Tapas bar Samsara

Strolling in Barcelona’s city center reveals an astounding variety of spoken languages: there are the languages used by the throngs of visitors coming from literally everywhere, and also the languages of the 300,000 registered foreign citizens from more than 160 nationalities. Residents of Barcelona speak “a total of 277 languages.” These languages cannot only be heard but also seen: Besides Latin script, at smaller or specialized businesses (along with Catalan, which is compulsory but not exclusive on signage in Catalonia) we find Cyrillic (Russian), Chinese, Arabic, Urdu, and … Devanāgarī, the script of Hindi, Nepalese, and of the classical language of India, Sanskrit.

Sanskrit names in Barcelona are obvious on Indian restaurants and, of course, Yoga centers; but they are not exclusive to these: we can find a tapas bar (“tapas” are tasty small local appetizers) called “Samsāra” (the cycle of reincarnation), a marriage agency with the same name, a ladies’ apparel shop called “Dharma” (the Cosmic Law), a cosmetics shop called “Ādhāra” (“support”), and many more.

Marriage agency Samsara

Why was the verb form “Bhavantu” (“may they become”) chosen for a clothing shop for babies? Its owner, Mr. Rodrigo, born in Argentina, explained: “When my wife was pregnant with our baby we used to listen to an Indian mantra: ‘sarve bhavantu śaraṇam’ (‘may all beings be protected’). We do not practice Yoga, but we liked the sound of that word.”

A “mālā” is a rosary for mantra repetition (“japa”), so the name of the ladies’ apparel shop “Japamala & friends” owned by Mr. Sandro, of German origin, was intriguing. Mr. Sandro kindly indicated to me that his former partner was of the opinion that “names with many “a” sounds are better for business than names with many “o” or “u” sounds.” Mr. Sandro added that he has kept the name because “it sounds good.”

Sweet Minu Madhu

The “sweetest” experience in my quest was with a “fake” Sanskrit word. Walking in the old town I came across “Minu & Madhu”, another ladies’ apparel shop. The shop is run by Mrs. Martine, the friendliest lady from Périgord in France you could ever meet. She welcomed my explanation of the meaning of “Madhu” as “sweet” or “honey”: “Indian ladies tell me that it is a person’s name but they were not able to tell me what it means! People ask me so often about it and now I will be finally able to explain it, “je vous aime!”

Mrs. Martine got the owner, Mrs. Laura Serrat, a Catalan of French descent, on the phone: “I am sorry if this comes to you as disappointment”, she said, “but I did not choose the name for any reason connected to India. ‘Minou’ is what we endearingly call in French kitten or children, and ‘Madhu’ is what I used to call my Grandmother.” Assuming that this was a diminutive for “Madeleine”, I asked whether it should not be spelt “M-a-d-o-u”, instead. Mrs. Serrat’s response was: “I thought that it sounded sweet this way.” Well, isn’t this exactly what “Madhu” means?

Bhavantu baby store

Does Sanskrit then have a euphonic quality to itself? I asked Doctor Maria Elena Sierra, teacher of Sanskrit at the University of Barcelona. Dr. Sierra explained that interest in Sanskrit has grown in the past ten years, and so have the course offering of this language at the University. She told me that half of her students are foreigners who have gone as far as extending their stay in Barcelona in order to be able to complete their studies. They come from Belgium, the UK, Italy, Latin America and elsewhere; even including Indians and Nepalese residing now in Catalonia.

Dr Sierra teaching Sanskrit at the University of Barcelona

As to why Sanskrit “sounds good”, Dr. Sierra explained that the culture of ancient India was very concerned about the vibrations of spoken language. So, does Sanskrit have any special system to deal with the quality of sound? Dr. Sierra pointed to “Sandhi”, a rule of phonetic alteration, which she explained as “aimed at avoiding cacophony.” Besides, “Sanskrit shows a consonantism of a much older stage common to all Indo-European languages, which we recognize when we hear it.”

It is not only Sanskrit words in the Latin script that can be found in Barcelona, but imitations of Devanāgarī script are common too, as shown on the board of an attraction called “Shambhala” at the theme park of Port Aventura in the coastal area of Salou-Vilaseca.

Indexing “the exotic Orient”: fake devanāgarī on amusement park ride

The aesthetics of signs such as these is still tied to the Western idea of the “mysterious East”, crafted by colonial travelers and unmasked in Edward Saïd’s Orientalism (1978).

In other examples, as in the Nepalese restaurant “Himāli”, the signs are in both “Indianized” Latin script and in the actual Devanāgarī script. Diversity appears as important as communication here, and signage evidences that “we live in a new paradigm where homogeneity is no longer sustainable and cannot be simulated and where identities must be projected in global settings”, as Pujolar et al. (2011, p. 81) argue.

Surya Restaurant

Devanāgarī script may even appear without translation or transliteration, as on the sign of restaurant “Sūrya”. The sign displays the name of the Sun-God above a subtitle that reads: भोजनालय “bhojanalāya” (“dining hall” or “restaurant”).

The subtitle “Indian Street Food & Drinks” provides an explanation. The sign appeals to an experience of “authenticity”: only those who have travelled to India (or Sanskrit students) will be able to fully savor the term भोजनालय … and the delicacies of Indian street cuisine. At the same time, the sign exhibits a “de-territorialisation effect on cultural practices” (Pujolar et al., 2011, p.80; drawing on Appadurai).

Global culture is made of mobile individuals who link distant cultural spaces, as proven by the presence of the classical language of India in Barcelona. And since Sanskrit does indeed sound very good, let me end by saying: ॐ सर्वे   भवन्तु   सुखिनः (“Om sarve bhavantu sukhinah”), “Om, may all beings be happy!”

Reference:

Pujolar, Joan; Fernàndez, Josep-Anton; Subirana, Jaume. Language, Culture and Identity in the Global Age. Digithum, May 2011. ISSN 1575-2275. Available at: <http://journals.uoc.edu/index.php/digithum/article/view/n13-identicat>. doi:http://dx.doi.org/10.7238/d.v0i13.1186.

Multilingual Hyderabad (Source: Wikimedia)

It is by now widely known that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia. What is less widely known is the fact that this knowledge is almost exclusively derived from Canadian research conducted by Ellen Bialystok and her team (e.g., Bialystock et al., 2007). The data for these studies come from comparing monolingual English-speaking native-born Canadian dementia sufferers with their bilingual counterparts. The bilinguals are all migrants to Canada who had learned English during adolescence or young adulthood and come from a variety of first-language backgrounds with Central and Eastern Europeans predominating.

This data base raises an obvious problem: is it bilingualism that delays the onset of dementia or is it the fact of migration or other confounding variables?

Research published in Neurology last week addresses exactly this bias in a study of the relationship between bilingualism and onset of dementia in a non-migrant population in India. The researchers, Alladi et al., investigated age at onset of dementia in a group of more than 600 dementia sufferers in Hyderabad, the capital of Andhra Pradesh. Hyderabad constitutes a highly diverse linguistic environment: the official languages of Andhra Pradesh are Telugu and Urdu; English and Hindi are widely spoken due to their official status on the national level; other languages with significant numbers of speakers include Tamil, Marathi and Kannada.

Bi- and multilingualism are indigenous to Hyderabad – as they are to most of India – and bi- and multilinguals do not systematically differ from monolinguals on migration status or other variables.

In this cohort, the researchers found that the onset of dementia in the bilingual population was delayed by 4.5 years (a finding very similar to the 4.3 years found by Bialystok et al. in Canada).

A variable that often correlates with bilingualism in these studies is education and here Alladi et al. are also breaking new ground by including an illiterate cohort. Among illiterates (defined as people without any formal education), the protective effect of bilingualism was even greater: the onset of dementia in bilingual illiterates was 6 years later than in their monolingual counterparts.

Why does speaking more than one language have these protective effects? Having to switch between languages on a regular basis enhances “executive control:” making frequent linguistic choices – activating one language and suppressing another – is a form of practicing cognitive multitasking. Like other forms of cognitive practice – participating in continuing education, undertaking stimulating intellectual activities, engaging in physical exercise – bilingualism thus contributes to an individual’s “cognitive reserve” and wards off the effects of aging a bit longer.

Confirmation that bilingualism delays the onset of dementia in a different bilingual population than the one studied to date is good news for bilinguals.

Even more importantly, the study by Alladi et al. makes a significant contribution to bilingualism research by extending the evidence base to a population with a very different sociolinguistic profile from the one that predominates in the literature. Even so, psycholinguistic and sociolinguistic approaches to bilingualism still have a long way to go before they will truly meet.

The gap between the psycholinguistics and sociolinguistics of bilingualism is nicely illustrated by another of Alladi et al.’s findings: in the Hyderabad sample, the protective effect of bilingualism does not increase with speaking more than two languages, i.e. from the perspective of the delayed onset of dementia, trilingualism or quadrilingualism do not offer any more benefits than bilingualism. This finding is in contrast to another Canadian study (Chertkow et al., 2010). Those researchers found – similarly to Bialystok et al. – that the onset of dementia was delayed in bilingual immigrants to Canada and in French-speaking Canadians. However, they did not find that bilingualism was similarly beneficial for English-speaking Canadians. In fact, in that study the onset of dementia was later in monolingual English-speaking Canadians than in bilingual English-speaking Canadians. For language learning and use to have a protective effect for English-speaking Canadians, they needed to be at least trilingual. Chertkow et al. concluded that bilingualism was sometimes beneficial in delaying the onset of dementia but multilingualism was always beneficial.

Alladi et al. draw on sociolinguistics, specifically language ideologies, to explain their differential findings:

In places in which an official dominant language coexists with a number of minority languages, it can be reasonably assumed that the amount of language switching between languages is proportional to the number of languages spoken: the more languages people know, the more occasion they will have to switch between them. In the strongly trilingual environment of Hyderabad with Telugu, [Urdu] and English being used extensively and interchangeably in both formal and informal environments, with high levels of code switching and mixing, it could be speculated that those speaking 2 languages have already reached a maximum level of switching and the knowledge of additional languages will not be able to increase it. Such an interpretation would be supported by the view that neural mechanisms underlying cognitive control demands in bilingual communities with high levels of code switching are different from bilingual communities with practice in avoiding language switching or mixing. (Alladi et al., 213, pp. 4f.)

One of the frustrating aspects of much psycholinguistic research addressing the cognitive advantages – or otherwise – of bi- and multilingualism lies in the fact that the findings of different researchers frequently conflict. As long as bi- and multilingualism are taken as unitary phenomena inherent in the individual, this will always be the case. Not only do we need to extend the evidence base to include different linguistic, cultural and national contexts, we also need to bring psycho- and sociolinguistic research together to get a better understanding of what “bilingualism” might actually mean in a particular context. Alladi et al. have taken a most welcome step in the right direction.

References

Alladi S, Bak TH, Duggirala V, Surampudi B, Shailaja M, Shukla AK, Chaudhuri JR, & Kaul S (2013). Bilingualism delays age at onset of dementia, independent of education and immigration status. Neurology PMID: 24198291
Bialystok E, Craik FI, & Freedman M (2007). Bilingualism as a protection against the onset of symptoms of dementia. Neuropsychologia, 45 (2), 459-64 PMID: 17125807
Chertkow H, Whitehead V, Phillips N, Wolfson C, Atherton J, & Bergman H (2010). Multilingualism (but not always bilingualism) delays the onset of Alzheimer disease: evidence from a bilingual community. Alzheimer disease and associated disorders, 24 (2), 118-25 PMID: 20505429

Eatery on Kat Hing St, Wuhan, site of Chi Li’s Life Show (Source: city.ifeng.com)

I am very much looking forward to attending the Intercultural Literacy, Communication, and Competence in the Context of Multiculturalism Conference at Zhongnan University of Economics and Law in Wuhan in November this year. I’ve never been to Wuhan before (nor anywhere else in China) and what I usually do before going anywhere is read. I’ve asked my students and colleagues from China for recommendations, and as soon as I mention Wuhan, they’ve all said: “Chi Li! You have to read Chi Li’s novel about a restaurant owner in Wuhan.”

I’d heard the advice a couple of times but googling “Chi Li” turned out to be easier said than done, particularly as I had a summary of the plot of her most famous novel but no title. I asked around some more among the Chinese I know, wondering whether there was a translation into English and the answer I received was “Of course! She’s very famous. Her work has been translated into many languages.”

So, I asked for “Chi Li” in Chinese characters and then googled “池莉” – restricted to English-language sites, of course, as I can’t read Chinese. This way I found the Wikipedia entry for Chi Li although it’s only a stub and disappointingly short. However, at least I found out the English title of the novel I was after this way: Life Show. The Wikipedia link from “Chi Li” to “Life Show” however did not bode well: “Wikipedia does not have an article with this exact name” it says.

No matter, I now had the author and the English title and so I should have found the book in a matter of a few clicks. It wasn’t to be. In a blog post on ilookchina I learnt why:

Although many of her novels have been translated into French, there are no English translations yet, which is a shame.

What?! A famous Chinese author not translated into English?!

Unfortunately, it’s true and I shouldn’t have been surprised, of course. Global book translations look very much like a one-way street out of English. According to UNESCO’s Index Translationum English is the original language of a cool 1,220,893 books translated into other languages. The runner-up, French, is the source language of less than 20% of that number with 215,216.

Chinese is in 16^th position – behind such relatively minor European languages as Swedish (7^th), Danish (9^th), Dutch (11^th), Czech (13^th), Polish (14^th) and Norwegian (15^th).

Table 1: Top 20 Source Languages of Translated Books (Source: Index Translationum)

By contrast, considering the target languages into which the world’s books are being translated, unbelievably English is nowhere near the top. As Table 2 shows, English is only in fourth place as the target language with less than half of the number of translations than the 1^st placed, German. If you think 4^th place is not bad, consider the number of English-language readers and the size of the English-language book market, and the position is obviously ridiculously low.

Table 2: Top 5 Target Languages of Translated Books (Source: Index Translationum)

1. German 290,828
2. French 237,890
3. Spanish 228,151
4. English 145,737
5. Japanese 130,610

The figures for source and target languages of books translated in the world are a good indicator of the inequality of cultural flows. The UNESCO figures make a mockery of the rhetoric of intercultural communication: it’s almost as if the whole world was listening to the communication emanating from a narcissist.

In Australia “becoming Asia-literate” is currently a very fashionable media topic. How that is supposed to happen without translations from Chinese, Hindi, Japanese, Korean and Asia’s many other languages, I don’t know.

As far as my quest to read at least one novel by Chi Li before I visit Wuhan is concerned, I’ve now ordered Le Show de la vie and will be looking forward to brushing up my French while I learn about China!

To me, the prevalence of an Indian culture indigenous to the UAE is most apparent in the radio stations. These billboards on the highway from Dubai to Abu Dhabi provide some examples. Both City 101.6 and Hit 96.7 are stations in the Arabian Radio Network targeting urban young people with an Indian background. Without any knowledge of Hindi and Bollywood movies, it took me some time to figure out the slogan “Sara shehar mujhe city 101.6 ke naam se jaanta hai.” It turns out that the slogan on this billboard is an intertextual reference to a famous line spoken by the Bollywood actor Ajit Khan (1922-1998) in the 1976 movie Kalicharan. What he said was “Sara shehar mujhe Lion ke naam se jaanta hai,” which translates as “The whole town knows me by the name of Lion.” I’m amazed at the complex cultural references on a simple billboard and that a movie line spoken a world away in space and time continues to “fly.”

I’ve learnt two things from the conversation with the study agent and the exercise of trying to figure out a billboard: you ignore diversity at your peril, and I wish I knew Hindi!