Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online: Resources and Strategies

Targeting and Profiling Customers and Vendors Online: Resources and Strategies

Over 80 percent of respondents to a recent survey on the Ecademy BNI Trusted Network stated that the majority of their business came from networking and referrals. It’s the easiest way to get new business and doing it online is even easier (and less expensive). There’s an abundance of resources that make this possible including search engines and business information sites like Google, Hoover’s Online, Spoke Pro; online business networking communities like Ryze, Ecademy, and openBC; what we call “six degrees of separation” sites like LinkedIn, Spoke Basic, and Zero Degrees; customer relationship management (CRM) sites like SalesForce.com, freeCRM.com, and SugarCRM; and hybrid sites that offer the functionality of two or more of these like Spoke. We’ll delve deeper into each of these four categories of resources and the tactics to make them work for you in a series of future articles. In this article we’ll look at the targeting and profiling strategies behind the tactics that make it all work.

Targeting

Sales conversations have to be targeted to be successful and targeting those conversations means focusing on the buyer’s goals. Here’s how you do it:

• First, determine the title or function of your prospect. You can probably do this from memory since you see the same job titles sale after sale.

• Next, come up with a menu of business issues for that title.

• Discuss these issues with your prospect until he shares a goal related to one of them.

• Once the prospect shares a goal your offering can help achieve, the buying cycle begins.

Let’s drill down deeper:

• What are the job titles or functions of the people you will have to have conversations with to close the sale?
• Who is qualified and empowered to buy from you? (Example: Vice President of International Business Development)
• List the vertical industries you work with even though you have horizontal offerings since prospective buyers will want to know you have experience in their industry. (Example: Energy)
• Now, for each of the job titles you’ve listed, what goals or business objectives do the people in those jobs or functions have? (Example: aligning international expansion with core business objectives, international management issues, and operational issues)
• Out of the goals you’ve listed, which ones can be addressed through your services? (Example: international management issues and operational issues) Make sure the goals you list are monetarily based - it’s easier to cost-justify buying a service that provides a measurable financial benefit.

Profiling

There are two key areas of interest when profiling customers: demographics and behavior. Let’s first talk demographics:

• Who are your current customers?
• What are their job titles?
• In what industries are they found?
• How much of their company’s revenue comes from outside the US? According to Common Sense Advisory “for many fortune 500 firms, non-US revenue - or xenorevenue - accounts for 20 to more than 50% of their global income.”

Now let’s look at their behavior:

What percentage of their revenue do they spend on your services? According to Common Sense Advisory, “localization expenditures are minuscule - 2.5% or lower of non-US revenue.” This discrepancy between earnings and expenditures represents a huge opportunity.

• What do they buy?
• How often do they buy?
• What is the size of their average purchase?
• What languages do they buy?
• What time of year do they buy?

You don’t have to think of everyone you target as a prospect. It’s worth networking with them regardless. People tend to know others like themselves, so by meeting and building relationships with more people who fit your target profile, you are likely to meet still more if you focus on creating relationships, rather than just moving on once you determine they’re not a prospect. Help them in areas other than those covered by your services. Build a relationship with them. As Harvey Mackay put it, “Apply The Law of Large Numbers to your prospect list. Position yourself as Number Two to every prospect on your list, and keep adding to that list.” If your list is long enough, the Law of Large Numbers will work to your advantage. Most large companies need translation. Few of them do it in house. They’ll always be reconsidering options. Don’t write them off just because they already have a provider. Contact them once in a while. Send them a relevant article. Work on being second in line. Gain mindshare and hold on to it because, in Mackay’s words, “If you’re standing second in line, in enough lines, sooner or later you’re going to move up to Number One.”

Christopher Hurtado is president and CEO of Linguistic Solutions, secretary of the ATATCD, and coauthor of Vacation Spanish: A Survival Guide for Mexico, the Caribbean, Central & South America. Since founding Linguistic Solutions in 1991, he has been using high tech/high touch methodologies to manage customer relationships, translation projects and a worldwide network of freelance translators while serving a variety of international clients, including Fortune 500 companies and high-tech startups.

Scott Allen is a leading expert in building quality business relationships online. He is coauthor of the forthcoming The Virtual Handshake: Opening Doors and Closing Deals Online, a contributing author to Blog!: How the Web’s New Mavericks Are Changing the World, and a monthly columnist for FastCompany.com. He is also the About.com Entrepreneurs Guide, helping some 50,000 monthly visitors follow their dreams of business ownership.

LINGUISTICS

LINGUISTICS

 
scientific study of language, covering the structure (morphology and syntax; see grammar), sounds (phonology), and meaning (semantics), as well as the history of the relations of languages to each other and the cultural place of language in human behavior. Phonetics, the study of the sounds of speech, is generally considered a separate (but closely related to) field from linguistics.

Early Linguistics

Before the 19th cent., language was studied mainly as a field of philosophy. Among the philosophers interested in language was Wilhelm von Humboldt, who considered language an activity that arises spontaneously from the human spirit; thus, he felt, languages are different just as the characteristics of individuals are different. In 1786 the English scholar Sir William Jones suggested the possible affinity of Sanskrit and Persian with Greek and Latin, for the first time bringing to light genetic relations between languages. With Jones's revelation the school of comparative historical linguistics began. Through the comparison of language structures, such 19th-century European linguists as Jakob Grimm, Rasmus Rask, Karl Brugmann, and Antoine Meillet, as well as the American William Dwight Whitney, did much to establish the existence of the Indo-European family of languages.

Structural Linguistics

In the 20th cent. the structural or descriptive linguistics school emerged. It dealt with languages at particular points in time (synchronic) rather than throughout their historical development (diachronic). The father of modern structural linguistics was Ferdinand de Saussure, who believed in language as a systematic structure serving as a link between thought and sound; he thought of language sounds as a series of linguistic signs that are purely arbitrary, as can be seen in the linguistic signs or words for horse: German Pferd, Turkish at, French cheval, and Russian loshad'. In America, a structural approach was continued through the efforts of Franz Boas and Edward Sapir, who worked primarily with Native American languages, and Leonard Bloomfield, whose methodology required that nonlinguistic criteria must not enter a structural description. Rigorous procedures for determining language structure were developed by Kenneth Pike, Bernard Bloch, Charles Hockett, and others.

Transformational-Generative Grammar

In the 1950s the school of linguistic thought known as transformational-generative grammar received wide acclaim through the works of Noam Chomsky. Chomsky postulated a syntactic base of language (called deep structure), which consists of a series of phrase-structure rewrite rules, i.e., a series of (possibly universal) rules that generates the underlying phrase-structure of a sentence, and a series of rules (called transformations) that act upon the phrase-structure to form more complex sentences. The end result of a transformational-generative grammar is a surface structure that, after the addition of words and pronunciations, is identical to an actual sentence of a language. All languages have the same deep structure, but they differ from each other in surface structure because of the application of different rules for transformations, pronunciation, and word insertion. Another important distinction made in transformational-generative grammar is the difference between language competence (the subconscious control of a linguistic system) and language performance (the speaker's actual use of language). Although the first work done in transformational-generative grammar was syntactic, later studies have applied the theory to the phonological and semantic components of language.

Other Areas of Linguistic Study

In contrast to theoretical schools of linguistics, workers in applied linguistics in the latter part of the 20th cent. have produced much work in the areas of foreign-language teaching and of bilingual education in the public schools (in the United States this has primarily involved Spanish and, in the Southwest, some Native American languages in addition to English). In addition, such subfields as pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and psycholinguistics have gained importance.

The Emperor's New Linguistics

The Emperor's New Linguistics

If we are to believe a best-selling book and a recent three-part PBS series, almost every question about human language has now been resolved. Language is essentially a simple endowment present at birth, all the world's languages are really very similar with only "trivial" exceptions, and the whole point of a language is merely to be able to say and understand things one has never said or heard before. We owe these triumphant findings to the Chomskian school of linguistics, most recently advanced by Steven Pinker's book The Language Instinct and the TV presentation entitled The Human Language Series (1).

Translators can perhaps be excused if they fail to join in the celebration, especially since the index of Pinker's book does not even contain the word "translation," nor were any translators consulted in creating the TV series, though representatives from several dubiously scientific language specialties certainly were. But these two recent treatments may nonetheless have their positive side. Where before Chomskian doctrines lay relatively hidden in abstruse treatises, pedantic classroom assertions, and cabalistic sentence diagrams, now at last they have been revealed to all in relatively direct language, so that their shallowness and banality can no longer be ignored.

As most translators have learned from continued struggles to provide a real equivalent between two idioms, the differences between the world's languages are definitely not "trivial," even if one accepts this word in the broader sense encouraged by Chomsky of differentiating human languages from communications between animals or "intelligent machines" (to the extent that any final knowledge is available about either category). Nor is it enough for a language to merely create new sentences—it can be argued that two other equally important and closely related goals of a language are to convey some sort of meaning to others and/or at least to gratify one's own sense of understanding (even where one fails to understand).

If differences between languages truly were trivial, and if merely generating new sentences were the principal point of language, machine translation in its ultimate form of Fully Automatic High Quality Translation (FAHQT) would have long ago been attained, which is clearly not the case. The period when Chomsky and his followers first began their work coincided with the heyday of sacrosanct mainframe ideology: it was simply assumed that computers could solve any problem. We now know better, and the continued propagandizing of such theories is simply an embarrassment left over from the past. In a sense Chomsky himself has now come down from his pedestal and stands naked among us.

Perhaps these popularizing polemics are most objectionable in their attempt to bury earlier linguistic theories of possibly greater merit. This effort reaches a new low in academic name-calling in Pinker's attack on Benjamin Lee Whorf, whose major thesis was nothing more shocking than the notion, commonly noted by translators and laymen alike, that language and "reality" tend to become interdependent, co-creating, and co-correcting elements of our world views. Perhaps the real problem is that Whorf never received a formal degree in Linguistics, even though his findings strongly influenced Edward Sapir and many others allegedly his academic superiors. Indeed, until recently his views were known as the Whorf-Sapir Hypothesis.

Equally striking is Pinker's attempt to deemphasize the concept of "deep structure" as a major component of Chomskian dogma. In the past this notion supposedly accounted for the many different ways of expressing similar ideas in different languages (or even in the same language)—underlying all of them lay the safety net of "deep structure." Critics were quick to point out that no one has ever set eyes on this entity, much less found any reason for believing in its existence, and it is not surprising that Pinker has now abandoned it.

But the author remains steadfastly faithful to "Universal Grammar," another Chomskian icon aptly abbreviated as "UG." We are supposed to believe that "UG" truly explains how all the world's languages are really saying the same thing in different ways. The problem with Universal Grammar is that it is not really a modern, scientific idea at all but a medievalist notion based on faith and superstition. As George Steiner points out in After Babel:

To the twelfth-century relativism of Pierre Hélie, with his belief that the disaster at Babel had generated as many kinds of irreconcilable grammars as there are languages, Roger Bacon opposed his famous axiom of unity: `Grammatica una et eadem est secundum substantiam in omnibus linguis, licet accidentaliter varietur.' [Grammar is one and the same following substance in all languages, although it may vary in its specifics]. Without a grammatica universalis, there could be no hope of discourse among men, nor any rational science of language.

Thus, Chomskian notions may have fallen into the same logic trap as these medieval ones, which furthermore go back even further to Aristotle himself:

As writing, so also is speech not the same for all races of men. But the mental affections themselves, of which these words are primarily signs, are the same for the whole of mankind....With these points, however, I have dealt in my treatise concerning the soul...—On Interpretation, I (Peri Hermeneias, translated by Harold P. Cooke)

In other words, this so-called "modern" science of linguistics may be about as well founded as the ideas of the Churchmen who opposed Galileo.

The first of the three one-hour tapes in The Human Language Series, subtitled "Discovering the Human Language: Colorless Green Ideas," presents the basic tenets of these theories and promotes Chomsky's assertion that "the language faculty is a subsystem of the human brain." The second tape, entitled Playing the Language Game, continues this argument by showing how children learn language and further advances the claims that "all of language is innate" and "language is an organ of the mind." The third tape, entitled The Human Language Evolves, examines the challenging notion that language may be linked to evolution but then runs off in a number of other directions without following up on any of them. At various points in the series, work by linguistic anthropologists and other scholars is presented as though it were a natural follow-up on Chomskian positions, when in fact these approaches antedate this outlook.

It would of course be quite comforting if it could be proven that all human languages are basically alike, and that all human being are ultimately saying the same thing. But it is also possible that many differences separate our languages and cultures, and that people are frequently saying quite different things, even when they are using the same words and even when they are speaking the same language. The latter notion, while slightly unsettling, tends to explain more about human relations than the former, even before a second language enters the picture.

Apologists for the Chomskian approach may insist that many subtleties have been overlooked in these comments. But the primary texts underlying this school of linguistics are so pretentious and prolix that it is truly hard to determine what these subtleties may be. Surely linguists—of all people—should cultivate as simple and direct a style as possible. When they fail to do so, one is justified in identifying their failure as further proof that something is amiss in their theories. Translators—perhaps above all others—customarily show great respect for technical terminologies of all sorts. But they also tend to detect intuitively those terminologies composed of arbitrary jargon, where far less may be present than meets the eye.

Two images spring to mind in explaining the different perspectives of translators and linguists. In the first translators can perhaps best be seen as front-line soldiers in an ongoing series of language wars: caught in the trenches, they regularly and routinely fight day-to-day, hand-to-hand skirmishes with the minutiae of language. Linguists, however, have little hands-on experience of this sort and rarely seek to gain any: they perhaps most resemble rear-guard armchair generals. And the examples of linguistic encounters they cite have little connection with those taking place on the battlefield.

Another comparison is suggested by astronomer Carl Sagan's dismissal of alleged UFO reports. If UFOs truly exist, challenges Sagan, why is it that astronomers never seem to discover any. After all, astronomers are constantly watching the sky and scanning it with all manner of subtle detection devices. They are moreover professional sky-watchers. Yet the only ones who spot saucers are almost invariably amateurs, who rarely ever glance skyward and have little beyond ignorant superstition to help them interpret what they see.

Springing from this comparison, those supporting medieval linguistic theories could just possibly emerge as the amateurs, while the true professionals with their eye on scientific data could be none other than translators.

Some truly great theorists have of course been active in the field of linguistics—not only Whorf and Sapir but Saussure, Hjelmslev, Uldall, Bloomfield, and Mounin, among others. But it is hard to escape the conclusion that the Chomskian view adds up to a kind of Dr. Feel-Good view of language: don't worry, it's not really very complex, and we have it all under control. Perhaps this is the kind of linguistic theory that Americans deserve, or at least those Americans who would rather not learn—or even know much about—foreign languages. In the same way that Lysenko's theories of biology protected Soviet citizens from any idea that could pollute Communism, perhaps these linguistic doctrines protect Americans from knowing very much about language.

It is also hard to escape the conclusion that today's standards in Linguistics may be extremely low. I hope to present some ideas for raising these standards in a future article. As Georges Mounin pointed out long ago, there can be no valid theory of linguistics that does not also provide a workable theory of translation, something the Chomskians quite clearly fail to do. Per Dohler has suggested that perhaps translators have something to learn from linguists—but it is equally possible that linguists have a fair amount to learn from translators.

Linguistic Predictions

Linguistic Predictions

Introduction

A word of comfort to those of you who are unhappy about an important and so far unique and unprecedented linguistic development underway in the world and the present shift in English identity to a world property or world identity.

The rise of global English doesn't mean the loss of a geographical identity. People in Britain remain British, those in the US stay American. A model is Switzerland. You can be German, French or Italian but you are ultimately Swiss. Even now the term Spanish is misleading because it doesn't consider the Catalans and others.

Although I still believe the loss of a linguistic identity has far more advantages than drawbacks, other languages in the world won't be spared. A much more disastrous fate is awaiting them. It will also free us from the shackles of nationalism and arrogance. We will save time and energy which we still put into translation. A global English might overrun and replace lots of languages (compare French and la grande nation). So everybody in the world will acquire a new linguistic identity. I wonder, what's wrong with that. After all languages come and go. This is a rule of nature. Just think of what happened to Latin. It gave birth before it died to a number of daughters Like: Italian, Spanish, and Portuguese....

On the other hand a lot of people are worried that the English invasion will bring with it American and English culture. They believe it's a kind of cultural colonialism. The whole world will be Anglo-Saxonized or Americanized. Even in China people have already started eating MacDonald's hamburgers (symbolic). There is no reason to worry that Chinese (Mandarin) one day will be a more powerful language than English. Chinese sounds are more difficult to the people of the world. In addition its writing system is cumbersome and not suitable for international communication. Human beings have always lamented the demise of the present. Shelly's "West Wind" makes way for a new life.

Language is the basis for all human interactions. No thinking is possible without language. It is indeed surprising why linguistics and language have not got the attention and focus they deserve till now. After all, human knowledge and science is only possible through the medium of language. Acquiring a new language opens new perspectives on life and broadens our minds. Our identity is still based on language. However, in case of English and because of its international role the idea of identity might get lost or is in deed on its way to be lost (it is becoming a world or a human identity). Yet, English culture and literature can only be seen in English. That's why although translation is a brilliant discipline it cannot overcome its deficiencies. Just imagine translating Shakespeare or Coleridge into Dutch.In short, language is superior to all other disciplines and is always first in sequence. It is knowledge, pleasure, emotions (mind and body or body and soul in one). After all we are not only heads but bodies too.

Density and Speed

One question which doesn't leave my mind is: Can the human language we know cope with the information density and the speed we are experiencing. As you know, information is growing and coding or packing information into language is necessary. Informal language uses more verbs. It is verbal or verbose (i.e. information density is low). Academic language tries to avoid verbs as much as possible apart from some basic ones like: be, have and a couple of other high frequency ones. So nominalization is a feature of Academic English because of the problem of information density. You can do more operations on nouns than on verbs. For example you can count nouns; use adjectives with them (describe them) etc... But nominalization means using nouns and as you knows most of them, at least the academic ones, are of Romance origin i.e. very long words (multi-syllabic). What will be if this information density grows to such an extent that the present human language is no more capable of packing information. On the other hand human language is slow for communicating messages. You need more time to pronounce long Romance words. Will there be a new communication medium to cope with the problems of density and speed.

Ambiguity, Density, Identity and Speed

Now I would like to extend the ideas of density and speed which I touched upon to two additional important phenomena which are part and parcel of human language.

Ambiguity

Some people complain about the imprecise use of language. If human language won't suffice to code information in the future due to information density and speed and of course due to misunderstandings (ambiguity) then the analogue language we have now might make way for a digital language Nowadays, everything is becoming digital. Why not human language? Once human language is digitized or replaced by a digital (computer) language (whether prescribed or agreed on), not only ambiguity ends but also beauty and mysticism and culture of human heritage. This means there will definitely be advantages of density, speed and clarity but a lot of disadvantages as I already mentioned will ensue foremost among those is reduction. Digital data is compressed or zipped. Compression means losing part of the information which is beyond human perception. Thus! , Digitalization means reducing human language to two modes, there is current or no current, a duality of yes and no like vending machines or computers. It is always a win/lose situation. This is an economic principle. We have to make a decision and set priorities.

Identity

Another problem of human language is identity. Identity doesn't only help us to belong to a nation and provide a profile but also create big human conflicts. Just take nationalism which is not only based on skin colour and facial features but also on language.

There are different peoples (nations) in the world: In the Middle East there are Arabs, Turks, Kurds or Persians. In East Asia there are: Chinese, Koreans, and Vietnamese. In Germanic Europe there are: the English, the Germans, and the Dutch etc. In Romance Europe: the French, the Italians, the Spanish. All these People look alike in their own parts of the world and it is difficult to tell them a part like one cell twins but they have lots of conflicts mostly based on nationalism (language identity). Using a digital language might solve some national conflicts. Human relations will probably then be based on economy and not languages.

Growth

Perhaps one day we will cease to be bodies or at least some parts of our bodies will be left as remnants based on a different anatomy (giving way to big heads) in the process of human evolution. The problem is not one of technology as much as that of growth .The pace of information growth is scaring. This is in deed a gloomy picture (at least to us now). Our biggest problem and enemy is ultimately growth not only that of information. Every thing is growing: world population is growing, pollution is growing, and economy is growing. People usually think it is positive but any growth means more consumption and more damage. This means we have to set priorities. I personally find it difficult to cope with the information overload. Sometimes I develop interest in a variety of issues and I find myself lost. It has already become difficult to make a choice or a decision.

Maths or translating language into a digital or formal language can only substitute natural language by means of reduction. Reduction means parts of our analogue language (like intonation and other features) are lost because digital or mathematical language stops the language flow, creates boundaries and compresses data as I already mentioned. So because of information density, speed and the possible need for a language that doesn’t allow ambiguity. The language we know now might change or be replaced. I mean human beings have already thought of a language like Esperanto void of identity based on linguistic differences which has caused a lot of human suffering. I am not saying this is what I personally prefer. I know the price we have to pay but our present language has to cope with the big challenges it is going to face in the future.

Suppose extraterrestrials landed on our Earth I am sure they would be greatly surprised to find that people on a small planet like Earth can neither communicate freely and direct (without the help of an intermediary i.e. an interpreter or a translator) nor can get in touch easily. Their astonishment would grow further when they find out how much suffering this linguistic diversity has caused so far. People's nationalities have been defined foremost on linguistic grounds. Languages create different identities and cultures. This on the one hand makes the world more interesting but on the other hand prepares ground for tragic conflicts. The loss of a linguistic identity doesn't necessarily mean the loss of a geographic or ethnic identity but it will mean one obstacle being removed.

I would like to elaborate on this issue by drawing a comparison from economy. In Europe, we used to have different currencies and in a sense it was a nice feeling to see foreign currencies when we were on holiday but no one can deny that the introduction of a single currency has also solved a lot of problems. The advantages of a single currency certainly outweigh the disadvantages by far if any. The EURO has set an example and paved the way for a single, at least, official European language. People can go on using their languages but we need a common European or world language to make us strong in unity. People are afraid of the loss of cultures and languages. However, cultures and languages have never been static. They are destined to change. In the age of globalization, information and communication technology, satellite TV and fast travelling the gap has become narrower. In addition, we can save more time and energy when everybody can communicate without any linguistic barriers. I hope one day the present state becomes history and we can say: A long time ago people on our Earth used to have different languages and we wonder how they could cope without a single world language.

English has already become global and no more the property of a certain community. Nobody feels at a disadvantage when speaking English. It's no more Germanic in quality because it has at least incorporated vocabulary from nearly all languages in the world. This makes English indeed global. Every nation can find a bit of its linguistic heritage integrated into English. Moreover, its writing system has no diacritical points as in some languages which make them difficult to use, pronounce and communicate in writing. English has become a powerful tool and rich; it has become simple and complex at the same time. Gender is nearly non-existent because the article remains "the" whatever the gender and the position in a sentence. There are no difficult case endings and sounds as in lots of other languages which sometimes constitute insurmountable barriers. We can express any idea most powerfully and precisely. It has reached the level of maturity and deserves the label of a global language. In addition, it sounds beautiful and appealing to the ear or at least acceptable and learnable by the majority of people. Finally, global English is experiencing a simplification of its grammar and phonetics

Density, Memory and Speed

Information is increasing on a daily basis. Our human knowledge has grown, is still growing and will continue to grow due to advances in nearly all disciplines. We are already experiencing information overload. The question is what will be in 50or so years? Even computers are facing difficulty with memory challenges and new search engines like Google are adapted to more effective ways of information storage and retrieval. Academic language takes refuge in nominalization. Our present languages are not prepared to keep pace with such density and speed not experienced before and it is not clear whether our memories and brains can accommodate and cope with these developments.

Global English

English is experiencing a development unprecedented in human history. Every day there are new speakers of English. Again what will be in 50 years or so? The impact of this new situation will be three-fold:

1. First, the dominance of English will be to the "disadvantage" of other languages and cultures.
2. Second, loss of linguistic identity (to the "disadvantage" of the so-called "native speakers") which might have advantages since linguistic variety despite its beauty has been a source of tragic conflicts in the world. No more BE or AmE but a global English.
3. Third, English will change in its new role to accommodate other cultures and languages. People have already started mixing BE and AmE and don't care about the pedantic view not to mix the two varieties.

Of course, in every change and development lie advantages and disadvantages but perhaps the advantages outweigh the advantages. In addition to what is mentioned, we will save a lot of time and energy spent on translations and thus communications barriers are removed. This doesn't mean that a Global English in turn won't change or split but it is a fact that people in our global village and a 24-hour society are not kept apart as they used to by geographical barriers. We can communicate freely and quickly through the medium of Global English. We have already reached the age of more direct and instant contact. Future linguistic changes consequently will be of a different nature.

The principle of convention and democracy in change

This is not plea for an artificial replacement of the present world languages. On the contrary natural languages are a means of social cuddling and cannot be changed by the dictatorship of minorities. It's always the dictatorship of the majority. There will be no revolution but changes are already underway. It's a fact that a Global English is already underway to overrun many a language.

The versatile and analogue character of Natural Languages

Natural (analogue) languages are certainly superior to artificial or digital languages because they accommodate nearly all of our present needs and can be used for all disciplines. However, we have already developed mathematical and computer languages to satisfy specific needs. In addition, natural languages leave room for ambiguity which still might be very useful to satisfy certain human needs (like literature, playing on words, implications, jokes ....) but can also be a source of misunderstanding. On the other hand digitization is simple, boring and poor cannot satisfy our present social needs although it is precise, mathematical, can be reduced, stored and manipulated.

As already mentioned these are only predictions made due to a variety of changes and developments in the last 20 years or so. Perhaps the most threatening force is growth. This word might sound positive but is in fact behind a lot of evil. Just imagine everything is growing, Earth population, economy (which means more consumption and Pollution and more...). Human knowledge has grown exponentially. This is the reality and not fiction even though a lot of trash is being produced daily but you can’t make an omelette without breaking eggs. In order to cope with this growth we need resources. For example we need food for the growing population, but producing and consuming food means in turn more pollution, more damage...

As far as human knowledge is concerned we also need resources to store and retrieve information. There are big advances in science and technology and our knowledge is growing on a daily basis. Just take the number of books, websites published everyday in comparison what was some years ago.

The computer networks worldwide, the phone, TV (satellite, cable, terrestrial), internet (email and the web), modern airlines have made it possible to contact each other just in-time, interact with each other, discuss issues online, share work, brainstorm ideas, pool resources and so on much faster and more productively. There are practically no boundaries left. All sciences are linked and have become inter-disciplinary. In Europe the EU and the single currency have also removed borders. Thus growth or density of information necessitates a tool to communicate and interact faster. Human language might not be capable of keeping pace with this growth and speed. Academic language is compact uses more nouns than verbs (nominalization: independent of tense, aspect and mood) because you can pack more information into nouns than verbs, use many of them (cram your text but still not wordy). They are quieter, more objective and do a lot of other operations on them. For example, you can count them, modify them.... Verbs in comparison are verbal or verbose (more talk than matter). They i.e. verbs are more subjective, dynamic (the majority of verbs are dynamic not stative and even among the limited number of stative verbs which exist some behave dynamically. Verbs of high frequency belong to informal register, show change and are conjugated which you don't have in nouns. Nouns are static (almost lifeless), neutral to change and emotions and more objective. Counting the number of nouns and verbs in a page of an academic paper will show this tendency. In addition, verbs are subordinate to nouns because they relate nouns to each other like prepositions and we can do only with a few of them. Some are transitive with one object or some have two open connections. So we need something beyond English either as an adapted natural language or an artificial functioning next to our natural one. It can be any tool.

However, human language is beautiful, encodes more than linguistic information, and allows room for ambiguity. There are a lot of implications and layers in human language next to the basic linguistic layer. It is analogue, has no boundaries and is far much superior to mathematical or digital languages.

language and linguistic

language and linguistic

Almost all human beings acquire a language (and sometimes more than one), to the level of native competency, before age 5. How do children accomplish this remarkable feat in such a short amount of time? Which aspects of language acquisition are biologically programmed into the human brain and which are based on experience? Do adults learn language differently from children? Researchers have long debated the answers to these questions, but there is one thing they agree on: language acquisition is a complex process.

Most researchers agree that children acquire language through interplay of biology and environmental factors. A challenge for linguists is to figure out how nature and nurture come together to influence language learning.

Emphasis on Nature

Some researchers theorize that children are born with an innate biological “device” for understanding the principles and organization common to all languages. According to this theory, the brain’s “language module” gets programmed to follow the specific grammar of the language a child is exposed to early in life. Yet the language rules and grammar children use in their speech often exceed the input to which they are exposed. What accounts for this discrepancy?

That is where the theory of universal grammar comes in. This theory posits that all languages have the same basic structural foundation. While children are not genetically “hard-wired” to speak a particular language like Dutch or Japanese, universal grammar lets them learn the rules and patterns of these languages—including those they were never explicitly taught. Some linguists believe that universal grammar and its interaction with the rest of the brain is the design mechanism that allows children to become fluent in any language during the first few years of life. In fact, childhood may be a critical period for the acquisition of language capabilities. Some scientists claim that if a person does not acquire any language before the teen-aged years, they will never do so in a functional sense. Children may also have a heightened ability, compared to adults, to learn second languages--especially in natural settings. Adults, however, may have some advantages in the conscious study of a second language in a classroom setting.

Emphasis on Experience and Usage

Not all linguists believe that the innate capacities are most important in language learning. Some researchers place greater emphasis on the influence of usage and experience in language acquisition. They argue that adults play an important role in language acquisition by speaking to children—often in a slow, grammatical and repetitious way. In turn, children discern patterns in the language and experiment with speech gradually—uttering single words at first and eventually stringing them together to construct abstract expressions. At first glance, this may seem reminiscent of how language is traditionally taught in classrooms. But most scientists think children and adults learn language differently.

While they may not do it as quickly and easily as children seem to, adults can learn to speak new languages proficiently. However, few would be mistaken for a native speaker of the non-native tongue. Childhood may be a critical period for mastering certain aspects of language such as proper pronunciation. What factors account for the different language learning capabilities of adults and children? Researchers suggest accumulated experience and knowledge could change the brain over time, altering the way language information is organized and/or processed.

Why Further Study is Needed

While our understanding of language acquisition is incomplete, this pursuit is well worth the effort, according to NSF program officer Joan Maling.

“We still don’t understand how a child learns its first language, why some children have language disorders or how children and adults learn a second language,” she says. “And we still don’t understand what happens when a stroke or a disease such as Alzheimer’s seems to wipe out a person’s knowledge of language.”

Unraveling the process of language acquisition promises not only to help scientists answer these questions, but to explain fundamental features of learning and the human brain.

Anthropological linguistics

Anthropological linguistics

By Kamil Wiśniewski Aug 17th, 2007

Anthropological linguistics is more often considered to be a sub discipline of anthropology than linguistics and historically that is where it comes from. The primary concern of anthropologic linguistics was with the unwritten languages in America and their recording in order to preserve them in case the number of speakers started to decrease drastically. Moreover, the languages were seen as a vital part of culture so the knowledge of language was required to be able to completely understand the analyzed culture.

Anthropological linguistics deals with describing many languages and issues such as the influence of language on the behavior of the community that uses it. The well known Sapir-Whorf hypothesis is a result of such investigations. According to this theory the language that people use has strong influence on the perception of the world. Therefore, anthropolinguists deal with problems such as how it happens that peoples sharing a culture might speak different languages and peoples who have different cultures sometimes share a language.

Also finding a systematic way of putting down previously unwritten languages in a way that would reflect all linguistic peculiarities and phonetic phenomena is the task of anthropologic linguists. Such undertakings not only lead to preserving endangered languages, but are also important from the point of view of culture. To find appropriate way of writing in a language that has only been spoken linguists seek the phonetic patterns. It is also important to provide a way of symbolizing speech sounds in such a way as to enable the native speakers to read it in order to verify if the linguists’ assumptions are correct. When this task is accomplished the analysis of morphemes begins and later on also of syntax.

As anthropologic linguistics works on the assumption that communities’ cultures are reflected by language change it investigates synchronic and diachronic language change – that is it analyses various dialects and if it is possible the historical development. Moreover, the emergence and evolution of pidgins and creoles is also within the scope of interest of anthropologic linguistics. What is more, language acquisition in children is also studied by anthropolinguists, however, not the stages of language development are examined, but how the acquisition of linguistic abilities is perceived by the community. It turns out that in certain cultures parents do not interfere with the process, while in others caretakers put a lot of effort in teaching verbal etiquette.

Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive Linguistics

Cognitive linguistic is an interdisciplinary journal of Cognitive Science. It is published by Mouton de Gruyter.

Cognitive Linguistics presents a forum for high-quality linguistic research on topics which investigate the interaction between language and cognition. We publish articles that focus on topics such as

• the structural characteristics of natural language categorization (such as prototypicality, cognitive models, metaphor, and imagery)
• functional principles of lingusitic organization (such as iconicity)
• the conceptual interface between syntax and semantics
• the relationship between language and thought, including matters of universality and language specificity
• the experiential background of language-in-use, including the cultural background, the discourse context, and the psychological environment of linguistic performance