Thursday 30th April

Bonjour. Ciao. Hola. Ahlan. Yassou. Namaste.

Happy 100th Birthday Captain Tom!

Did you manage to match all the school staff to their favourite animal? Were you super impressed with Mrs Waldron’s ability to show jump? Giraffes, elephants and monkeys were certainly popular animals and made the quiz a little bit tricky as you had to look closely at the photographs. I still think my picture of the baby goat was the cutest, closely followed by Mrs Hamblett’s red panda.

I always like to start the blog with a greeting to the whole community … a hello all, a hello everybody, a good day all … but sometimes it gets a bit repetitive, so today I thought I’d greet you in a variety of languages. Do you recognise any of them?

I would love to say that I am bilingual, but sadly I am not. If somebody is bilingual it means they can speak two languages fluently. The prefix bi means ‘having two,’ and the Latin word lingua means ‘tongue, language,’ so bilingual literally means ‘having two tongues’. A person who speaks more than two languages fluently is called multilingual. Are you bilingual or multilingual even?

Being able to speak more than one language is really special. I am able to speak a few words of Welsh, a few words of German and a few words of French. I have also learnt some British Sign Language (BSL). When I go on holiday to a non-English speaking country I always make the effort to learn a few words in the language of that country: hello, please, thank you, goodbye. This helps me to show respect to all of the people I meet. Mrs Aziz is multilingual, she speaks English, Swahili, Punjabi and Urdhu. Way to go Mrs Aziz! Mrs Hackett says she pretends she can speak French - I have seen her teach quite a few French lessons and she has done it really well, I think she needs to have more confidence in herself - it always sounds real to me. Mr Priest, Mr Holder and Mrs Davies also teach really good French lessons. I often know when they have been teaching you as I hear lots of ‘Bonjours’ around the school.

Did you know that there are roughly 7,111 spoken languages in the world today? The top ten most spoken languages in the world are: Mandarin Chinese; English; Hindustani; Spanish; Arabic; Malay; Russian; Bengali; Portuguese and French. Around 86% of the world population use Asian or European languages; and there are around 46 languages that only have a single speaker!

Have you ever thought about learning a new language? This could be the time to do it. I know Mrs Walters is learning BSL online. For a native English speaker, Mandarin Chinese would be one of the hardest languages to learn (apparently you would need 2200 or 88 weeks of study to achieve fluency in this language and I really do hope we will back in school before then). French is listed as one of the easier languages to learn - so maybe that would be an easier choice, particularly as our KS2 children already have lessons in school. If I had a super power, I would love the ability to speak and understand all the languages of the world. How cool would that be!

We would love to hear about your experiences with languages. As always, email us at children@olive.dudley.sch.uk.

Au Revoir. Auf Wiedersehen. Arrivederci. Sbohem. Alweda. Adios.

We miss our whole school community and we cannot wait until we can all be united once again. We, just like you, are eagerly awaiting further government announcements on this.

Stay safe.