Adiós Inglés
According to Global Reach’s latest statistics on the use of language online, only 36.5 percent of the global online population are native English speakers.
Culture
¿Habla Spanglish?
Want to irritate your Spanish and English teachers at the same time? Try a little Spanglish. Here’s a recent Associated Press article… ”Language is not controlled by a small group of academics that decide what the words are that we …
And Europe’s Getting Bigger…
In a draft accord released early on Friday, the EU endorsed a recommendation by its executive arm, the Euroepan Commission, that the 10 candidate countries “fulfill the political criteria and will be able to fulfill the economic criteria and to …
Advertising America
According to this recent NY Times article, the State Department is launching an ad campaign to promote “American values” to the Muslim world: Special efforts will be made to give audiences here in Indonesia, elsewhere in Asia and in the …
Spanish America
More than 10% of American residents now speak only Spanish at home, up from 7.5% in 1990, according Bill Frey, a senior fellow in demography at the Milken Institute. He writes: “Toy manufacturs, for example, upped their production of bilingual …
Languages Living Together
After reading about languages doing battle in Romania, it’s nice to see that languages can coexist in Lebanon: Lebanon, a former French mandate country, is a good illustration of how the French and English languages don’t have to be in …
No more “hot dogs” in Romania?
It’s not official yet, but there’s an interesting law in the works in Romania: It still awaits legal fine-tuning and presidential approval, but as it stands now, it dictates that any foreign texts or words spoken at public events political …
Japanese Culture 101
The students become the teachers with this wonderful site.
Democracy, Translated
According to this NY Times story, Vietnam is requiring that anyone who wants to launch a Web site get government permission first. Here’s the story. What jumped out at me was this mention of what happened to someone for posting …
Language is Power; Power is Language
According to a Sept. 28th article in the Economist, tensions between French and Dutch speakers in Belgium has been flaring up. Apparently, in the region around Brussels, French-speaking Walloons and Dutch-speaking Flemings live side by side. Dutch has long been …