21/10/2016–04/11/2016 Headlines Fancy using virtual reality to learn a language? ImmerseMe, “believed to be the world’s first” such tool, affords travellers the opportunity to “learn practical language skills” for interacting in foreign places, for example, to make purchases and to…

21/10/2016–28/10/2016 Headlines Californian voters are being asked to overturn a law restricting bilingual education in public schools. This comes in the wake of wait lists and increasing enrolments for dual-language programmes. In one such programme in Cahuenga Elementary School, teachers…

14/10/2016–21/10/2016 Headlines Applications for this year’s Endangered Languages Documentary Programme grant cycle for linguistic documentation of endangered languages is now open! Every year, the Programme offers four grant types for applicants affiliated to entities that handle grants and who have experience in…

07/10/2016–14/10/2016 Headlines Aiyoh! Aiyah! Scrumdiddlyumptious! What do all these words have in common? They belong to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has just included a handful of South Indian English words this month. 10 October was Indigenous People’s Day on Duwamish Land, Seattle,…

30/09/2016–07/10/2016 Headlines Speech sound disorders are estimated to affect 10% of children in the US. Byun Lab at the New York University Steinhardt Department of Communicative Sciences and Disorders is working to develop an app for speech therapists called staRt! The app is intended…

23/09/2016–30/09/2016 Headlines I fink “th” sounds are making the nooze again. HSBC commissioned a report called “The Sounds of the Future” for the launch of its new ID, currently rolled out to 15 million users. Results showed that the British…

16/09/2016–23/09/2016 Headlines Apart from Dutch, what’s the other official language spoken in the Netherlands? Frisian. Now you can learn this minority language—the language most closely related to the English language—with Future Learn here! Lessons start 26 September 2016. Or find out more about Frisian before…

09/09/2016–16/09/2016 Headlines Ferdinand de Saussure’s theories about the arbitrariness of the relationship between signals (words) and the signified (the concepts the words represent) may not be as universal as we thought, a new study shows. The word for ‘nose’ across…

02/09/2016–09/09/2016 Headlines “The more foreign languages we learn, the faster the brain responds and processes the data it absorbs during learning.” Researchers from the Higher School of Economics (Moscow, Russia) and the University of Helsinki (Finland) have confirmed, by measuring…

26/08/2016–02/09/2016 Headlines The East African Legislative Assembly has passed a resolution this week, making Kiswahili the official language of the East African Community, alongside English, reports All Africa. Russian-language learners will now be able to practise speaking the language with grannies in Moscow (Russian)! Under…

19/08/2016–26/08/2016 Headlines Concert sign language interpreters? Andrea Marks writes for Noisey about the people whose job it is to translate song lyrics—during live concerts and from bands like The Grateful Dead, no less—into American Sign Language (ASL). A recent study on the effects…

12/08/2016–19/08/2016 Headlines Manglerud School in Oslo, Norway will be the first state-run primary school to offer an English curriculum, meaning that all subjects—apart from the Norwegian language—will be taught in English. The Norwegian Language Society (Noregs Mållag), has, however, raised concerns…