Overview of Critical Need Languages
The majority of disability providers will not have a solid knowledge of the foreign language that a student chooses to enroll in, but they often must transcribe lessons, provide services or offer assistive technology support so a student can access the coursework. Critical need languages, such as those listed below, have increased in importance due to national priorities and the realization that few U.S. citizens have skills in these languages. Therefore, more critical need language courses are being developed at the K-12 and postsecondary levels. This section provides a basic overview of how critical need languages compare with English, especially related to written language.
For more information on each language, search the Internet or go to the websites where most of the following information was excerpted:
Arabic
Modern Standard Arabic is based on 30 original consonants, four of which are long vowels. It also uses three newly established letters that represent the letters /g / (hard), /p/ and /v/ commonly used in European languages. Arabic uses four short vowels, and three nunations (unn, ann, and inn sounds) commonly used on indefinite nouns and adverbs. The definite article is /al/; it precedes nouns, adjectives, and numbers. Two diphthongs, /aw/ and /ay/, are also commonly used.
Vowel diacritics, which are used to mark short vowels, and other special symbols appear only in the Qur'an. They are also used, though with less consistency, in other religious texts, in classical poetry, in textbooks for children and foreign learners, and occasionally in complex texts to avoid ambiguity.
Most punctuation marks used in the Arabic language are mainly borrowed from the Western system of punctuation, but some are modified. The Arabic language employs two sets of numerals: one is the Arabic numbers commonly used in the Western World, and another that may have been Indian in origin. All Arabic letters are written in cursive style in horizontal lines from right to left. All Arabic letters have independent shapes; however, most of them change their shapes, as they appear in the beginning, the middle, or the end of the word, or on their own.
Arabic uses a root stem such as “k t b” (to write) becomes the source from which one can derive many expressions related to the idea of “writing” by varying the vowels, and adding pronoun endings or suffixes. Thus, kataba – he wrote; kitab – a book; al-kitab – the book; kitaban(i) – two books; kitabi – my book; maktabah – library; maktub – written or letter; katib(un) – male author; katibah(tun) – female author, etc.
Arabic employs two main grammatical genders: masculine and feminine; neutral is not used in Arabic. All nouns, pronouns, adjectives, and numbers have singular, dual, and plural forms. One noun may have hundreds of synonyms such as the word “lion” which has 500 synonyms.
Chinese
In spoken Chinese, words are made up of one, two or more syllables. In written Chinese, each of the syllables is written with a separate character. Each character has its own meaning, though many are used only in combination with other characters. Every character is given exactly the same amount of space, no matter how complex it is. There are no spaces between characters and the characters which make up multi-syllable words are not grouped together, so when reading Chinese, the reader has to work out what the characters mean and how to pronounce them, but also which characters belong together.
There are approximately 400 syllables in Mandarin without the tones. When tones are added, the number is about 1100. In contrast, English has over 80,000 possible syllables. As a result, there are many homophones (e.g. syllables that sound the same but mean different things). These are distinguished by which of the four tones is assigned to them or in written Chinese by using different characters for each one.
A well-educated Chinese person today recognizes approximately 6,000-7,000 characters; some 3,000 characters are required to read a mainland China newspaper. The People’s Republic of China government defines literacy amongst workers as a knowledge of 2,000 characters, though this would be only functional literacy. A large unabridged dictionary, like the Kangxi Dictionary, contains over 40,000 characters, of which less than a quarter of these characters are now commonly used (excerpted from: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chinese_language).
Hindi/Urdu
There are multiple languages spoken and written on the Indian Sub-continent (India and Pakistan) with English being the lingua franca when people do not know each other’s language. Colloquial (standard) Hindi and Urdu (Hindustani) are very similar can be written either in Devnagri or Urdu scripts. Formal Hindi is Sanskrit rooted and written in Devnagri and formal Urdu is Perso-Arabic rooted and written in Urdu. These are often used for governmental communications, writings and literature.
The Devngari script used for Hindi contains both 10 vowels and 40 consonants and is characterized by bars on top of the symbols. Hindi/Urdu is highly phonetic; i.e. the pronunciation of new words can be reliably predicted from their written form. Like Arabic, nouns fall into two grammatical genders: masculine and feminine. Also, some words are used to show respect and politeness.
Japanese
The noticeable phonological difference between Japanese and English is in syllable structure where English syllable is basically closed (CVC: a consonant + a vowel + a consonant) and the Japanese syllable, open (CV), ending in a vowel. All syllables receive the same amount of stress or emphasis, whereas English tends to stress the first syllable. Similar to English, the Japanese language uses diphthongs (putting 2 or more vowel sounds together at once). The most common are /ai/, /ei/, and /oi/.
Japanese is written with Kanji, Kana (Hiragana and Katakana), the Latin alphabet and Arabic numerals. Kanji are ideograms (one symbol represents one word or part or a word) imported from China (e.g. basically the same as Chinese characters) and Kana are phonograms derived from Kanji by the Japanese. While an alphabet represents a single sound with each letter, each Kana represents a syllable (a consonant and a vowel). Each Kanji can be also transcribed using Kana. When any part of a text is considered too difficult for the reader (e.g. children or foreigners), kana are often written above kanji to indicate the pronunciation.
Korean
Korean is not closely related to any other language, though a genetic kinship to Japanese is almost certain. Like Japanese, Korean has a subject-object-verb word order, and a complex morphology (many inflections and small function words called particles). Another characteristic of Korean (and Japanese) grammar is a system of honorifics—endings and internal word markings that reflect social relationships.
The sound system of Korean consists of 21 consonants and ten vowels. These are overlaid with a large number of sound alternations, including vowel harmony, glide formation, vowel contraction and vowel deletion.
Korean is the only language to have a true alphabet (Hangul) completely native to East Asia. Hangul consists of 14 simple consonants and 6 simple vowels, which are grouped into syllabic or blocks of at least two and often three characters: (1) a consonant or a doubled consonant (2) a vowel or diphthong and, optionally, (3) a consonant or consonant cluster at the end of the syllable.
Persian/Farsi
Persian and Farsi are the same language, only called by different names based on indigenous, historical, political and other reasons. Persian/Farsi is an Indo-European language spoken mainly in Afghanistan, Iran and Tajikistan. The variant of Persian/Farsi spoken in Afghanistan is called Dari and in Tajikistan is called Tajiki.
Persian/Farsi spoken in Iran has six vowels and 23 consonants, including two affricates /ch/ and /j/. Modern Persian/Farsi and Dari are normally written using a modified variant of the Arabic alphabet with different pronunciation and more letters, whereas the Tajiki variety is typically written in a modified version of the Cyrillic alphabet. Suffixes predominate Persian/Farsi words, though there are a small number of prefixes. In modern Persian/Farsi script, vowels generally known as short vowels (a, e, o) are usually not written; only the long vowels (i, u, â) are represented in the text. This, of course, creates ambiguities. The reader must determine the word from context.
Russian
The Russian alphabet, known as Cyrillic, consists of 33 letters and 5 vowel sounds, with no differentiation between short and long vowels. This contrasts with English, which has 12 vowel sounds (5 long, 7 short), plus 8 dipthongs. Russian has a similar number of consonants to English, but their sounds do not fully overlap. Like many other languages, Russian has no articles (e.g. the, an). Similar to English, Russian is read from left to right in rows.
Russian is a largely phonetic language. This means that a word’s pronunciation can be predicted from its spelling; however, it is difficult to master Russian pronunciation because the accent can be placed on any syllable and each word has to be learned separately and may vary. Some words that are spelled alike are distinguished only by a different stress. In addition to the hard and soft consonants in Russian, the distinction between voiced and voiceless consonants is prevalent.
Turkish
Turkish uses a modified form of the same Latin script used in English. There are 21 consonants and 8 vowels. It lacks the q, w and x of English. In Turkish, each letter of the alphabet retains its basic pronunciation, has only one sound, and two or more letters are never combined to make a different sound. The eight vowels can be divided into two groups, the undotted and the dotted vowels. Dotted vowels are pronounced at the front of the mouth (as the French language) while their undotted counterparts are pronounced at the back of the mouth (more like English).
Turkish is an agglutinative language, which means that root nouns in even the simplest sentences can carry multiple suffixes (e.g. “Apparently, they were inside their houses” is a single word). There are more verb tenses than English. Irregular verbs, such as “to be” or “to have” do not exist, and one single conjugation is used for almost all verbs. Sentence construction follows the subject/object/verb pattern, and when writing numbers, Turkish uses commas and periods in the opposite way from English numbers (excerpt from http://www.turkishlanguage.co.uk/about.htm).
