The UK’s Cambridge Dictionary has declared nomophobia, the word that describes the stress and anxiety caused by being separated from your mobile device, as the People’s Word of 2018. For the first time, the Cambridge editors asked the public to vote for the word that best summed up 2018. They shortlisted four words that have…
Lauren Cortinas presents a solution for the youngest learners of Mandarin In October 2014, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg gave a speech at Tsinghua University in Beijing entirely in Mandarin Chinese. While his delivery was not perfect, the speech itself was a nod to what so many business and community leaders already know: Mandarin Chinese, the most…
Undocumented children are unable to go to school in South AfricaUNESCO’s 2019 Global Education Monitoring Report, Migration, displacement and education, shows that the number of migrant and refugee school-age children around the world today has grown by 26% since 2000 and could fill half a million classrooms. The Report highlights countries’ achievements and shortcomings in…
UPDATE, 11/20: EVACUATION OVER AND POWER RESTORED 🙂 Language Magazine’s office and the homes of most of our team have been under mandatory evacuation for the last week due to Southern California’s Woolsey Fire, but we are hopeful that evacuation orders will be lifted within the next few days and that we will then be…
The lower house of Russia’s parliament has approved a controversial bill on the teaching of native languages in schools. In the draft law approved by the State Duma, the Russian language was included in the list of native languages that students can learn at public schools throughout the country’s regions. Russia’s “ethnic” republics, with their…
According to the largest language census in Indian history, Hindi added 100 million new speakers between 2001 and 2011—a 25% rise, while 19,569 different languages or dialects were described as a “mother tongue” by the 1.21 billion people in the country. Of these languages, only 121 have 10,000 speakers or more. The census, which took…
Google Trends, which tracks the use of search terms, tweeted this morning that “Dónde Votar” was the top trending search on Google, spiking by more than 3,000%. Within an hour of the tweet, Priorities USA Action, a Democrat super PAC, translated its voter mobilization ads online to Spanish, specifically for voters in Arizona and Florida. This…
For the first time ever, the No 1 album in the U.S. features lyrics sung mostly in Korean. Love Yourself: Tear by K-pop group BTS clinched the No 1 spot last month, surprising many industry analysts. Priscilla Kim, director of the Korean Cultural Center in New York, which offers language courses, told The Guardian that,…
The German Research Foundation (DFG) has granted a Reinhart Koselleck Project to Prof. Dr. Monika Fludernik of the Department of English at the University of Freiburg. The foundation awards aid to people with outstanding reputations in research. The program’s aim is to support scholars pursuing exceptionally innovative projects or those that involve a high level…
The amount of the minimum income protection in Austria is now to be made dependent on the German language skills, among other factors, according to reports from Vienna. In each of the nine Austrian states, there is currently a different minimum income scheme. Now the Austrian government has decided to create a nationwide legal regulation,…