Vivian Cook

SLA researcher and writer on language topics

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

Boysenbeeren?

[HildaLeitner pünchi @leitner_hf]

Kennt jemand diese Beeren?

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@GeoffJordan16 @megandfigueroa It's one stage further back: they have different incompatible concepts of 'language'. They really should get past slanging each other's versions negatively to exploring their own positively, as Feyerabend would say.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

I have just realised displays of lavish Christmas food are a reversion to pre-19th century English meals where all food arrived at once from the later custom where it is served consecutively in separate courses. So why is posh food now so obsessed by the plate and the course?

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

The advice in Oxford around 1960 was to avoid naughty North Oxford. All the undergraduates hastily took notes on this useful information. Though the people I met there were no naughtier than elsewhere. Hang on, don't Le Carre ex-agents live there? Was the advice coded?

[Geoff Jordan @GeoffJordan16]

New term starts at unis. I remember the welcome address to freshers at LSE, 1962, given by Sydney Caine: "As to sex: I advise you all to rely on masturbation. It's cleaner, it's quicker - and you meet a better class of person".

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@pdkmitchell Books that list the editors, relatives, and fans who helped 'create' it are particularly suspect. To me, the more names, the worse the book (and likely the smaller contribution by the author themself). But I should confess my next book has a line in the preface written by my cat.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@mrjohnofarrell You can get the same effect by looking at on-line newspapers from different areas. Try the LA Times, The Straits Times (Singapore), Blick (Switzerland), Al Jazeera etc to see how they are handling English news. Though their own biases are not necessarily obvious to the outsider.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@gwalkden Oh no! I-mutation is back after a thousand years. I never dreamt it would be the next mutation to strike. Will English survive it?

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

This seems to me a much fairer way of displaying the richness of languages across the world rather than by numbers of speakers. It shows how much we are missing if we spend most time on say IndoEuropean languages rather than African languages. And build in a bias to UG studies...

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

As the discussion of whether word X is racist or non-racist now concerns so many people, can I remind them of the Universal Declaration of Linguistic Rights https://t.co/RQ8Wps4wcr. At least it’s a massively thought-out background framework to draw on.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@calandamountain A wonderful Welsh rival you may not know.

https://t.co/wcrQiH9tG6

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

Hear hear!

[George Wⓐlkden @gwalkden]

This article is symptomatic of everything that’s wrong with public discussions of language in the UK. 1/

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

https://t.co/JB9fQoj00V

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@ClaraBauler @spsmith45 Well 'always' is a long time. I started EFL on a scholarship at UCL to teach English in developing countries - an unquestionable good I thought. Only 25 years later did I question how much this aim was interlocked with the financial and political interests of native speakers.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

Many thanks! I'll check it out. However plurilingualism according to say CEFR is different from multilingualism, I think. The former implies separation of languages in society, the latter integration on one society.
Sad that Ethnologue now has to be cited from secondary sources!

[Seán Jeremy @news_sean]

@VivCookMC1 Thank you for that. Ethnologue's a great project but sadly not as Open Access as it used to be. The plurilingualism of which you speak is almost the protagonist in the marvelous Mission Song by John le Carré - I think it'd be right up your street if you'd not read it.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

The heading of the figure is ‘A World of Languages’, not ‘… of native speakers of languages’ – Africa has 2,154 languages. Ethnologue give L1 and L2 speakers of Hausa as 49 + 26 million, Swahili as 16 + 53. Multicompetent L2 users probably outnumber monolinguals worldwide.

[Seán Jeremy @news_sean]

@VivCookMC1 @UniverCurious @VisualCap Interesting reflexion Dr Vivian.
Are there any first languages in that part of the world spoken by at least 50 million people? That would indeed big a significant miss.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@UniverCurious @VisualCap The odd thing about this form of visualisation is how it misses the languages indigenous to Africa in favour of the languages spread there by imperialists. Can omitting the languages of an entire continent ever be a representation of the languages of the world?

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@JohnSimpsonNews My favourite is Davos, known to all media as DAHvoss, but pronounced by its inhabitants as DerVOHS.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

@jbwallingford Someone once said to me that the joy of academic Ife is that it is perpetually youthful as it is reborn each autumn with a new generation of students.

[Vivian Cook @VivCookMC1]

Today is Steve Biko Day. He justified English as the lingua franca of the Black People’s Convention in South Africa, because it was ‘analytical’ (Biko, 1978). Using an international language does not necessarily mean endorsing the values of the society from which it sprang.