Mini Meeting of the Minds at my home - Discovering EsperantoSaturday, April 11, 2008
Welcome at 7:00 PM / Program at 8:00 PM
Subject: Discovering ESPERANTO
Location: Annick's home at 17 rue des Noyers, Lyon 05
Watch a video below.

Linguistic Communication - A Comparative Field Study By Claude Piron

English version of the French article "Communication linguistique: Etude comparative faite sur le terrain", published in Language Problems and Language Planning, vol. 26, n° 1, Spring 2002, pp. 23-50.

Our world is shrinking. International exchanges, commercial and cultural, are growing at a tremendous rate, and traveling to far away places is becoming a commonplace occurrence for many people for whom it was just unthinkable a few decades ago. At the same time, whole segments of populations are displaced in many parts of the world, refugees and people requesting political asylum are more and more numerous, as well as immigrants desperately looking for a standard of living they cannot expect to enjoy at home. As a result, language problems are developing in many areas. They are all too often ignored, just as are ignored the deplorable results of language teaching in schools. In non-Germanic Europe, only one percent of the students are capable of expressing themselves correctly in the language they have been learning for six years at an average of four hours a week; in Asia, the corresponding proportion is one out of a thousand. But these facts do not appear to stimulate creative thinking. They are accepted with a deplorable resignation.

In international organizations, there is a strong demand for more language services, as can be readily ascertained in the hallways of the UN building in New York: a number of diplomats lobby there for the inclusion of Japanese, Hindi and other languages among the official ones. In Europe, languages are becoming more and more of a headache. In the European Union, many countries of Central and Eastern Europe have applied for membership. Politicians have responded quite favorably to their request, but they have failed to give much consideration to the language aspect of such an expansion, as if the phrase "good government thinks ahead" had lost its validity.

However, the day is no longer far off when the complications, inequalities and costs linked to language use, and ineffective language teaching, will cross the threshold of what society can tolerate. The aim of this paper is to give some help, drawing from research on the relevant situations and from factual data, to those who will have to define a strategy designed to cope with all these difficulties. The principles of operations research can be applied to the problem. The objective of having a fair, cost-effective and psychologically satisfying system of linguistic communication can be reached by different means which can be compared in the field, and a quantitative analysis can be attempted to evaluate the respective advantages and disadvantages of the various alternatives according to a predetermined set of criteria. There is no dearth, nowadays, of situations in which people with different languages have to communicate. Nothing prevents us from comparing them. (Source: www.claudepiron.free.fr/)