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7 June, 2012
Most of us have learnt a foreign language at school and continued learning it during our years at university. We travel abroad and we communicate with the local people in the local language, or at least in a common language (mainly English). We like it, we...
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4 November, 2009
What with the "weans", they had had little time to "red up" but how about if they were to "wet a pot of tea"?
A new survey carried out for Collins Dictionaries lists regional expressions in England that are dying out.
Words like "ommuck" for sandwich and...
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3 November, 2009
A survey of Indigenous people around Australia has found that the use of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages has remained almost steady since 2002.
The information comes from surveys done by the Australian Bureau of Statistics in 2008.
It found...
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19 October, 2009
An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies?
In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year...
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30 September, 2009
The Scanian ('Skånska') dialect of southern Sweden has landed on Unesco's list of threatened languages, much to the exasperation of Swedish linguists.
“There are neither linguistic nor practical reasons why Scanian should be counted as a language,”...