Although children don't need Jingles, they DO need native speaker adult mentors.

Dear Fellow Earthlings,

As mentioned in yesterday's installment, there are five major steps in preserving languages. The first step (that of preserving as much written and phonological data as possible) was covered in Installment 460.

The remaining four major steps are:

2. having the remaining native speakers pass on the torch to children not only through the content of

their descriptions but also through the sharing of their phonomes with the children.

3. having adolescents, as they contemplate their upcoming adult status, hone their phonological skills

while at the same time developing competency in other areas, such as in second or third

languages, mathematics, sports, and social responsibility awareness.

4. Making sure that all people of the linguistic community either maintain or acquire high levels of

expertise in using the language slated for protection at home, at school, in the community, and at

religious (if applicable) and other social institutions.

5. Make maximum use of technology to make up for a lack of numbers -- but never let their language

be taken over by AI, but rather nurtured, fortified, and spread by human beings who push the

language to be all it should be even while recognizing the rights of speakers of

ALL OTHER LANGUAGES to do the same with their own tongues.

Today I cover points 2 and 3 (albeit briefly). Points 4 and 5 will be covered tomorrow.

The first point (making sure that data of written and phonological samples) was discussed in yesterday's installment. In this installment I deal first on the second point: on how native spakers need to pass their skills on to their children. This mandates that these native speaker adults should never attempt to teach their children other languages or to force the children to speak languages in which the adults themselves do not have nativelike competency. Children are programmed genetically to learn the language which surrounds them. so nature should be allowed to take its course. Children should be allowed to acquire their language by means of their genetic predisposition to learn it.

The third point is a continuation of the second. As children turn into adolescents, now with a firm grounding in the language slated for preservation, they should now be allowed to investigate the acquisition of one or more additional language, as the situation calls for. Certainly, in this day and age one of the languages most sought after is English. Other languages that might be sought after would include French, Arabic, Swahili, Portuguese, and French.

But adolescents also need time to learn mathematics. social responsibility, sports skills, art, music, and so on. For the details to developing one's language fully, a firm underpinning based on Jingles training to develop phonological competency (both in producing target language speech and to catch it when it is produced by native speakers) is needed.

The additional aspects for making the target language viable in all facets are best developed if methods along the lines suggested by Joshua Fishman (See installments 163, 165, 170, 189, 190, 191, 192.) are a good starting point.

Space limitations being, what they are, the above explanation of points 2 and 3 must suffice. Tomorrow I will cover points 4 and 5 in Installment 462.

Steve Walker Earthsaver and Jingles Creator

© 2013 Steve Walker, The Jingles-The Japan Foundation for English Pronunciation, Summit Enterprises.