Urbana.org All Things New Blog - globalization

What makes a regional language?

Mon, 15 Jun 2009 13:09:00 -0600

Thanks to Andy Crouch for this story:

Le Monde Diplo (English), a heady French journal of international affairs and culture, has published a profile of reading in Malayalam, one of the major languages of South India.

While India at large has a literacy rate of 65%, in Kerala State it approaches 100%. And the people actually read—and write. LMD quotes from an experimental novel finding it (surprise, surprise) akin to a great French novel of the 20th century.

Author of the article Mridula Koshy looks at the Malayalam scene in light of the English Language juggernaut (a loan-word from India, by the way), finding the literary scene in Indian regional languages very much alive and kicking:

When Rushdie claims that “the true Indian literature of the past 50 years has been made in the language the British left behind”, it is worth asking what he means by “true”. An Indian novel in English might do well to sell 5,000 copies, but each week magazines churn out – in the best Charles Dickens tradition – serialised novels and short stories by the score in regional languages. India reads, but it reads overwhelmingly in Indian languages.

All of which betrays a bit of a simplification: India has a billion people. It is the amalgamation (originally by force) of many kingdoms and civilizations. Several of the regional languages, if their own countries, would be considered major languages in their own right: There are more Bangla speakers than French, according to the Ethnologue; there are 35 million Malayalam speakers, ranking the language far above most European languages.

So, while it's great that languages of 35 million are doing well, a question is: what is a regional language? A linguistics professor of mine once quipped that the difference between a dialect and a language is the presence of a national army. In that case, Indian languages may be forever doomed to being footnotes, while Danish, for instance, spoken by 5 Million, gets greater attention.

International Students' Short-Term Value

Fri, 29 May 2009 09:52:00 -0600

InterVarsity and other outfits working among International students frequently highlight the strategic value of hospitality and ministry to international students, frequently noting the impressive list of world leaders who studied in North America (25% of them).

But here, from GlobalHigherEd, is an analysis of international students' monetary value to the US economy: a net of $US15.58 billion. That is more than an insignificant impact.

Is there a bad to student mobility?

Wed, 06 May 2009 09:49:00 -0600

Upon the conclusion of Big Meetings for Big Bureaucrats in Leuven, Belgium last week, where the Bologna Process was to be pushed along, I was reading the GlobalHigherEd blog for a response.

The Bologna Process is, basically, the alignment of higher education standards in 46 mostly-European countries; the idea is to create a European interior market for university degrees. The subtext, always lingering, is the apparent global success of US-American universities, relative to European ones.

Writing in GlobalHigherEd, Peter Jones (University of Bristol, UK) comments on the lack of legitimacy to the student delegation at Leuven, claiming the European Students Union (ESU) to have a breathtaking "acquiescence with the Bologna scripts," as evidenced by a lack of criticism of the process.

The ESU would not be the first representative body to be taken up by bureaucratic and careerist agendas and seduced by proximity to forums of power and influence.

But to the meat here: Jones then offers some suggestions for rallying points for opposition to Bologna, wishing the ESU would voice these concerns. First pointing out that the ESU views mobility (meaning the ability to transfer between universities within the entire system) “as an unalloyed good”, he quotes from their position paper:

[Mobility’s] benefits for students, academics, institutions and society as a whole are undisputed. Xenophobia exists and becomes especially evident in the event of an economic crisis such as the one we are currently facing. Mobility will require openness and will contribute to a more tolerant European society…

Jones then proposes his main objection:

In fact of course mobility is a far more problematic issue than this. The ESU does recognise the dangers of the commodification of higher education, the promotion of brain drain and the creation of a higher education market but seems to see these as somehow side-effects rather than of the essence of the Bologna Process. The ESU both opposes making a market out of higher education and actively calls for the process which is contributing to it to be extended and implemented.

Never mind the disingenuousness of a researcher at a British University—beneficiaries of brain drain if there ever were any—Jones’ critique is deep and important. It’s basically the question of whether good local education might be squelched in the effort to be global.

Expanding further, this seems to be the same question of whether local or transnational is more capable of germinating vision.

Muslim Banks and Magic Banks

Thu, 30 Apr 2009 02:01:00 -0600

Even as the global credit collapse of 2008 is still undergoing investigation, with apparent trigger mechanisms (the US mortgage market, among others) separated from merely incidental developments (such as the price of wheat), one factor has repeatedly unnerved me: the sheer complexity of global finance.

I flatter myself to have a citizen’s grasp of several basic issues, from currency rates to free trade issues. But it has become clear that no citizen can possibly have an adequate grasp of the goings-on, by which I mean a grasp sufficient to inform a thinking voter’s opinions. It’s too complicated.

The fact that some of the leaders of the world’s banks hardly understand some of the issues leads Jeremy Harding of the London Review of Books to suggest that the elite financial world is behaving more and more like magic and magicians and less like the economics we learned in 101 classes and textbooks.

Contrasting the major international financiers with sharia-compliant Islamic banking, and it’s the nominally secular banks that appear cultic, and the devout banks that appear coldly rational:

Since the credit crunch not many people trust the sophisticated keepers of the modern money culture; in this sense the rise of sharia-compliant products is also a challenge to the unofficial, polytheist faith of offshore Britannia: the worship of markets in general and financial markets in particular.

One of the central differences between the Islamic and conventional approaches to finance is that our own cults – which may well see a revision before the end of this crisis – ascribe supernatural powers to money. Cult specialists are at great pains to understand and control how it works, but admit that it does so in magical ways that go beyond the effects of human commerce (for the markets, too, have magical attributes, including innate goodness). Whatever we want from money, we suspect, as devotees, that in the end it will always behave as it sees fit.

What’s going on here is a story of performance: Sharia-compliant banks (which vary widely and use differing notions of interest, usury and capital) have plain outperformed conventional banks over the last year. And in a disenchanted world, that's the only banking that matters. But if we are no longer disenchanted – if there's a new mystery cult in charge, it should be less than responsive to a competing ideology.

As someone who has no intention of joining a Muslim bank, I nevertheless see incredible stories—far beyond the drudgery of numbers—in play here. I’m not sure what it all means, and I cannot evaluate Harding’s treatment of HSBC Amanah and others, but his suggestion that cult-like superstition is in operation in the global centers of commerce rings plausible.

Signs: Globalized Basketball

Sat, 21 Mar 2009 02:01:00 -0600

What is it about basketball that has made it the second-biggest sport in the world? Is it the association with American pop (read: black) culture? Is it its embrace by Communist governments?

Where have you seen basketball’s reach?

This is from rural Poland, courtesy of sxc.hu member mzacha.

Reverse Brain Drain?

Mon, 15 Dec 2008 18:02:00 -0600

The Globe and Mail has published a remarkable story this week, profiling a mass exodus of highly skilled and experienced foreign-born financiers from collapsing Western (primarily US-American) firms. They’re headed back to India (and China and Malaysia and so on), sometimes with their newly-minted US passports.

The root causes are both bureaucracy and opportunity. On the one hand, the United States’ immigration policies make staying difficult for unemployment green-card holders, and make it difficult for firms to hire the best foreign workers, even those graduating from top American universities.

And on the other hand, sometimes the opportunities are plain better. What you may be giving up in earning power you may gain in a shot for the top.

Here’s the central point:

According to a large-scale study of 1,200 Indian and Chinese returnees to be published next month by Vivek Wadhwa, a U.S. immigration scholar and consultant, the majority of people joining the reverse brain drain are under 40, most have masters or doctorate degrees, and they're generally leaving because they believe prospects look better in the world's poorer half.

"These people seem to be doing better back home than they would have done in the U.S.," Mr. Wadhwa said. "More than 60 per cent of Indian returnees and more than 80 per cent of Chinese returnees believe their home countries offer better career and professional opportunities."

All this seems rather exciting, even if the trend poses new challenges for wheezing Western economies.

But “Reverse Brain Drain” is a bit of a misnomer; Brain Drain has never been unidirectional. It’s been going on for decades within the West, as European and North American corporations raid each others’ executives. And it’s been going on within the United States as well, as states and cities attempt to lure creative classes from each other. It’s not reverse brain drain—it’s globalization of the same.

Not entirely unrelated, Andy Crouch posted this last week on culture-making.com: a time-lapse map of airplanes around the world over a 24-hour period. Because this is basically a map of economic integration, you can at least somewhat read brain drain into the activity. These are people in motion, after all, not goods, and not information.