Languages

For a member of a supposedly extinct species, Craig Wetherill does a pretty good impression of the living. He responds to premature reports of his demise by launching into a local fairy tale. "Y'n termyn eus passys, 'th era tregas yn Selevan den ha benyn yn tyller cries Chi an Hordh. . . . " The story he's recounting is "John of the Ram's House." The language he's speaking is Cornish.

Shakespeare, Edith Wharton and Internet poetry were supposed to be among the main topics of discussion at the largest gathering of humanities professors in the nation. But the sour economy and shrunken job market for academics proved to be more dramatic than any novel or play. An estimated 8,500 professors and wannabe professors of English literature, composition and foreign languages gathered for the annual meeting this week of the Modern Language Assn.

Los Angeles police Capt. Dennis Kato stands in a rooftop parking lot, a device in hand resembling a clunky 1980s-era cellphone. He selects Korean from the device's menu, then speaks into the microphone: "Medical assistance." A speaker on his vehicle booms in Korean: "If you require medical assistance, please approach the nearest officer." Switching to Spanish, Kato says: "Welcome." The screen lights up: "Welcome to this event. We are here to facilitate your 1st Amendment rights."

Kyle Rothstein stands out in a sea of Chinese faces not because he is an American teenager with curly red hair and clear blue eyes, but because he speaks Chinese. Fluent Chinese. The visual and verbal double take is the handiwork of his father, Jay Rothstein, a prescient American businessman who put Kyle in a bilingual English-Mandarin school in San Francisco when he was 5. The elder Rothstein had read that if you don't learn to speak a foreign language by that age, you never really get it.

The operator of two English language schools was charged Wednesday with running a scheme that allowed foreign nationals, including several Russian prostitutes, to fraudulently obtain student visas to enter and stay in the United States. Bezhad "Ben" Zaman, 50, of Beverly Hills, a naturalized U.S. citizen from Iran, was arrested by federal agents without incident in what investigators believe is the largest student visa fraud scheme ever staged on the West Coast, authorities said.

A generation ago, the ancient Chumash tongue of Samala was all but dead, its songs and sagas buried in a university basement beneath mountains of yellowing research notes. But now Samala is the talk of the reservation. Thanks largely to a non-American Indian graduate student who was working for pocket money 40 years ago, the tribe has unveiled the first major Samala dictionary, a key moment in the language's rebirth.

Few cities have been as successful as this one in parlaying a knowledge of English into an economic boom. Every day, an army of call-center workers chirps, "Can I help you?" in lilting Indian tones to thousands of customer-service callers half a world away. In other gleaming high-rises, legions of software engineers toil at their computers designing programs for clients in the United States, Britain and Canada.

List makers have whittled the 61 films entered in the foreign-language film category for the 79th Academy Awards down to nine contenders.

"What's that?" Jenny Wright asks fourth-grader Michael Lopez, pointing to a drawing of a foot. The boy shrugs. This fall afternoon, as the rest of Wright's remedial reading class at Park Hill Elementary School in San Jacinto completes language exercises on worksheets or computers, Wright is coaching her newest student, Michael, one on one. He knows what a foot is, of course, but to him it's \o7el \f7\o7pie\f7.

The Pentagon is setting up a civilian Language Corps, a cadre of about 1,000 foreign-language speakers who can help the government in times of war and national emergencies. In a three-year pilot program, the Defense Department will recruit volunteers and do testing to see whether such a program would work. If successful, a permanent corps could be developed, officials said.