Study Reveals Brain Activity Patterns Underlying Fluent Speech

Research Could Pave the Way for a Brain Prosthetic to Translate Thoughts into Speech

When we speak, we engage nearly 100 muscles, continuously moving our lips, jaw, tongue, and throat to shape our breath into the fluent sequences of sounds that form our words and sentences. A new study by UC San Francisco scientists reveals how these complex articulatory movements are coordinated in the brain.

The new research reveals that the brain’s speech centers are organized more according to the physical needs of the vocal tract as it produces speech than by how the speech sounds (its “phonetics”). Linguists divide speech into abstract units of sound called “phonemes” and consider the /k/ sound in “keep” the same as the /k/ in “coop.” But in reality, your mouth forms the sound differently in these two words to prepare for the different vowels that follow, and this physical distinction now appears to be more important to the brain regions responsible for producing speech than the theoretical sameness of the phoneme.

The findings, which extend previous studies on how the brain interprets the sounds of spoken language,  could help guide the creation of new generation of prosthetic devices for those who are unable to speak: brain implants could monitor neural activity related to speech production and rapidly and directly translate those signals into synthetic spoken language.

The new study, published on May 17, 2018, in Neuron, was conducted by Josh Chartier and Gopala K. Anumanchipalli, PhD, both researchers in the laboratory of senior author Edward Chang, MD, professor of neurological surgery, Bowes Biomedical Investigator, and member of the UCSF Weill Institute for Neurosciences. They were joined by Keith Johnson, PhD, professor of linguistics at UC Berkeley.

A Neural Code for Vocal Tract Movements

Chang, a neurosurgeon at the UCSF Epilepsy Center, specializes in surgeries to remove brain tissue that causes seizures in patients with epilepsy. In some cases, to prepare for these operations, he places high-density arrays of tiny electrodes onto the surface of the patients’ brains, both to help identify the location triggering the patients’ seizures and to map out other important areas, such as those involved in language, to make sure the surgery avoids damaging them.

In addition to its clinical importance, this method, known as electrocorticography, or ECoG, is a powerful tool for research. “It’s a unique means of looking at thousands of neurons activating in unison,” Chartier said. 

In the new study, Chartier and Anumanchipalli asked five volunteers awaiting surgery, with ECoG electrodes placed over a region of ventral sensorimotor cortex that is a key center of speech production, to read aloud a collection of 460 natural sentences. The sentences were expressly constructed to encapsulate nearly all the possible articulatory contexts in American English. This comprehensiveness was crucial to capture the complete range of “coarticulation,” the blending of phonemes that is essential to natural speech.

“Without coarticulation, our speech would be blocky and segmented to the point where we couldn’t really understand it,” said Chartier.

The research team was not able to simultaneously record the volunteers’ neural activity and their tongue, mouth and larynx movements. Instead, they recorded only audio of the volunteers speaking and developed a novel deep learning algorithm to estimate which movements were made during specific speaking tasks. 

This approach allowed the researchers to identify distinct populations of neurons responsible for the specific vocal tract movement patterns needed to produce fluent speech sounds, a level of complexity that had not been seen in previous experiments that used simpler syllable-by-syllable speech tasks.

The experiments revealed that a remarkable diversity of different movements were encoded by neurons surrounding individual electrodes. The researchers found there were four emergent groups of neurons that appeared to be responsible for coordinating movements of muscles of the lips, tongue, and throat into the four main configurations of the vocal tract used in American English. The researchers also identified neural populations associated with specific classes of phonetic phenomena, including separate clusters for consonants and vowels of different types, but their analysis suggested that these phonetic groupings were more of a byproduct of more natural groupings based on different types of muscle movement. 

Regarding coarticulation, the researchers discovered that our brains’ speech centers coordinate different muscle movement patterns based on the context of what’s being said, and the order in which different sounds occur. For example, the jaw opens more to say the word “tap” than to say the word “has” — despite having the same vowel sound (/ae/), the mouth has to get ready to close to make the /z/ sound in “has.” The researchers found that neurons in the ventral sensorimotor cortex were highly attuned to this and other co-articulatory features of English, suggesting that the brain cells are tuned to produce fluid, context-dependent speech as opposed to reading out discrete speech segments in serial order.

“During speech production, there is clearly another layer of neural processing that happens, which enables the speaker to merge phonemes together into something the listener can understand,” said Anumanchipalli. 

Path to a Speech Prosthetic

“This study highlights why we need to take into account vocal tract movements and not just linguistic features like phonemes when studying speech production,” Chartier said. He thinks that this work paves the way not only for additional studies that tackle the sensorimotor aspect of speech production, but could also pay practical dividends. 

“We know now that the sensorimotor cortex encodes vocal tract movements, so we can use that knowledge to decode cortical activity and translate that via a speech prosthetic,” said Chartier. “This would give voice to people who can’t speak but have intact neural functions.”

Ultimately, the study could represent a new research avenue for Chartier and Anumanchipalli’s team at UCSF. “It’s really made me think twice about phonemes fit in—in a sense, these units of speech that we pin so much of our research on are just byproducts of a sensorimotor signal,” Anumanchipalli said.  

This work was supported by grants from the NIH (DP2 OD008627 and U01 NS098971-01). E.F.C. is also a New York Stem Cell Foundation-Robertson Investigator. This research was also supported by the New York Stem Cell Foundation, the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the McKnight Foundation, the Shurl and Kay Curci Foundation, and the William K. Bowes Foundation. 

UC San Francisco (UCSF) is a leading university dedicated to promoting health worldwide through advanced biomedical research, graduate-level education in the life sciences and health professions, and excellence in patient care. It includes top ranked graduate schools of dentistry, medicine, nursing and pharmacy; a graduate division with nationally renowned programs in basic, biomedical, transitional and population sciences; and a preeminent biomedical research enterprise. It also includes UCSF Health, which comprises three top-ranked hospitals, UCSF Medical Center and UCSF Benioff Children's Hospitals in San Francisco and Oakland, and other partner and affiliated hospitals and healthcare providers throughout the Bay Area. 

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https://www.ucsf.edu/news/2018/05/410606/study-reveals-brain-activity-patterns-underlying-fluent-speech

Minds matter: Psychology of language learning

‘It’s all in the mind!’ – How true when it comes to learning a foreign language. Every teacher knows that you can have the best resources in the world, but if the learner is not in the right frame of mind to engage with the new language and use the opportunities before them, then they are unlikely to do so. There are all kinds of reasons why a learner may put obstacles in their own way or simply avoid engaging, but many of these reasons often lie in how learners view themselves, their competences, and their relationship to the language, classroom, peers, and the teacher.

Our psychologies are complex, and care must be taken not to oversimplify, but I have chosen to focus on 5 key areas of learner psychology which I think can make a difference to learning and which we as language educators can work on developing. Introducing the two Gsand the three Cs!

Have they got Grit?

Firstly, learners need to have a Growth mindset and become Gritty about their language learning. It is a well-known adage that learning a foreign language is like a marathon, not a sprint. It takes time, progress is slow and incremental, and there can be many setbacks along the way. Language learners need to develop persistence and even in the face of challenges, be able to roll up their sleeves undeterred and tackle problem areas all over again with renewed vigour – that is grittiness.

Learning a foreign language is like a marathon, not a sprint.

Growth Mindset

To have grit, language learners first need to have a growth mindset. This is when they believe that their abilities in learning a language are not fixed but can be developed. Not all learners will reach the same level of proficiency, but with the right kind of effort, strategies, and investment of time and will, every learner can improve. However, if a learner holds a fixed mindset, believing that language learning competences stem primarily from a fixed ability, then they are more likely to give up easily, and in some cases not even try to succeed. These learners feel helpless, believing there is little they can do to improve or overcome difficulties. In contrast, those with a growth mindset are typically willing to put in the effort to improve and explore a range of possible pathways to proficiency.

With a growth mindset, learners believe that their abilities can be developed.

What are the 3 Cs?

In terms of the three 3 Cs, learners need to feel a sense of Competence, Control, and Connectedness.

Competence

Learners need a sense of ‘I can’ in respect to learning a language. Much of this can stem from their mindset; however, they also need to feel that they are personally able to manage and cope with learning a language.

Control

A key part of that feeling can be generated when learners are empowered with a sense of control. Learners benefit from being able to intentionally and proactively select and initiate approaches to learning where possible in their contexts. A sense of control also concerns how learners explain their perceived successes and failures to themselves and others. Do they attribute these outcomes to factors within their control or to external factors beyond their control? With internal attributions, learners are likely to be motivated and willing to expend effort on learning, knowing that they can make a difference.

Connectedness

The third C refers to learners feeling connected not only to their teachers, but also their peers, their institution, and the language per se. When learners feel they belong in a group or institution and when they feel cared for as people and in terms of their learning progress, they are much more likely to engage and be active in their own learning. However, learners also need to build a personal connection to the language itself. Even if they feel competent and able, without a compelling reason to engage with the language, they might not bother! Help your learner’s to find a purpose, why are they learning a language and what value could it have for them and their future lives – be that in terms of relevance, importance, utility, and/or interest.

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https://oupeltglobalblog.com/2018/03/27/psychology-language-learning/

The beautiful language of the people who talk like birds

Their unusual whistled speech may reveal what humanity’s first words sounded like.

If you are ever lucky enough to visit the foothills of the Himalayas, you may hear a remarkable duet ringing through the forest. To the untrained ear, it might sound like musicians warming up a strange instrument. In reality, the enchanting melody is the sound of two lovers talking in a secret, whistled language.

Joining just a handful of other communities, the Hmong people can speak in whistles. The sounds normally allow farmers to chat across their fields and hunters to call to each in their forest. But their language is perhaps most beautifully expressed during a now rarely-performed act of courtship, when boys wander through the nearby villages at nightfall, whistling their favourite poems between the houses. If a girl responds, the couple then start a flirty dialogue.

It’s not just the enticing melodies that make it the perfect language of love. Compared with spoken conversations, it is hard to discern the identity of the couple from their whistles – offering some anonymity to the public exchange. The couple may even create their own personal code, adding nonsense syllables to confound eavesdroppers – a bit like the Pig Latin used by English schoolchildren to fool their parents. “It gives them some intimacy,” says Julien Meyer, at the University of Grenoble, France, who visited the region in the early 2000s.

The practice not only highlights humanity’s amazing linguistic diversity; it may also help us to understand the limits of human communication. In most languages, whistles are used for little more than calling attention; they seem too simple to carry much meaning. But Meyer has now identified more than 70 groups across the world who can use whistles to express themselves with all the flexibility of normal speech.

These mysterious languages demonstrate the brain’s astonishing capacity to decode information from new signals – with insights that are causing some neuroscientists to rethink the fundamental organisation of the brain. The research may even shed light on the emergence of language itself. According to one hypothesis, our first words may have sounded something like the Hmong’s courtship songs.

Meyer’s interest in whistled languages began with a 40-year-old Scientific American article about Silbo Gomero – a form of whistled Spanish ‘spoken’ on one of the Canary Islands. The trilled sounds allow shepherds to communicate across deep ravines, and they are apparently so close to the local birdsong that blackbirds have been known to learn and mimic the human dialogues. You can hear a clip above of someone whistling 'En todo el mundo hay hombres que hablan silbando', which translates as 'Around the World, there are humans who whistle their language'. (Clip courtesy of Julien Meyer and Laure Dentel.)

Meyer was instantly fascinated – and ended up completing a PhD on the subject. More than a decade later, he’s still hooked. “I didn’t think that one day it would give me a job,” he says.

Much of Meyer’s research has focused on charting their prevalence around the globe. The ancient history books offered a few pointers. In the 5th Century BC, for instance, the Greek historian Herodotus described a group of cave-dwelling Ethiopians. “Their speech is like no other in the world: it is like the squeaking of bats,” he wrote.  We can’t know for sure which communities he was describing, but Meyer says that several whistled languages can still be heard in Ethiopia’s Omo Valley.

Indeed, Meyer has now identified whistled languages in every corner of the globe. Given that the whistles can travel much further than normal speech – as far as 8km (5 miles) in open conditions – they are most commonly found in mountains, where they help shepherds and farmers to pass messages down the valley.

But the sounds can also penetrate dense forests such as the Amazon, where hunters whistle to locate each other through the dense foliage. “The whistles are good for fighting against reverberation,” says Meyer. And unlike regular speech, they tend not to scare the potential prey. They can also be useful at sea: the Inuit communities of the Bering Strait whistle commands to each other as they hunt for whales.

Read more at:

http://www.bbc.com/future/story/20170525-the-people-who-speak-in-whistles

A word in your ear: the interpreters who speak for world leaders

There are few professions that offer a front-row seat to history, or a chance to rub shoulders with world leaders, as well as the odd tyrant. Interpreting is one of them, and it is interpreters who have given us some of the 20th century's best phrases. 

The Soviet interpreter Viktor Sukhodrev, who died in May, aged 81, famously rendered Nikita Khrushchev's threat to the west, made during his first visit to the US in 1959, as "We will bury you". (What Khrushchev actually said was, "Communism will outlast capitalism," but it was the more brutal, and not entirely accurate, phrase that stuck.)

Typically interpreters spend their days "in the booth". This means sitting in a soundproof cubicle, wearing a headset, listening to their own voice, one ear covered and the other ear slightly covered. They work in same-language pairs. Each does a stint of 30 minutes because "after an hour your brain explodes," one says. That simultaneous interpreting should be possible seems something of a human miracle. "I still don't know how I can listen and speak at the same time. There is something happening in my brain I can't understand," I was told.

Like acting, the best interpreters capture the personality of the person who is speaking: the emotion of Ahmadinejad, or the sardonic deadpan of Putin. (This doesn't signify approval, merely a fidelity of rendition.) Interpreters strive for the idiomatic rather than the literal; as one puts it, "You have your favourite synonyms and idioms, like pocket change."

Sitting in on top-level meetings and negotiations, interpreters strive to be invisible. Sometimes clients come up with specific demands. One interpreter who agreed to translate for the fashion designer Ralph Lauren was given a long list of instructions, including what clothes she should wear (black) and how to tie her hair and do her makeup. She turned the job down.

Here's how three translators recall their toughest assignments.

• Read more at: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jul/25/interpreters-world-events-gorbachev-reagan-deng-xiaoping-ahmadinejad

Pidgin - West African lingua franca

What is Pidgin?

The Oxford English Dictionary definition of Pidgin is: A language containing lexical and other features from two or more languages, characteristically with simplified grammar and a smaller vocabulary than the languages from which it is derived, used for communication between people not having a common language; a lingua franca.

Simply put, Pidgin English is a mixture of English and local languages which enables people who do not share a common language to communicate.

Most African countries are made up of numerous different ethnic groups who do not necessarily have a lingua franca, so Pidgin has developed.

It is widely spoken in Nigeria, Ghana, Equatorial Guinea and Cameroon.

There are differences, because English is mixed with different languages in each country but they are usually mutually intelligible.

A form of Pidgin has developed into a mother tongue for the Krio community in Sierra Leone, which non-Krios can find difficult to understand.

What is so special about Pidgin?

"It's quite fluid, it keeps changing all the time and it's expressive as well," says Bilkisu Labran, head of the new BBC language services for Nigeria.

"Sometimes, if you don't have a word for something, you can just create an onomatopoeic sound and just express yourself. And it will be appreciated and understood.

"I can talk about the gun shots that went 'gbagbagba' and you get my gist. So it vividly captures it instead of describing or trying to find a word to say: 'The gun shots were very loud'."

Also, Pidgin hardly follows standard grammatical rules so "you can lose things like verbs", by saying: 'I dey go' to mean 'I'm going'.

Other examples are:

• I wan chop ( I want to eat)
• Wetin dey 'appen? (What is happening?)
• I no no (I do not know)
• Where you dey? (Where are you)

How many people speak it?

It is difficult to know the precise number of speakers across the region as it is not formally studied in schools and is spoken in varying degrees of proficiency.

But many millions of people undoubtedly speak it on a daily basis, especially young people.

Nigeria is estimated to have between three and five million people who primarily use Pidgin in their day-to-day interactions. But it is said to be a second language to a much higher number of up to 75 million people in Nigeria alone - about half the population.

Although it is commonly spoken, Pidgin is not an official language anywhere in West Africa.

In many schools, children are disciplined if they are caught speaking Pidgin, rather than English.

However, some local radio stations do broadcast in Pidgin.

How did it originate?

West African Pidgin English, also called Guinea Coast Creole English, was a language of commerce spoken along the coast during the Atlantic slave trade in the late 17th and 18th Centuries.

This allowed British slave merchants and local African traders to conduct business.

It later spread to other parts of the West African colonies, becoming a useful trade language among local ethnic groups who spoke different languages.

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http://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa-38000387

10 last spoken languages in the world

The vanishing words we need to save

Robert Macfarlane collects words that describe nature and landscape – and which are dying out. He explains their power to shape our relationship with the earth itself.

Robert Macfarlane is a compiler of words: an explorer of hedgerows and roadsides, salt marshes and sea-caves. But he is also a magician, of sorts – one who weaves spells using lost phrases that recall a different connection with our landscape. In his latest book Landmarks, the British naturalist calls for “a glossary of enchantment for the whole earth, which would allow nature to talk back and would help us to listen”.

We speak on the phone the day before he is due to talk at the Hay Festival. I am sitting in my car at a rest stop next to the river Wye in Wales, opposite public toilets, trying to stay still to keep my mobile from cutting out. Macfarlane is in the kitchen of his home in Cambridge, also clinging to a patch of reception. He laughs as I describe my location. This is a man who has found peregrine falcons at a power station and water voles at a municipal dump, claiming in his 2007 book The Wild Places that “the human and the wild cannot be partitioned”.

Similarly, he doesn’t believe that the words he has collected in Landmarks are just for shepherds or hill-walkers. “I’m talking to you from my edge-of-the-suburb house in Cambridge – most people are in cities now,” he says. “The book is about all of us finding ways to celebrate and enrich the language that we have for landscape and nature.”

In Landmarks, Macfarlane pulls together nine glossaries of terms taken from 30 languages, dialects and sub-dialects around Britain and Ireland. They all describe aspects of weather, nature and terrain – and many of them are dying out, slipping out of conversation and off the tongues of those who once spoke them. They have been lost. Macfarlane wants them to be found.

He describes two of his favourites: “One is this lovely Cornish word ‘zawn’, which means a wave-smashed chasm in a sea cliff – it’s so evocative of that gaping mouth, and the power of those places,” he says. “Another is this soft, Gaelic phrase ‘rionnach maoim’, the shadows that clouds cast on moorland on a windy day. There’s something about the poetry of that, the precision and the need to compress that phenomenon down into that gorgeous soft phrase.”

In his book’s lists, he has included words coined by poets along with agricultural or geological terms. There is the ‘shepherd’s lamp’ imagined by the 19th-Century poet John Clare to describe the first star that rises after sunset, and a smattering of terms from the Victorian poet Gerard Manley Hopkins: ‘heavengravel’ for hailstones, ‘endragoned’ describing a raging sea, and the ominous ‘doomfire’ – meaning, as Macfarlane puts it, “sunset light which has the appearance of apocalypse to it”.

Macfarlane delights in the language. “There’s just the sheer joy of exactitude; I see it as a form of beautiful elegance. These lovely poems that fold up inside these words and spring out of them like jack-in-the-boxes – they’re gorgeous forms of precision,” he says. 

The glossaries include ‘zwer’ (Exmoor dialect for “the noise made by a covey of partridges rising in flight”), ‘frazil’ (“loose, needle-like ice crystals that form into a churning slush in turbulent super-cooled water, for example in a river on a very cold night”) – and ‘blaze’, which along the North Sea coast means “to take salmon by striking them at night, by torchlight, with a three-pronged spear”.

As might be expected in Britain, there is an entire list devoted to words for rain, most of them Gaelic. From ‘virga’, meaning “observable streak or shaft of precipitation that falls from a cloud but evaporates before reaching the ground”, to a ‘beum-sléibhe’, or “sudden torrent caused by the bursting of a thundercloud”, every drop is accounted for. Some of the definitions are lyrical – like ‘smirr’, “extremely fine, misty rain, close to smoke in appearance when seen from a distance”, and the “torrent of brutal rage” that is ‘burraghlas’. Others are more prosaic, like ‘clagarnach’, Irish for “clatter of heavy rain on an iron roof”, and ‘letty’, “enough rain to make outdoor work difficult”.

But Landmarks is more than an ode to language. By enriching our vocabularies, Macfarlane believes, we can change the way we interact with our landscape. “We increasingly make do with an impoverished language for nature, a generic language: ‘field’, and ‘wood’, and ‘hill’, and ‘countryside’. It’s a very basic way of denoting, and that’s fine, and sometimes we need to speak generally,” he says. “We can’t always speak absolutely precisely. But I’m fascinated by details and by the specifics of nature, and its particularities – and language helps us to see those.”

Early in the book, Macfarlane describes flying over the Scottish Outer Hebrides in a twin-prop plane. He saw “the tawny expanse of Mointeach riabhach, the Brindled Moor: several hundred square miles of bog, hag, crag, heather, loch and lochan that make up the interior of Lewis”. Across the aisle from him, two people looked out of the window. Macfarlane recounts: “One of them laughed. ‘We’re flying over nothing!’ she said.

Seed fund

“If we just see a landscape as some kind of waste space and devoid of detail, it becomes more vulnerable to dismissal or disinterest or improper use,” Macfarlane tells me.

In Landmarks, he quotes the American essayist and farmer Wendell Berry: “People exploit what they have merely concluded to be of value, but they defend what they love, and to defend what we love we need a particularising language, for we love what we particularly know.”

A chapter in the book is dedicated to the Scottish-American John Muir, whose writings inspired the US president Theodore Roosevelt to create the country’s first national parks. “Muir gives me hope,” Macfarlane said in his talk at Hay. “His writing changed the course of landscape history. It’s the idea of hope in the dark.” He described the seeds of the bristlecone pine, which lie dormant in the soil and are germinated by forest fire. “Individual actions in culture – art, writing – can be dropped, like the pine seeds. They seem dead but decades later they can flare into life.”

Subtitled a “field guide to the literature of nature”, Landmarks is a work of great scholarship – but also a call to action. It explores “how reading can change minds, revise behaviour and shape perceptions”. And it fits within a wider resurgence of nature writing in Britain, including Costa award-winning H is for Hawk and The Shepherd’s Life, the memoir of a sheep farmer.

Macfarlane believes there is an “astonishing surging cultural energy that’s working across photography and art and in literature”. He credits it to an acute sense of loss. “It’s because we live in the shadow of destruction and damage, because we are a generation that’s grown up conscious of climate change, and that internalised anxiety at the world’s ongoing peril is a really powerful imaginative force that we don’t quite register in its full form but is deeply in us,” he says.

‘An A-Z of words lost’

Macfarlane was inspired to write the book both by discovering a “peat-deep word-hoard of Hebridean Gaelic” and after the culling of nature words such as buttercup and kingfisher from the Oxford Junior Dictionary, which he described at Hay as “an A-Z of words lost”. He thinks we can learn from how children encounter nature.

“The last chapter is about a group of children in a country park which has the busiest A road in the east of England on one side, and a hospital on the other,” he says. “It’s about the limitless wonder with which children meet even a very unwild place, which is an inspiration to all of us who’ve forgotten how to speak ‘childish’.”

Just as important as the words that are vanishing are the words being created every day. Macfarlane explains in the book that his seven-year-old son, when told there was no word for “the shining hump of water that rises above a submerged boulder in a stream”, quickly suggested ‘currentbum’. “Since the book was published, I’ve been sent many words – on postcards, and letters, from diaries and clippings, as well as emails and Twitter – and children and parents have begun to send me ones that they make up,” Macfarlane tells me.

The collecting of terms in Landmarks is not a form of hoarding, an attempt at control in the face of loss. At his Hay talk, Macfarlane expressed how he hoped the book might give new life to the place-languages within. “I want these words to be released and let their energies and their poetries run wild,” he said.

To that end, the last glossary, Childish, is left blank. It is a sign of hope. As Macfarlane says in Landmarks, “We have forgotten 10,000 words for our landscapes, but we will make 10,000 more, given time.”

His glossaries, then, are much more than vocabulary-expanding lists. This is where Macfarlane the magician takes over.

“I wanted them to become spells, really; chants, incantations – you step into them like you might step into a flowing stream and let the words run over you. They do have their own magic, which is nothing to do with me. I just put them on the page,” he says. “But they become spells.”

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http://www.bbc.com/culture/story/20151126-robert-macfarlane-on-the-wild-words-were-losing?ocid=fbbrt

La langue luxembourgeoise «est plus utilisée que jamais»

Non, le luxembourgeois n'est pas menacé de disparition. Au contraire. C'est de moins en moins la première langue des jeunes enfants mais de plus en plus de gens l'utilisent. Plus que jamais, y compris à l'écrit. La demande des frontaliers pour l'apprendre explose. Décryptage d'un vrai phénomène, qu'il connaît sur le bout des doigts, avec Marc Barthelemy, président du Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise et professeur-attaché au ministère de l'Education nationale.

La langue luxembourgeoise est-elle menacée de disparition ou, au contraire, est-elle plus utilisée que jamais? 

«Elle est plus utilisée que jamais parce qu'il y a davantage de personnes qui la parlent. Il n'y a plus seulement les 300.000 Luxembourgeois qui la parlent mais également les frontaliers qui arrivent au Luxembourg et dont beaucoup suivent des cours pour apprendre le luxembourgeois. Par conséquent, il y a de plus en plus de personnes qui savent parler le luxembourgeois et qui le parlent. 

En revanche, on constate que chez les enfants scolarisés à 4 ans, le taux de ceux qui ont le luxembourgeois en première langue diminue. Il n'y a plus que le tiers des enfants de 4 ans qui ont le luxembourgeois comme première langue. Mais le concept de première langue ne correspond pas exactement à ce qui se passe au Luxembourg. Il y a énormément d'enfants qui parlent plusieurs langues chez eux. De plus en plus d'enfants maîtrisent au moins deux langues parfaitement».

Les frontaliers apprennent vraiment plus le luxembourgeois aujourd'hui?

«Oui, parce que nous avons toujours de plus en plus de demandes pour des cours de luxembourgeois au Luxembourg et dans les régions limitrophes où le ministère de l'Education nationale participe à l'organisation et au financement de cours. La demande est croissante et on peine à satisfaire cette demande. Cela fait une douzaine d'années que je vois ce phénomène s'amplifier mais j'ai l'impression que ça augmente de plus en plus rapidement».

Comment expliquez-vous cette demande pressante?

«It's economics! comme le disait Bill Clinton. La raison est évidemment économique et financière. Si on regarde les offres d'emplois le samedi dans le Luxemburger Wort, le luxembourgeois est toujours mis comme une condition. Ou au moins comme un avantage. Et dans beaucoup de domaines on veut que les candidats comprennent au moins le luxembourgeois». 

Pourquoi les Luxembourgeois se soucient-ils tant de leur langue depuis quelques mois?

«Oh, ce n'est pas depuis quelques mois... ça date d'il y a bien plus longtemps! La naissance du luxembourgeois en tant que langue remonte à la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Avant la Seconde Guerre mondiale, la grande majorité des Luxembourgeois auraient dit: on parle un dialecte allemand, le luxemburger deutsch. Lors de la guerre, l'occupant a forcé les Luxembourgeois à parler allemand et il a fait un référendum où les Luxembourgeois auraient dû répondre: notre langue c'est l'allemand. Mais les Luxembourgeois ont refusé et ont répondu: notre langue c'est le luxembourgeois!

Après la guerre il y a également eu maintes discussions sur la forme écrite du  luxembourgeois car il n'y avait pas de standards. Une première apothéose étant la loi du 24 février 1984  fixant clairement que "la langue nationale des Luxembourgeois est le  luxembourgeois". Mais il est également écrit que l'allemand, le français et le luxembourgeois sont les langues utilisées dans le pays. 

Je pense que la discussion a été créée par certaines pétitions et il faut également souligner que lors des dernières élections trois partis avaient le luxembourgeois dans leur programme: l'adr évidemment, Déi Lénk ont demandé une alphabétisation  des enfants en luxembourgeois et les Pirates avaient rédigé tout leur programme en langue luxembourgeoise. A ma connaissance c'était une première».

Sur quels critères repose l'affirmation selon laquelle le luxembourgeois est de plus en plus écrit? 

«On peut faire deux constats: Tout d'abord la production au niveau littéraire de tous genres est en augmentation constante. Le second est qu'à différents niveaux, l'utilisation du luxembourgeois pour communiquer de façon informelle par SMS a beaucoup augmenté. Il y a beaucoup de jeunes qui ont l'habitude de communiquer par écrit en luxembourgeois même s'ils ne le parlent peut-être pas beaucoup. Mais il n'y a pas d'études scientifiques là-dessus».

Pourquoi utilisent-ils le luxembourgeois?

«Probablement parce que c'est la langue de communication pour les différentes communautés du pays. Mais je ne puis que l'affirmer. Il y a vingt ans je vous aurais dit la future langue de communication du pays ce sera le français. Mais l'immigration des pays de l'Est a changé la donne. Ils ne sont pas francophones, ni romanophones du tout. Cela a changé la donne. Tout comme la réalité économique: le poids de la France diminue à tous les niveaux. Et l'importance du français, au niveau international, aussi. Même si vous allez en Belgique, vous ne parlez plus le français. Dès qu'il y a deux Belges il faut parler l'anglais. Je l'ai vraiment constaté dans les réunions internationales (en tant que conseiller de Mady Delvaux, ministre de l'Education nationale, ndlr). Et je regrette que le français soit en perte de vitesse au Luxembourg».

Comment ça s'explique au Luxembourg?

«Dans le temps, le français était la langue de l'élite. Il y avait un pourcentage limité d'enfants qui allaient à l'Athénée au lycée et là, on parlait français. La langue véhiculaire à partir de la 5e, c'était le français. C'était clairement la clef pour entrer dans les couches supérieures. Depuis pas mal d'années le français est la langue parlée à d'autres niveaux de la société et je me demande si ce n'est pas le luxembourgeois qui reprend le rôle de clef d'accès dans certains milieux. C'est une observation.»

Pourquoi le luxembourgeois est-il si difficile à écrire, y compris pour les Luxembourgeois ? 

«C'est faux! Il n'est pas difficile à  écrire pour les Luxembourgeois. D'abord il faut comprendre que traditionnellement on n'écrit pas le luxembourgeois et jusqu'à ce jour on n'apprend pas à écrire le luxembourgeois à l'école. Nulle part. Donc les élèves qui sortent du système scolaire luxembourgeois ne savent pas écrire le luxembourgeois. Ils savent écrire l'allemand, le français et l'anglais. L'alphabétisation se fait en allemand. 

Traditionnellement la langue de communication c'était l'allemand mais il est en perte de vitesse à cause des éléments de la Seconde Guerre mondiale. Peut-être que ça va changer... on va voir. Mais le luxembourgeois ne s'apprend pas. Donc l'adulte normalement ne sait pas écrire le luxembourgeois sauf s'il suit des cours». 

Combien de temps lui faut-il pour apprendre à l'écrire ?

«Quelqu'un qui parle le luxembourgeois, écrit l'allemand et le français apprend très rapidement à écrire le luxembourgeois. Il faut de quinze à vingt heures. Car l'orthographe du luxembourgeois repose sur l'orthographe des mots allemands et des mots français. J'affirme très clairement que la personne qui sort du système scolaire luxembourgeois, qui ne sait pas écrire le luxembourgeois, peut apprendre à l'écrire très rapidement. Et bien sûr il faut le pratiquer sans quoi on le perd.

Traditionnellement les Luxembourgeois sont d'avis qu'on peut écrire le luxembourgeois comme on veut. Une habitude qui était toujours très répandue. Et on peut le faire. Mais le problème c'est évidemment qu'on peut créer des malentendus. 

Il faut dire que la forme écrite du luxembourgeois n'est arrêtée qu'imparfaitement. Le dispositif règlementaire du luxembourgeois est incomplet. Dans les règles d'écriture du luxembourgeois il reste des trous. Pas mal de choses ne sont pas encore réglées».

Pourtant il existe bien un Lëtzebuerger Online Dictionnaire...

«Le lod.lu est arrivé au terme de la lettre Z mais il présente évidemment aussi des lacunes qu'il faut encore compléter. Le luxembourgeois est encore à un stade moins avancé. Une douzaine de personnes travaillent sur le sujet au Luxembourg. 

Les écrivains influencent également l'établissement de règles. Il y a maintenant des écrivains qui sont vraiment doués et créatifs pour l'écriture en luxembourgeois. Un autre facteur positif et très important est que les débats à la Chambre des députés se font en luxembourgeois, ce qui ne se faisait pas voilà cinquante ans. Ils sont écrits et intégralement publiés dans tous les quotidiens. Tout un service à la Chambre  s'occupe de la correction de la langue luxembourgeoise. Ce qui a vraiment donné un essor à l'écriture de cette langue car c'est probablement l'endroit où on écrit le plus le luxembourgeois depuis ces dernières décennies».

La place de la langue luxembourgeoise à l'école fondamentale est finalement très mineure...

«Elle est peut-être mineure mais elle est beaucoup moins mineure qu'à l'époque. Avant, presque tous les enfants maitrisaient le luxembourgeois quand ils allaient à l'école primaire. Mais entre-temps on fait systématiquement la lecture de textes luxembourgeois à l'école fondamentale. Ce qui fait une grande différence. C'est ma langue maternelle mais en sortant de l'école j'avais des difficultés à la lire alors que mes enfants n'ont aucun problème, ils ont l'habitude de lire le luxembourgeois. Ça a changé. 

Et puis maintenant on fait un apprentissage systématique de la langue luxembourgeoise comme langue étrangère pour les enfants qui viennent d'arriver au pays. Pour ce faire, on a développé des outils pédagogiques dans les derniers quinze ans. Surtout au secondaire on a des classes dites d'insertion pour les enfants qui arrivent au pays à l'âge de 10-12 ans et qui ne parlent pas les langues du pays. En France, il suffit d'apprendre le français pour suivre les cours. Au Luxembourg, non. Il faut savoir le luxembourgeois, l'allemand et le français. Parce que ces trois langues sont utilisées comme langues véhiculaires à l'école. Et c'est ça le problème! Ce n'est pas le problème des gens qui arrivent de tous côtés. Le problème c'est qu'il faut leur apprendre non pas une mais trois langues. C'est la grande différence avec les autres pays. 

En 2009 a été créé un master en langue et littératures luxembourgeoises à l'Université du Luxembourg. Combien d'étudiants se sont lancés? 

«Il y a eu 36 personnes qui ont eu le master et 14 qui sont en route. Ce master permet de devenir professeur de luxembourgeois. Depuis la première promotion de ce master, le ministère recrute des professeurs de luxembourgeois. Nous avons entre-temps  des professeurs de langue luxembourgeoise dans nos lycées. Et nous en recherchons encore. Cette année nous voulions d'ailleurs en recruter six et nous n'avons eu que quatre candidats.

Non seulement on n'apprend pas à écrire le luxembourgeois à l'école mais en plus il n'y a aucune offre pour l'apprendre au sein de nos écoles. Et ça, notre ministre veut le changer. Il a annoncé que tout élève se verra offrir la possibilité d'apprendre le luxembourgeois à l'écrit dans des cours facultatifs. Et pour faire ça, il faut des profs.»

La langue luxembourgeoise est-elle prête pour devenir une langue officielle de l'UE ? 

«La réponse est clairement oui. Parce qu'il n'y a vraiment pas d'argument contre. Il y a, au contraire, un très grand argument pour. A part le symbole d'une telle action. L'Europe finance beaucoup de projets portant sur les langues et le luxembourgeois en est exclu parce qu'il n'est pas reconnu. Ni comme langue officielle, ni comme langue minoritaire.

Si on décidait maintenant de traduire beaucoup de textes législatifs en luxembourgeois, il faudrait certainement faire un travail sur la langue luxembourgeoise. Il faut décider si on veut le faire ou pas. Mais c'est possible. On le fait déjà pour les discussions à la Chambre des députés. 

Le Conseil permanent de la langue luxembourgeoise a toujours demandé de faire cela mais en ajoutant que nous voulions le statut de l'irlandais. C'est-à-dire qu'il n'y a pas l'obligation de traduire tous les textes en langue luxembourgeoise». 

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http://www.wort.lu/fr/politique/on-n-apprend-pas-a-l-ecrire-a-l-ecole-mais-la-langue-luxembourgeoise-est-plus-utilisee-que-jamais-5899ecc3a5e74263e13aa398