Diversity – Chris Chang-Bacon

Map of World’s Largest Languages

June 11, 2015June 11, 2015 Chris Chang-Bacon

Ever wonder who would win a heavy weight championship between world languages?

Well here you have it. Alberto Lucas López designed a language map proportioned by number of native speakers. Turns out, of the world’s 7,102 known languages, more than half of us speak only 23 of them.

But there’s even more to the map than meets the eye. Each color also represents a region of the world.

World Language Regions

Interestingly, had López colored the map by languages’ region of origin, we’d be left with a much less colorful map: Every language listed comes from Europe, Asia, or the Middle East. On a map of language origin, the entire continents of North America, South America, Africa, and Australia wouldn’t even appear. Continue reading “Map of World’s Largest Languages” →

Career, Diversity, Education, Teaching

Shape Up – There’s an Ed-Talent Scout on Campus!

September 15, 2014September 17, 2014 Chris Chang-Bacon

Well, it’s clear that someone at the New York Times read my last post on bringing more men to the teaching profession. While I focused on gender, the conclusion asked how we could make teaching more appealing across the board, and the Times kindly dedicated an entire “Room for Debate” segment to answering me.

So here you have it: Six educationists chimed to ask “What can be done to make a career in education more attractive to men and people of color?”

You may, of course, read the columns in their entirety, but here’s a quick tally of the most prominent suggestions:

Continue reading “Shape Up – There’s an Ed-Talent Scout on Campus!” →

Dialect, Diversity, Language

How Many Englishes Do you Speak?

August 25, 2014November 6, 2014 Chris Chang-Bacon

It’s no secret that English-speaking Americans can sound vastly different from one another. We have different accents (Southern, Jersy, “Bah-ston”), vocabulary (pop vs. soda), and good ol’ colloquial idioms (Really New England, how can 15 minutes before an hour [e.g. 12:45] be referred to as “quarter OF?”). A grad student at N. Carolina State University created some amazing maps of some of these differences which, according to the Huffington Post, briefly “set the internet on fire.”

The levels of allegiance to this word are staggering.

We freely discuss these differences, but rarely talk about how they impact our perceptions. We know people make assumptions based on race, gender, or clothing styles, but do we judge based on dialect as well?

In my Language, Literacy, and Culture course, I used Morocco as an example of a Linguistically Stratified Society in which the language you speak strongly indicates your social class. French, for example, is more often used in universities and legal documents, while Darija tends to be the at-home language of urban communities, Tashelhit for rural areas, etc. I used the graphic below to “rank” the social status of each language.

Continue reading “How Many Englishes Do you Speak?” →