new elements from outside,
Arzak is the Heston Blumenthal of Basque country,
exuberantly fusing traditional Basque ingredients such as gooseneck,
barnacle, eel and spider crab with cutting edge molecular cuisine.
We are very open to the world and we can accept foods...
Influences from... ..all over the world.
It's an exchange of cultures, of other cultures.
So in the same way that the Basque language can have
words from other languages, so the Basque food can have dishes
and ingredients from other places. That's very good.
It's very curious, yeah. Yeah.
I think it's interesting how the language and the cuisine are,
are similar, in some ways. Yes, it's very similar, yeah.
And the cuisine is there, literally, in the kitchen. Shall we go to the kitchen?
OK, I'll follow you, thank you. OK. You're cooking, eh?!
I'll help you! If you trust me!
It's called lichen. Ah, it's lichen! Yes.
Some fruit sauce. ARZAK SPEAKS BASQUE
Like so. It's so beautiful.
Maybe I should do it better to be symmetrical!
It's very well. Very well. A little oil.
This is olive oil. Ah, of course.
It's beautiful. And a little salt.
Can I just take a little broken bit here?
Oh, a little salt on it.
Ah, this doesn't work, hey, this is for the guest.
So this is not for the guests,
this would not be good enough for the guests.
This is once done... Very good, very well, so...
I feel like someone on MasterChef: The Professionals
who's made his... erm, who's plated up.
It is very lovely, I love the colours.
And so this is made to look like stone is the idea, the rock.
Si, it's the, the...
When you go to the mountains, here you can find this type of...
Ancient Basque Cromlechs, yeah,
or Dolmens we call them sometimes don't we, yeah?
And this was the inspiration for the plate. Fantastic.
Cuisine and language may well be so entwined,
because traditionally recipes were passed on by word of mouth...
It's an oral tradition.
In the Basque history it's more from spoken
from one generation to other than written.
I think the first Basque book was in 1545? I believe.
Very well, very well!
Why do you think the Basque language has survived in a way that
so many other languages haven't? Breton, Cornish...
HE SPEAKS BASQUE
We are very proud of being the people here,
this is why things have survived the, the, the language so, so much.
In neighbouring France, it's far harder to preserve
the struggling local language.
We're moving from the Basque country
to the more or less neighbouring Occitan country.
Occitan is the language spoken in the south of France principally in the Langue d'Oc...
they reckon about seven million people
have a smattering of it at least, yet nonetheless,
because of its variations and because it isn't supported
in the way that Basque is, many people fear
it will suffer from linguicide... it will die.
like so many of the world's languages,
it's on the endangered list.
SHE SINGS
Liza Occitan, as she is known, sings in Provencale,
one of the six dialects of Oc.
She also presents French TV's regional Occitan news program
and has a devoted following of Occitan sympathisers.
The Occitanian language is very beautiful to listen to.
The sounds are beautiful. It's a Mediterranean language. It's a Latin based language.
It's much nicer to sing, for instance, than French, like...
I've made the choice to sing in Occitan,
because it actually has beautiful sounds.
The language of Oc is a romance language
but also a distinctly romantic one.
It was the language of the Troubadours, it was spoken by Dante
and sung by the minstrel Blondel in his desperate search
to find his king, Richard the Lionheart...
Many governments have given up attempting to repress
regional languages, and now support and promote them -
the notoriously centralised French state
continues its policy of linguistic imperialism.
It's had a pretty tough history though, hasn't it, Occitan?
The French state decided that they would try and centralise everything
and eradicate differences. Around the whole of France
would have one single version of French,
and therefore any of the other languages that were spoken across the whole of France,
any of the Languedoc, any of the Occitan dialects, had to be forbidden.
So children were beaten in schools, so they wouldn't speak it.
It's so interesting, this, cos it's a story we come across again
and again, with minority languages.
With the Irish under British rule and their language.
With the Basques under Franco and their language.
And also with you with Occitan, the...
A less vicious regime perhaps, than Franco, but nonetheless
it was a... Homogeneity was the idea, there must be one French.
I would ask you, are you essentially optimistic
or pessimistic about the future of Occitan?
We are forced to be optimistic, in our situation -
if we become pessimistic, it's over.
This forced optimism is a stark contrast to the genuine confidence
of Basques in Spain, but is it just a case of nostalgia,
does it really matter?
Liza thinks Marcel, one of the few shepherds
traditionally working in the Alpille, the hills beyond Marseille,
will prove a point.
Little lambs!
This is wonderful.
Is he hopeful that the language will survive for the next 100 years?
SPEAKS DIALECT
He thinks these languages should live because it's part linked
to the identity and the culture of the land.
So he thinks the languages should definitely continue to exist.
D'accord. So, it's a matter of pride and identity
to speak the language. It makes him belong more to the land
and to this region?
SPEAKS DIALECT
France has yet to sign up for the 1992 Charter
to protect and promote minority languages.
France's constitution forbids it,
as it enshrines French as the official language.
Occitan and other French dialects have struggled for centuries
with one of France's most powerful and secretive institutions.
This is the French Academy
where the 40 so-called Immortals meet regularly to rule on which
words may or may not be officially included in the French language.
It was set up by Cardinal Richelieu in the 1630s, and since then
it's survived everything from revolution to Nazi occupation.
The Academy members are drawn from the creme de la creme of French society.
They are writers, politicians, scientists and philosophers.
You could argue that the Academy has been partly
responsible for homogeneity of French.
That, for example, Occitan and Basque have not been given
a full minority status like Welsh is or, or other...
But, you know, what they, they have lost is not too much
and in compensation they have been participated to one
of the most wonderful conversation possible, the conversation
in Paris, the conversation in the great towns of France.
For Academy members, it is their own, French language
and identity that is in peril, from an influx
of languages from around the world, primarily English.
In a period where the "Globish" English is so invading,
it is superfluous I think to take care so much of these local languages
that are not leading anywhere.
So that is very much your position, there is an official language,
if you like, that is... Not an official language,
but an agreed language that is agreed, by cultured people.
If one speaks rap, the other one speaks Maroc, Moroccan,
and the third, I don't know, a language from les banlieues,
there is no possibility of discussion.
Although the Academy has no legal authority of its own,
its decisions exert a huge influence.
Over the years, the Academy
has ruled on new French words to replace a host of imported ones.
Among them, balader for Walkman, courriel for email,
in an attempt to hold back the constant deluge of globish.
Merci.
Well, it's closed to mortals like me but what the Immortals are now
going to decide "in camera," must be off camera.
They're going to decide which unpleasant "Franglais"
and other interloping words will be accepted and which rejected,
and admitted into the French language.
400 years, the best part of, this has been going on.
It's a very strange and very French system.
Hmm. They're playing Boules.
Some might say that the Academy is a typically French relic
of a bygone age, spitting into the wind.
And as much as they try, it's impossible to stem
the inevitable mutability and inventiveness of language.
FRENCH RAP SONG
English may not be the greatest challenge to the purity of French.
A more potent threat is much closer to home,
in music made by the immigrants of the Maghreb,
the ex-colonies of North Africa.
They are reinventing the language of Racine and Corneille
to reflect their own identities, a new kind of French citizen.
I've come to Marseilles to meet one of the genre's maestros,
rapper and producer DJ Sya Styles.
Do you think that rap language
has changed the French language generally?
TRANSLATION:
New Maghrebi additions to standard French include "brelle,"
meaning useless or powerless, and "kiffer," derived from
the Arabic word for hashish, which has come to mean, "to love."
TRANSLATION:
'It's hard enough to transform a language a word at a time.
'All the more extraordinary is to resurrect an entire language from the dead,
'as an act of political will, to gift an identity to a whole nation.'
Israel had a difficult birth, a tricky childhood and a stormy adolescence.
Whatever one's views of the current political situation here
it was a remarkable journey to statehood,
and language was at the centre of it.
Hebrew was the language spoken here, centuries before
a man called Jesus Christ walked these streets.
But after the Diaspora, the dispersal of the Jews throughout Europe
and 2,000 years of persecution,
Hebrew died out as a spoken language,
remembered only in the Torah,
in rabbinical tradition
and in Friday night suppers in Jewish homes.
Fast forward to the creation of the state of Israel
in the aftermath of the Second World War and the Holocaust.
The most crucial question facing them was what language do we speak?
Yiddish, the lingua franca of the Middle European Jew,
was polluted, tainted by the shtetl, by pogroms and by the death camps.
Russian was too limited,
so they made the bold decision to reinvent Hebrew
as a modern living language.
Israeli linguist Ghilad Zuckermann is taking me
to Rishon LeZion where the first Hebrew school was built in 1889.
Stopping off in a garage for some mechanical problem solving
exposes an intriguing linguistic problem...
how do you describe things that simply didn't exist in the Bible?
HE SPEAKS HEBREW
Stephen. Shalom. How are you?
HE SPEAKS HEBREW
Handbrakes, did you say? Handbrakes.
THEY SPEAK HEBREW
I got that. You said it's the carburettor and you said, no it's fuel injected.
Yes. Yeah. A lot of English words in there.
'Well, they did create Hebrew words for carburettors, etc,
'but not all of them caught on.'
There are a lot of English words.
Are there any biblical Hebrew words in there that you can see?
HE SPEAKS HEBREW
Battery is...
It's not... It's a Hebrew-based word. Right.
But obviously it's a new word because it's a new concept.
Quite, so wouldn't exist in the Bible. Right.
It means to collect and to store.
So it's collects like this energy.
Well, that's also known as a capacitor. Capacitor.
Isn't it, so it's capacitor - exactly the same idea.
And, and, I mean, they're all, this bottle here, I mean obviously
there would be Hebrew words in the Bible for bottles and jars.
The coolant inside, but the container, the receptacle?
THEY SPEAK HEBREW
It is a Hebrew word which means container.
That's what I wondered.
That you would find in the Bible, women carrying pots and all kinds of...
You know, pots, and lots of words like that in the Bible.
Potters' vessel.
You'll see modernisation of ancient terms.
But usually when it comes to cars, the English wins.
For example, if you have a puncture.
HE SPEAKS HEBREW
Puncture. Puncture. You call it a puncture.
You see, he knows the Academy of the Hebrew language word,
but actually people say puncture.
'Ah!
'So Hebrew has an Academy as well!
'Not so surprising, I suppose, when they started a language from scratch.
'Car duly fixed, we're off now to visit the place where it all began.'
HE SPEAKS HEBREW
'When Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the prime force behind the revival of Hebrew,
'began to teach here, Palestine was still part of the Ottoman Empire
'and his students would have been dressed as these children have today.
'The slow process of re-inventing modern Hebrew had begun.
'Ironically, the Yiddish language, sturdy enough to survive
'the Holocaust, was now facing a more serious threat...
'from the state of Israel.'
In this classroom these were the young pioneers, whatever you
call them, the early Zionists, which was not then necessarily
a coloured political word, it just meant they wanted to live here.
They were being taught what kind of Hebrew?
Because the Hebrew you speak, which you call Israeli,
which seems a sensible idea,
presumably was not the same as the one that was being developed?
They were taught in the best Hebrew,
which was available for their teachers.
Let us remember that the teachers were not Hebrew speakers.
Wasn't their first language. It was not their first language.
They were not native Hebrew speakers. There were none. They were mostly Yiddish speakers.
They could not in fact rid themselves from the structures of Yiddish.
But modern Israeli Hebrew has been an enormous success.
It is a first language for most of the population of the country.
And how is it that this engineered language managed to succeed?
I think that at the end of the day there was a lot of ideology for,
and the wish to, have a language for the future state.
And the other thing was to have a language
which was a unifying tongue for all the Jews
because Jews came from all over the world.
Right. Speaking different languages.
So in a sense it was political will, and it was identity that drove it?
Right. Definitely identity. But the important thing to realise is
the success of Israeli, of course, is not only the revival of Hebrew,
but rather the survival of all the other languages like Yiddish, etc.
Israeli, if you want, is on the one hand a phoenix
rising from the ashes, Hebrew.
On the other hand it's a cuckoo, laying its eggs in the nest
of another bird, tricking it to believe that it is its own bird. This is Yiddish.
On the other hand it's a magpie stealing from America
and then Polish. So it's a phoenix-cuckoo hybrid.
Three birds. Well, with some magpie characteristics.
And in fact I would argue that Israeli is not
the murder of Yiddish, but rather Yiddish... HE SPEAKS HEBREW
So, Yiddish...
speaks itself within Israeli and this is the irony of history.
Ben-Yehuda and many other revivalists wanted very much
to reject Yiddish, but history tells us,
"No, Yiddish survives beneath Israeli."
So Israeli is a story of revival and survival.
The only thing I'd say is that if Yiddish was chosen
as the language for Israel, it would have been a funnier country.
It just would have been funnier.
Don't you think? Oy! But we, but we keep...
Schlep your bag for you, sir?!
In our globalised world, this kind of phoenix-cuckoo hybrid
may be the most workable way of keeping local languages alive.
Here in Africa, Kenya alone has 69 languages.
The mother tongue of the Turkana people only has
anything in common with two of those.
This fierce warrior tribe of pastoral nomads are, like the Jews,
attempting their own journey of survival and revival,
involving three languages.
'Turkana children learn English in the mission schools they attend.'
Four times 14. Do we have any division?
The official state language, Swahili,
is spoken in the towns for everyday activities such as shopping.
'And, in their own communities, Turkana teachers are passing on
'the mother tongue to the next generation.'
HE SPEAKS NATIVE LANGUAGE
So while the purity of the language may be lost,
hopefully Turkana, along with all the other
languages we have explored, will survive in a new and hybrid form.
I really do hope so.
Because, in the end, our attachment to our language
is about emotion not intellect.
Our identity is all about feelings.
What better way to celebrate the end of my travels than a game
'at Carrow Road, the home ground of my beloved Norwich City Football Club.'
On The Ball, City, the oldest football song in the world.
All the tribal identity issues we have as human beings,
and we would be foolish to deny,
are allowed to take place on the football field.
Against the run of play.
Come on. OK, we score back.
Come on, you Yellows!
Aaaagh!
Oh, no!
Oh, my lordy!
We're doomed!
There are those who say, it doesn't matter to me,
I have no sense of identity, it doesn't matter that I'm British,
it doesn't matter that I'm English, it doesn't matter that I'm from
Shropshire, or Yorkshire, or Norfolk.
Maybe they're right, but I can't feel like that.
I have this... I can't help but belong.
And, I think it was Clemenceau, the French prime minister
in the early part of the 20th century,
who said that he was a patriot but he wasn't a nationalist.
And they said to him, what do you mean by that?
He said, well, I think a patriot loves his country,
but a nationalist hates everybody else's country.
And I think a good football team to support is you love
your football team, you love your region,
you love your city, you love your county,
but it doesn't mean you hate everybody else's.
And the best of belonging is that embracing of who you are
and it's just like an extra dimension in your life.
An extra feeling. It's a sort of hugging feeling,
of belonging. I find it very important in my life,
and without it, I think my life would be poorer.
Oh, too much. Come on! Come on!
'Football terraces are a cauldron of passion,
'bad language and, surprisingly, wit.
'The way we use, and, of course, abuse language with new ways
'of swearing, or jargon, or slang are a testament to our creativity
'but also give us a deeper insight into the workings of the mind.
'And this is what I'll be looking at next time.
'So you'd better sodding well tune in.'
Subtitles by Red Bee Media Ltd
E-mail subtitling@bbc.co.uk