04/03/16–11/03/16 Headlines Skype translator has added Modern Standard Arabic—currently the fifth most commonly spoken language in the world—to the growing list of languages that it can speak out-loud. According to Microsoft’s Gurdeep Singh Pall, this is a particularly timely development…

26/02/16–04/03/16 Headlines In Canada, Nova Scotia province’s Office of Gaelic Affairs has recently allotted over $40,000 to nine non-profit organisations with the goal of preserving and revitalising the Scottish Gaelic language. According to the Office’s website, one-third of Nova Scotians…

19/02/16–26/02/16 Headlines Google Translate now offers translations in 13 new languages: Amharic, Corsican, Frisian, Kyrgyz, Hawaiian, Kurdish, Luxembourgish, Pashto, Samoan, Scots Gaelic, Shona, Sindhi and Xhosa. This brings the total number of Google Translate languages to 103, a number that Google claims covers “99% of the…

12/02/16–19/02/16 Headlines In Qatar, the state Cabinet has approved a new draft law requiring all ministries, official institutions, public schools, and universities to use Arabic—in a bid to promote the language in Qatar, especially among its youth. If and when it becomes…

05/02/16–12/02/16 Headlines Over in Bosnia, six-year-old Zejd Coralic is hearing-impaired, but his entire first-grade class has learnt sign language so that they can communicate with him. Bosnia adopted laws in 2003 to fully integrate children with disabilities into the classroom.…

29/01/16–05/02/16 Headlines African languages are woefully underrepresented in terms of the amount of Wikipedia articles written in them, reports htxt.africa. Less than 40,000 articles are in Afrikaans, while about 30,000 articles are in Kiswahili, as compared to 5 million in English and…

We choose and lose our given names, but surnames prove more durable. The word ‘surname’ itself derives from Medieval Latin supernomen, and entered the English language via the Anglo-Norman French surnoun, referring to the title added to—or ‘above’—one’s name. The Old…

22/01/16–29/01/16 Headlines This week marks the start of a 4-day training programme for 400 educators who will be teaching the Mon language to 150,000 students in Mon state and other parts of Myanmar, reports The Irrawaddy. With the support of the…

Hawai’i today is best known as the 50th U.S. state: an island paradise popular with tourists and famous for its warm climate and sandy beaches. According to data from the U.S. Census Bureau’s The American Community Survey, approximately 75% of…

15/01/16–22/01/16 Headlines Microsoft has finally released Skype for Windows, enabling users to have their speech translated in 7 languages—English, Chinese Mandarin, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish—in real time! Meanwhile, text-to-text translations can be translated to more than 50 languages.…

08/01/16–15/01/16 Headlines On Monday, China tested the first search engine in the Tibetan language! Launched in April 2013, the project, named “Cloud Tibet”—which would enable news, picture, video, and audio search options—is to be released in the later half of…

It is a dark and stormy night. I play a game that involves filling five different categories with words beginning with the same alphabet. One by one, categories flash onto my phone screen and settle: “Mythological Characters”, “Languages”… then comes…