· October, 2011

Stories about Language from October, 2011

Collecting Audio of UN Human Rights Declaration in 370 Languages

  27 October 2011

United_Sounds on SoundCloud is compiling the largest collection of audio recordings of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in more than 370 languages. If you speak a language they don't yet have, you can submit an audio recording – the UN has probably already translated, you just have to...

Nepal: Movies & Nationality

  18 October 2011

Acharya, a Nepali language movie based on the life of a Nepali music legend, has been categorized in the Mumbai Film Festival as Indian movie because of its production banner. XNepali asks “do movies have nationality”?

Poetry Slam Activism in Francophone Africa

  17 October 2011

Poetry slam is a well-known channel of expression for many activists in North America but the rest of the world has now embraced this unique blend of poetry and rhythmic oral story telling. Here are some examples from Francophone Africa and the context in which they arose.

Whose Language? The Royal Spanish Academy and Copyright

  16 October 2011

Can a language used by millions of people be copyrighted and be the property of an institution? This and other questions are circulating online following the news that the Spanish Royal Academy (RAE) and Grupo Planeta told Uruguayan journalist Ricardo Soca to remove web content considered their exclusive property, such as links to the RAE website.

Jamaica: Hiding “Behind Blackness”

  10 October 2011

Under the Saltire Flag shares an interesting perspective on the recent riots in London: “I have no problem accepting that in many areas Britain is blindly racist and must be called out on it. It can be frustraiting to realize that in many instances Jamaica is just as blindly racist...

Russia: Putin Gets Twitter Hashtag for His Birthday

RuNet Echo  10 October 2011

#CпасибоПутинуЗаЭто (“Thanks to Putin for This”) hashtag that resembles the Soviet “Thanks to the party for this” became a “Twitter sensation” according to the Wall Street Journal and a “Twitter storm,” according to The Moscow News. The campaign that was started [ru] by a pro-Kremlin blogger Vladimir Burmatov as a way...

Ukraine: Interview With Author Vasyl Shklyar

  5 October 2011

Brian Spadora‘s RFE/RL interview with the Ukrainian novelist Vasyl Shklyar – who “has attracted a lot of attention in Ukraine this year both for his bestselling novel, Black Raven, as well for the statements he’s made against the erosion of freedoms that has taken place under President Viktor Yanukovych” –...

Curacao: Changes Needed in Court of Justice

  3 October 2011

“A Dutch European lawyer indiscriminately lambasting a prime minister and a party leader in front of four innocent new judges…indoctrinating them from day one how to judicially digest post-colonial power struggles from a sole Dutch white privileged position is borderline dangerous”: TRIUNFO DI SABLIKA thinks it's time for “this constant...