Miss Indonesia 2009 promises "I will learn Indonesian"

Beauty pageant winner’s answer in English has caused controversy in her "native" Indonesia.

The winner of the Miss Indonesia beauty contest has pledged to brush up on her Indonesian language skills after raising eyebrows for answering the pageant judges' questions in English.

Kerenina Sunny Halim, a 22-year-old teacher who has an American mother and an Indonesian father, beat 32 other contestants to be crowned Miss Indonesia last week.
Her brother, TV star Yusuf Iman, told reporters that she could not speak Bahasa Indonesia fluently because she was schooled at home and had few chances to practice.

"Weird, how come Miss Indonesia missed Indonesian?" said a blogger named Coro on Kompas.com, the website of one of the country's biggest newspapers.

"This is truly a tasteless joke!" wrote another blogger on the Web site of the Jakarta Post newspaper. "How on earth do the pitiful judges of this laughable beauty pageant justify their foolish decision? Imagine a Chinese beauty contestant who does not speak Chinese... Shame on the judges!"

Halim has promised to improve her Indonesian, saying it was an easy language to learn for those who are willing.

"It's been hard for me to speak Indonesian, because I use English every day," she was quoted by the Jakarta Post newspaper as saying. "But I will learn."

In 2006, the winner of the Indonesian leg of the Miss Universe contest, Nadine Chandrawinata, an Indonesian of German descent, was lambasted by the public and the media after struggling to answer the judges' questions in English.

Liliana Tanoesoedibjo, head of the judges panel, said Halim's English language skills would help Indonesia's chances in the Miss World contest in Johannesberg. "She can speak Indonesian, but has a bit of an American accent. But her Indonesian is good enough," Tanoesoedibjo said.

In the last decade, many Indonesians have been trying to improve their English skills and many English words have seeped into the local language.

Some bloggers expressed sympathy with Halim, saying foreign language skills were key to succeeding in today's world.

"For Bahasa Indonesia you need enough to get by. But these days, you need to be fluent in a foreign language, English at least," Memen Suprietmen said on a posting on Kompas.com.

Various versions of this story, or comments about it, can be found...

here at this news site, [click with your mouse]

here on a blog by a disappointed Indonesian man,

and here on this blog by an Indonesian woman.

What do YOU feel about this? Tell us in the COMMENTS below.

Can you read this?

Accdroing to a resraech at Caibrmdge Urivensity, it dosen't mettar in waht oedrr the letters in a wrod are. The olny impotrant tihng is taht the fisrt and lsat letetr be in the rhgit pcale. The rset can be a tatol mses and you can slitl raed it wiohtut prlboem. Tihs is becasue the hamun mnid deos not raed evrey lteter by itslef, but the wrod as a whloe.

It is a fun fact about the human mind, isn't it?

Write any words/sentences and scramble them here.

What is Esperanto?

Following up on Brian's comment on the Disappearing Languages post...

What is Esperanto?

Esperanto is a language, but not of any country or ethnic group: it is a neutral, international language.

Origins

The basic rules and words of Esperanto were proposed by L. L. Zamenhof at the end of the 19th century. Within a few years, people started learning it and formed a worldwide community. Since then, Esperanto has been in use (and freely evolving) just like any other language.

Characteristics

Esperanto has a very regular structure. Words are often made from many other roots, and in this way the number of words which one must memorise is made much smaller. The language is phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are very simple, so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written worde and vice-versa. All this make the learning of the language relatively easy.

Most Esperanto roots are similar to words from Romance, Germanic or Slavic languages. However, Esperanto is not merely a "pot-pourri" of those languages, but a true and independent language in itself - structurally more similar, furthermore, to non-European languages than to European ones.

Using Esperanto

Esperanto is most useful for neutral communication. That means that communication through Esperanto does not give advantages to the members of any particular people or culture, but provides an ethos of equality of rights, tolerance and true internationalism. This can be seen in many diverse situations: international meetings, books, magazines, music, the Internet of course, and often also in private and family life.

Young people can have very meaningful experiences through Esperanto: being hosted free of charge in the homes of people in other countries and making contact with their culture without barriers; enjoying international festivals and training at interesting seminars; becoming acquainted with and learning more foreign languages; and becoming active and taking an interest in TEJO, as the case should arise.

An extract from the Christian Bible translated into Esperanto.

This article has been 'taken' from here. Check out the rest of that web site.

Please also check out those links provided by Brian.

Disappearing Languages - follow up

Here is an article from a Japanese newspaper (Asahi Shimbun) about endangered languages in Japan.

With only 15 speakers left, the Ainu language is “critically endangered” while seven other languages in Japan are also at risk of disappearing, according to a UNESCO report.

These eight languages in Japan are among about 2,500 around the world that have become or could become extinct, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization’s report said.

UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger listed eight languages in Japan, such as the Ainu language, as independent tongues under international standards rather than indigenous dialects, an official with Paris-based UNESCO said.

In addition to Hokkaido, the Ainu language used to be widely spoken in Russia’s Sakhalin as well as the Chishima island chain off the coast of Hokkaido, including the Northern Territories. But the speakers there have died out.

“Few people speak Ainu in everyday life,” said the Sapporo-based Foundation for Research and Promotion of Ainu Culture.

The seven other endangered languages in Japan are Yaeyama, Yonaguni, Okinawa, Kunigami, Miyako in Okinawa Prefecture, Amami in Kagoshima Prefecture, and Hachijo in Tokyo. The first six languages are spoken on the Nansei island chain, which stretches from north of Taiwan and south of Kyushu, and Hachijo in Tokyo’s Hachijojima island and nearby islets.

UNESCO described the Yaeyama and Yonaguni languages as “severely endangered,” while the other five were “definitely endangered.”

Osamu Sakiyama, professor emeritus of linguistics at the National Museum of Ethnology, welcomed UNESCO’s approach, saying a dialect should be treated as an independent language if its speakers have a distinct culture.

“Coupled with the myth that Japan is ethnically homogenous, people tend to think that one language is spoken in Japan. But I want people to know there is quite a diversity,” Sakiyama said.

The Atlas of the World Languages in Danger released Thursday is the third. It conducted similar research in 1996 and 2001.

More than 30 linguists covered about 6,000 languages around the world, making the survey one of unprecedented scale.

The 2,500 endangered languages were put into five different categories: unsafe; definitely endangered; severely endangered; critically endangered; and extinct.

The number of “critically endangered” languages stood at 538, including 199 with 10 or fewer speakers. There were 502 “severely endangered” languages, 632 “definitely endangered,” and 607 were deemed “unsafe.”

Many of these languages are spoken in sub-Saharan Africa, South America and Melanesia.

Since 1950, 219 languages have become extinct, according to the report. The latest language to disappear is Eyak in Alaska, with the death of the remaining speaker, the report said.

Ryoji Kikuchi, an official with the Hachijo board of education, welcomed UNESCO’s citation as a good opportunity to keep record of the disappearing language.

“We have wanted to do something about the language because the number of people who speak it is decreasing due to the aging of society,” Kikuchi said.

Kikuchi said local officials are considering uploading a recording of the Hachijo language, taped several decades ago, on the town’s website.

Feel free to COMMENT on this post below.

Thousands of languages are disappearing

NEWS FLASH!




The United Nations cultural agency, UNESCO, says more than a third of the world's six thousand languages are in danger of extinction. Of those two thousand, it says, about two hundred are spoken by only a handful of people.

Download and listen to this news story here.

Here is the text:

When a language dies, UNESCO says the world loses valuable cultural heritage - a great deal of the legends, poems and the knowledge gathered by generations is simply lost. In 2008, Alaska's last native speaker of Eyak died, taking the language with her.

Chief Marie Smith Jones, praying here for the survival of the Eyaks. She died at the age of eighty-nine, campaigning to save her people's heritage.

UNESCO says government action is needed if the world is to preserve its linguistic diversity. People must be proud to speak their language to ensure it survives.

In the last five years, the governments of Mexico, New Zealand and the United States managed to reverse the trend locally. But UNESCO says the phenomenon of dying languages appears in every region and in very diverse economic conditions.

Here are some of the words and idioms used in the news report:

• UNESCO - short for the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization

• valuable cultural heritage - features belonging to a particular society, such as traditions, languages, buildings or works of art, which still exist from the past, are unique and therefore have a historical importance

• a great deal of - many, a lot of

• legends - old stories presented as history but unlikely to be true

• native speaker of... - someone whose first language, or mother tongue, is...

• campaigning - taking action aimed at achieving a goal

• to preserve its linguistic diversity - to save the great number of languages currently spoken

• to reverse the trend - to make sure people are encouraged to speak rare languages, so those languages can survive

Any thoughts on this?

There are many problems in this world. Is 'disappearing languages' something for us to worry about?

Do you speak a language that is disappearing?

How many of you will not teach your children the mother tongue your parents spoke and used with you?

Is English your second language? Third language? Fourth language?


Comments, thoughts, opinions in the COMMENTS below please.