Language Problems and Language Planning - Volume 24, Issue 3, 2000

Although small budgets have recently been allocated to governmentally controlled “Authorities” for Yiddish and Ladino, both of these languages (as well as Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian) suffer from a serious lack of well-prioritized efforts in accord with their specific language-planning needs. The ultra-orthodox Yiddish-speaking community is the only one among all of the “Jewish languages other than Hebrew” which has both a continually growing number of young speakers as well as demographically concentrated residential areas with neighborhood institutions (schools, synagogues) utilizing their own vernacular. The secular Yiddish sector is much richer in modern language-related institutional infrastructure and intelligentsia but is almost in total disarray insofar as demographic concentration of young speakers, schools with adequate instructional time and young institutional leadership are concerned. Ladino is even worse off, with respect to speakers and infrastructure, but has recently moved ahead noticeably due to prominent younger leaders with a rich agenda of important goals and projects. Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian both suffer from a dire lack of language-focused intellectuals as well as the absence of a dominant spoken or written variety and are still regarded by their own speakers as dialects lacking in autonomy. None of the latter three languages/varieties has either a periodical press or book-production and the last two lack even courses, teachers or pedagogic materials appropriate for young students. The current insufficiency of funds and less-than-informed efforts on behalf of governmental authorities may lead to the early demise of most “other Jewish languages than Hebrew” in Israel, with the distinct exception of Yiddish in ultra-Orthodox circles.

The linguistically “mixed” marriage stands at the crossroads of important factors in the future of French in North America and Catalan in Europe: reversing language shift. While Quebec and Catalonia initially appear strikingly similar, one could easily conclude that if the couple exogamique is good for the future of Catalan, it will also favor francisation in Quebec. Strong evidence indicates that demographic, linguistic, socioeconomic, and even “life-style” factors may make linguistic exogamy favorable to Catalan, but marginally disadvantageous to Quebec French. With “mixed” couples (whether married or not) increasing in number in both countries, the linguistic outcome of the “mixed” household becomes increasingly important to language planners.

Diacritics — marks above, through, or below letters — are used in many orthographies to remedy the shortcomings of the ordinary Latin alphabet. The author catalogues the various diacritics that are in use for spelling different languages, describing what they look like and what they are used for. He also analyses the problems of using accented letters in a multilingual computing environment, and discusses the extent to which these problems have been resolved, with particular reference to Unicode.