Today, the Latin alphabet is the international standard for phonetic writing. But this is a modern phenomenon. For centuries, Arabic was the central language to science and trade, and consequently, the use of its script was dominant worldwide well into the 19th century. Yet the 17th-19th centuries saw a slow decline in the use of Arabic, and a critical loss over ten years from the late 1920s to mid-1930s in the former Ottoman and new Soviet territories as Latin letters, and to a lesser degree Cyrillic, became the script of choice.

Colonialism and independence realized the decline of Arabic in Africa in many languages. Swahili, a major African language up the African east coast, has used the Latin alphabet since the 19th century, despite heavy influence from the Arabic language, along with Malagasy in Madagascar. Songhay, Yoruba and other West African languages were, in some regions, written in Arabic, although all are now written in the Latin alphabet. Nearer Arabia, Harari in Ethiopia, Berber in northern Africa, and Nubian in the Sudan area no longer use Arabic script. Even Afrikaans was written in Arabic by some people for part of the 19th century.

During the Arabic rule of Spain, Mozarabic, Aragonese, Portuguese, and Spanish were written in Arabic. During Ottoman rule of Eastern Europe, several languaegs—Greek, Bosnian, Romanian and Albanian—were written in Arabic script. Elsewhere in Europe, Tatars used Arabic to write Polish and Belarussian. But the decline of the Ottoman Empire saw the rapid abandonment of the Arabic script, and Turkey’s voluntary abandonment of Arabic script in 1928 saw the end of the Arabic script in Europe. Even the Kurds abandoned Arabic for a Latin alphabet in 1932.

The Russian Revolution and Soviet rule saw the switch from Arabic to the back-and-forth use of the Cyrillic and Latin alphabets, depending on the mood fo the Bolsheviks at any particular time. Russia’s central Asian languages such as Bashkir, Tatar, Chaghatai, and Chechen sporadically used Arabic but now all use Cyrillic. The languages of the Central Asian republics—Kazakh, Kyrgyz, Uzbek, and Tajik—are the same, having abandoned Arabic in the 1930s. The same is true for Azeri in the Caucasus. Uyghur in western China is the only Turkic language that still uses the Arabic script, and it remains an official language in that part of China.

In distant East Asia, Malay in Malaysia and Indonesia used Arabic script until Dutch and British influence gradually replaced that script starting in the 17th century. Some Filipino languages also abandoned the use of Arabic at this time. And finally, the Hui Muslim people used to write the Chinese and Dungan languages in Arabi script in a script called Xiao’erjing.

In addition to the obvious factors—imperialism, colonialism, and the Soviet hegemony—another factor was the printing press. Because there are several forms of each Arabic letter depending on where it appears in the sentence, material produced in the Arabic script could not be easily reproduced with a printing press.

In our previous discussions on what language to learn, Arabic has generally been rated as a second or third tier language in order of importance. A century ago, when the real-life Curzon, Younghusband, Chirol and Munro-Ferguson travelled the globe, it surely would have been a first tier language, if for nothing else than for the dominance of its script from southern Africa to western China. Those days, however, are long gone.

I’m going to repost as an independent post what I wrote as a comment on one of Chirol’s posts almost four years ago regarding languages, and what languages to learn. I was reminded of this topic because of Younghusband’s post on preparing your child for the ComingAnarchy, as I wrote my comment based on what languages I wanted my kids to study.

With regards to prioritizing language education, I consider five languages to be in the “first tier.” To rank them in general order of importance:

1. English (North America, Britain, Australia, Singapore, New Zealand, India, Hong Kong, most international cities: The international language, hands down.
2. Spanish (Spain, Latin America, large US cities): A language used broadly in the Western Hemisphere and increasingly in the United States.
3. Chinese (China, Singapore, elsewhere): Not yet used much outside China, but a language spoken by a billion people with real potential to become an international language in the 21st century.
4. French (France, much of Africa, Quebec, Iran): It’s international prestige is shrinking, but it remains popular in many former French colonies, and a vital language if you are working with any business that has any connection to France, due to the preference of the French to speak their own language.
5. Russian (Russia, former USSR, former satellites): The Russian language will shrink in importance as former satellites move to other, more international languages—Mongolia being one example. But for now, it remains the language of intercultural communication in places such as Kazakhstan and more useful than Turkish, which may well replace it in the coming decades.
   These languages have intercontinental importance. All but Russian will stay in the top tier for the rest of our lifetime.

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In last week’s The Economist the Director of the International Bureau for the Democratic Party of Japan wrote in to criticise one of the magazine’s covers, pictured below.

You made fun of our respected nation’s name on a cover that is sold on newsstands all over the region. This conduct is equal to burning a national flag, which is base and inconsiderate. No nation’s name should be treated like this.

(See Japanese Politics a third down the page for the full letter.)

Is he having a “black van” moment? What’s the big deal? It’s art! Is this guy writing in to every newspaper that publishes a political cartoon that makes fun of the Japanese? The only possible criticism of this cover that I can see is the stroke order is wrong. The director should be ashamed of this pettiness.

Throughout history languages have transformed with moving populations. Sometimes they transform right of existence. I was never one to get weepy about dying languages. I have always thought it a fact of history. But I do regret lost cultural artefacts, as well as the potential for linguistic and cognitive research. National Geographic’s Enduring Voices Project tries to preserve endangered languages by identifying and documenting them. They have a brilliant interactive map that lets you learn about Siletz Dee-ni, Tofa, Sentinelese (from The Last Island of the Savages) and the infamous !Kung. Learn more about language extinction hotspots.

In the book Spook Country William Gibson paints a picture of Cuban-Chinese gangsters who do parkour and communicate through a manufactured language called Volapuk.

Gibson describes Volapuk through the character Milgrim on page 16:

When the Russians got themselves computers, the keyboards and screen displays were Roman, not Cyrillic. They faked up something that looked like Cyrillic, out of our characters. They called it Volapuk. I guess you could say it was a joke.

I sometimes find myself doing a similar thing if I have to send a Japanese-language email on a Windows box that doesn’t have East Asian languages installed. But Volapuk isn’t simple phonetic translation, it selects Latin letters based on visual similarity to Cyrillic letters. Some letters can be encoded a number of different ways, thus, like l33t, Volapuk can sometimes prove difficult to translate.

With the spread of the Internet use since the 1990s (and rise of Unicode) this problem has pretty much been solved – with the exception of mobile phone-using Russian immigrants, I would suspect. Then there is the “Soviet” solution to just create a separate Russian internet, as covered by Passport and AE.

The latest Principles of War seminar series featured John Rendon of the Rendon Group who spoke on the topic of strategic communication. This is an issue dear to my heart as a former PR man with a technology bent familiar with the monolithic industrial-age government department system and its lack of timely communication capability.

Rendon hits all the buzzwords mentioning tipping points, communities of interest, long tails, social networks, user-generated content, Blink, etc. Without getting bogged down in all the jargon the presentation remains interesting for an audience wider than just MountainRunner and yours truly. Rendon gives insight into the problems a modern-day government faces in an unpredictable news cycle, and highlights the dangers of not knowing how a diverse and asymmetric audience will receive your message. His speech is wide of scope and blasts through a slew a topics. His scenario of a cyber attack perpetrated on a sovereign country by a community of interest geographically located in America raises an interesting legal point related to the legality of the US invasion of Afghanistan: can a country claim the right of self defence if attacked by a group within a sovereign country? Rendon brings up a number of diverse issues, connecting them in interesting ways that will give you a new appreciation of the problems in “official” communication in the 21st century.

Hilarious sign at UNHQ, NY. Photo by Blake Hounshell.

In the very public row over Russia’s refusal to extradite a suspect to Britain in the poisoning murder of Alexander Litvinenko, the headlines in the western press are focusing solely on Putin’s statement that Russia is not Britain’s colony:

And the “colonial” quip appears throughout all the articles:

Mr Putin said Britain’s behaviour was “clearly a remnant of a colonial mindset”… “They don’t have any colonies. And Russia, thank God, has never been a colony of Great Britain,” he said.

I find it interesting that the same story in Japan makes no mention of the colonial quote in either its headline or the contents of the story.

I wonder why the change in focus on what Putin said. Or was the Russian simply translated differently into English and Japanese? Did western media outlets see the colonialism quote as a good way to sell newspapers?

From the Wikipedia article (with sources):

Prior to 2007, the company website of Jamba Juice claimed that “Jamba” derives from the “African” word “Jama,” which means “to celebrate, taking care of body, mind and soul is a way of celebrating life.” The etymology has since been removed from the company’s website. Direct e-mails to the company claim it to be of West African origin, but they do not specify from which of the estimated 1800 African Languages it derives. “Jamba” means “fart” in Swahili. Additionally, there is a town named “Jamba” in Angola, which may be related to the word “jamba,” meaning “Elephant” in Umbundu, a language spoken in southern Angola. The town became relatively well-known as the headquarters of UNITA during the Ronald Reagan Administration in the USA.

Fareed Zakaria interviews Niall Ferguson in an episode of Foreign Exchange. Old Fergie has a thing or two to say about Iraq, comparing it to the Eastern Europe of the 20th century of all places! Give it a look below and wot wot! to the Chief for the link.