How do you visualise language learning? Perhaps you imagine building a tower, brick by brick. Or perhaps you see it more like furnishing an empty room. Or perhaps you swallow each word by the spoonful and let it become a…

23/10/15–30/10/15 Headlines The governments of Malta and Malaysia have both launched efforts to review and solicit feedback regarding their individual language education policies. Malta rolled out a consultative document looking to review and update Malta’s policies for younger students, entitled “A Language Policy for the Early…

Gabriel Lee speaks to Dr. Ruanni Tupas, an Assistant Professor at the English Language and Literature Academic Group of the National Institute of Education (NIE) in Singapore. Dr. Tupas is a member of the Executive Committee of the Singapore Association for Applied Linguistics…

16/10/15–23/10/15 Headlines The United States hopes to have at least one million K-12 students learning Mandarin by 2020 under a new initiative known as “1 Million Strong”. American President Barack Obama made the announcement during a visit to Washington D.C.…

9/10/15–16/10/15 Headlines The United States Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) is developing a new program that would allow for real-time “essential” battlefield translation between all 7,000 of the world’s existing languages. The Low Resource Languages for Emergent Incidents (LORELEI) programme does not…

2/10/15–9/10/15 Headlines The United States Center for Immigration Studies revealed that Arabic and Urdu are the two languages experiencing the most rapid growth in the country, while about 63 million or 20% of American residents now use a “foreign” language at home (not English). Meanwhile, the Pew…

25/9/15–2/10/15 Headlines A massive influx of migrants continues to enter European countries, most notably Germany, which has translated part of its constitution into Arabic for incoming refugees to learn. Google Translate has further requested for German-Arabic (Egyptian Arabic) and German-Persian translation assistance after reporting a…

For the current issue of Unravel, designer Felicia Follum put together an image for a language profile of the Frisian language (read it here!): Check out Felicia’s detailed creative process for the image in these videos: Part I Font design…

18/9/15–25/9/15 Headlines As Europe continues to respond to the refugee crisis, the BBC highlights the steps being taken to help new refugees assimilate in the United Kingdom, while Deutsche Welle asserts the importance of learning the local language, and suggests several options for newcomers who want to learn German. Yet existing programmes…

In light of the upcoming release of the Minions movie—or it might already be released, depending on where you are—I think it would be apt to discuss the intriguing world of these yellow, banana-like creatures and their language. Many believe…

What is it? Language Landscape is a project that aims to map the distribution of languages all around the world. It is headed by a group of linguistics PhD students based in London. The Language Landscape Map seeks to represent…

There is a vast difference between knowing a theory and putting a theory into practice. Perhaps that sounds obvious, but as the poet, John Keats, wrote in a letter: “Nothing ever becomes real till it is experienced.” I spent two…