Worldcrunch
-Essay- PARIS — I’ll admit it straight away: As a bilingual journalist, the growing use of Franglais by French politicians makes my skin crawl. Not because I think this blend of French and English is a bad thing in and of itself (it is!), or because the purity of the French language should be preserved […]
Important digital innovations have been put into practice in the areas of translation, subtitling and text-to-image.
As the world gets more homogenized and closely connected, geographic-specific languages risk vanishing — with one-third of languages having fewer than 1,000 speakers left. But tech can help.
A road sign for a ‘detour’ gets lost in translation.
The usually hushed words of international diplomats is a reflection of our real-time communication age, but also of rising tensions on an unsettled geopolitical chessboard.
There’s a fundamental flaw in the case being made against certain grammatically gendered nouns.
“Zeitgeist,” “Kindergarten,” “Wanderlust” have long since made it into international speak. Since we found out that U.S. President Donald Trump was infected with coronavirus, another popular German word has been spreading.
Modern languages are rich, beautiful and complex, and took ages to develop. Hearts and smiley faces? Not so much.
-Essay- NEW YORK — They said the devil had traveled in her clothing. Elsche Prösche, née Wohler, wife of Jochim, was in her forties, and lived a life of relative poverty in Kölzin, a village in northeastern Germany. She was my great-aunt, nine generations ago — and for charges of witchcraft, she was burned at […]
The BJP wants to turn back to clock by imposing Hindi on south and northeastern India and eliminating English.
Recent studies from a French laboratory of linguistics reveal surprising aspects of human language that make it even more mysterious than it sounds.
Researchers have identified more than 30 different languages in the South American country, 15 of which are still spoken on a regular basis.
BUENOS AIRES — “I’m in the literary gang and Borges is my godfather…” Serhiy Borschevsky is the “last remaining” translator in Ukraine of the works of the 20th-century Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges. Speaking to Clarin on his first-ever visit to Argentina, Borschevsky noted that “Borges is very popular in Ukraine. His books sell out […]
Caught between a host country trying to hinder their integration and a home country holding back their return, Rohingya children find themselves in linguistic limbo.
French was once the international language of diplomacy. In Europe, at least, it may have to resume that role now that English risks losing its status as an official EU language.
According to the projections of The International Organization of La Francophone, the language of Molière will retain its status in the next half-century thanks to the demographic growth of Africa.
As the Japanese government plans to accept up to about 340,000 new foreign workers over the next five years, coexistence may become an issue.
Colombia’s Spanish, beside its charming formality, is replete with graphic allusions to extreme brutality, becoming a mirror of a good 100 years of political and criminal violence.
Refugees who are allowed to stay in Germany must attend an integration course. But many of them fail the language test. Why is that?
More than just a vehicle to communicate, language expresses and helps construct identity. As such, it has the power to inspire and unite people — but language can also be a source of division, or an impediment to peace between groups already in conflict. From squabbles over things like spelling and pronunciation, to minority groups […]
-Analysis- From Washington to Tehran to Pyongyang, the world’s attention this week has been consumed by nuclear diplomacy (and lack thereof). Talk of bad manners and misbehaving politicians, in light of such high stakes, might seem beside the point. And yet … Yesterday, in a closed-door meeting at the White House, special assistant Kelly Sadler […]
-OpEd- MONTREAL — The news spread around the world: Canada had just changed the English version of its national anthem, replacing the line “in all thy sons command” with “in all of us command.” Why? To make it gender neutral of course. Officially, and in order to reduce the significance of this change, they pretend […]
-Analysis- By the end of Donald J. Trump’s presidency, people will wonder: Was there anything he did not say? Any line he did not cross? As a lifelong businessman, he has declared war early and often on diplomatic niceties, proud to speak “like the people.” The problem is that he is a person who speaks […]
PARIS — Le masculin l’emporte. In the French language, this is the idea that “the masculine form takes precedence” over the feminine form when matching an adjective or pronoun to a plural noun. If there is a group of women, adding just one man to the mix means that all words used to describe that […]
The answer from Chinese professionals may surprise you…
-Analysis- There is style, and there is taste. There is also politics. The “style” in question here is the sort that is so often the source of bloody combat in the publishing world: whether to capitalize the Pope (pope), how to spell “okay” (OK?) and any number of sordid battles over the English language and […]
VILLA UKIKA — Just outside of Puerto Williams, the world’s southernmost city, lives an extraordinary woman. This far-flung outpost on Chile’s Tierra del Fuego, across the Straight of Magellan, is quiet literally at the end of the earth. And at 89, Cristina Calderón is nearing the end of her life — when she will take […]
Language, Oliver Wendell Holmes said, “is the blood of the soul.” When there is more than one language on the same land, it can also becomes a prime source of conflict. On Sunday, an Israeli government cabinet committee approved the wording of a nation-state bill that, among other things, would downgrade the status of Arabic, […]
COPENHAGEN — In the picturesque Danish capital, it’s easy to overlook the men lying on public benches with a beer in hand, or assume they’re immigrants from Southern Europe. Listen carefully, though, and you’ll notice that they speak fluent Danish, a task almost impossible for foreigners. These men, it turns out, are Danish citizens; indigenous […]
-OpEd- PARIS — A lot is being said and written about the “Molière clause,” first introduced by Vincent You, an elected representative in the western French city of Angoulême, and which mandates the use of French language on construction sites. This is, first and foremost, a case of guaranteeing safety at dangerous sites. A large […]
Amazigh is spoken by around 10 million in Algeria. Despite its new official status, it is not mandatory in schools nor used in national government.
We all have favorite songs we listen to again and again. But there are few things as entertaining as hearing our favorite singers belt their hit tunes in another language. Love “Heroes’ by the late David Bowie? How about listening to it again … in German? Or the Johnny Cash classic “Ring Of Fire” in […]
CAIRO — There are 28 letters in the Arabic alphabet. There are four possible written forms for each letter, depending on whether it stands alone, or comes at the beginning, middle or end of a word. Then there are diacritic symbols, indicating the script’s correct pronunciation, which hover gently above or below each letter’s lines […]
A speed bump sign in Reykjavik, Iceland. When I don’t understand the language, I’m always grateful to see road signs that translate across borders.
Germany and Britain have always competed for top European talents. Now, Europe’s best and brightest may see the UK as too complicated. One of many potential positive side effects of Brexit.
PRAGUE — Czech Republic was the first country I visited that wasn’t either Latin or Germanic. Czech, as I found out the hard way, is a very tricky Slavic language, one of those that rarely lets you deduce the meaning of a word and in which entire sentences seem to have been written by somebody […]
SALLA — On the door of the tourism bureau in Salla, Finland, there’s a poster proudly informing visitors that they are “in the middle of nowhere.” That much is indisputable: Salla is a dark, remote place, lost in the middle of hundreds of miles of Laponian pine forests and covered in a thick mantle of […]
Northeastern Syria’s autonomous Kurdish leadership has informed schools in the area that they must teach core subjects in Kurdish. While proud to embrace their ethnic heritage, some worry that the change could create new conflicts.
BOGOTA — Spanglish: Is it a dialect? Ghetto talk? Whatever else it may be, Spanglish is now the brazen, no-nonsense fruit of two languages and cultures coexisting in the United States. It may sound a little crazy at times. For example, walking in a Latino area of New York one day, I saw a notice […]
From launching new air routes to studying Mandarin, Egypt’s tourism industry isn’t just standing idly by while post-revolution problems keep American and European visitors away.