Language Log

Jeb Bush gave a Spanish-language interview on Sunday with Telemundo's José Díaz-Balart. This is the first time since the launch of his presidential campaign that his functional bilingualism has been on full display.

Photograph of a Chinese ad spotted in a Beijing elevator by David Moser, who also provided much of the analysis that follows:

Sign on a pet-grooming place in Banqiao, Taiwan (contributed by Mark Swofford):

Here is an interesting picture that Francois Dube took today in a cakeshop in Yinchuan, capital of the Ningxia Hui (Muslim) Autonomous Region, People's Republic of China:

The star of this popular Voice of America program is Jessica Beinecke (Bái Jié 白洁).  Her Mandarin is quite amazing; indeed, I would say that it is nothing short of phenomenal. Here's a sample:

At the end of his abbreviated trip to Indonesia (cut short because of the volcanic eruptions of Mt. Merapi), President Obama gave a half-hour address at the University of Indonesia that finally showed off his skills in the Indonesian language, a subject we've been examining. Granted, it was a prepared speech, but Obama went out of his way to include Indonesian phrases and sentences that would resonate with the crowd (mostly composed of students and staff at UI), and he even worked in at least one ad-lib.

From the official transcript, here are the relevant Indonesian passages from the speech, accompanied by my quick analysis. (Video of the speech is available on C-SPAN here and on the White House site here.)

In January 2009, soon after President Obama was sworn in, we had our first video evidence of his conversational skills in Indonesian, based on an exchange he had with a State Department staffer. (See "Obama's Indonesian pleasantries: the video.") As I said at the time, his experience of living in Indonesia from age six to ten had left him "if not bilingual, at least bi-courteous." Now Obama is on his long-delayed state visit to Indonesia, and he's been breaking out some more Indonesian pleasantries and showing off basic food-related etiquette.

Within the short space of eight months, Singapore's founding Prime Minister and current Minister Mentor, Lee Kuan Yew, has done a nearly complete about-face in his attitude toward promoting the use of Mandarin in the republic.  As late as March of this year, when he was celebrating the thirtieth anniversary of the campaign to "Speak Mandarin," Lee was claiming that "In two generations, Mandarin will become our mother tongue.”

In those days, Lee was asserting that people have only so many “gigabytes” in their brains to devote to languages.  Though admitting that speaking “dialects” in some situations can provide “extra warmth,” he warned that, by using such languages, “You are losing important neurons with data which should not be there. And like the computer, when you delete it, it doesn’t really go away. It’s there at the back, and you’ve got to go to the rubbish channel and say ‘destroy.’ And it’s still disturbing your hard disk.”  (See this useful summary and detailed list of references by Mark Swofford.)

Just last week I reported on a couple of accounts describing Barack Obama's conversational skills in Indonesian, a language he learned living in Indonesia from age six to ten. In both of the accounts, Obama was said to handle conventional Indonesian greeting routines with aplomb. Now thanks to ABC News we have the video evidence, from an exchange that President Obama had with State Department staffer Charles Silver on Thursday as the president worked the State Department rope-line. Silver has been stationed in Jakarta at various times since 1969 and now works in the State Department's Office of Inspector General.

Back in July, Bill Poser noted that "Barack Obama is reported to speak Indonesian as result of the four years, from age six to age ten, that he spent in Indonesia." Bill asked for any evidence about Obama's competence in Indonesian. Since then, we've gotten some anecdotal reports about Obama's Indonesian (including from the President of Indonesia!), but we still don't know if his language skills rise above the basic conversational level.