· March, 2014

Stories about Language from March, 2014

Why Learning Italian Still Makes Sense

  31 March 2014

As Italian publishing company Alma Edizioni was busy organizing an event about the Italian language in Rome, they received an unexpected letter [it] from someone who defined himself as a “disappointed student”: Why? What's the point of studying Italian today? […] No one wants to study a language that no...

750 Million People Expected to Speak French by 2050

  25 March 2014

Countering the assertion by John McWhorter at the New republic that learning French is pointless, Pascal Emmanuel Gobry  writes on his Forbes blog that French might just be the language of the future: French isn’t mostly spoken by French people, and hasn’t been for a long time now. The language is...

State of Literature in Post-Dictatorship Myanmar

  23 March 2014

Writing for The Dissident Blog, James Byrne reviews the status of Burmese literature in the post-dictatorship era in Myanmar: When I was in the country last year there were poems being read about the Arab Spring. There were others about the harsh treatment of Burmese farmers. There were satires about...

Taiwan's #CongressOccupied Protest, Translated

  21 March 2014

Hundreds of translators have organized themselves through Facebook to translate stories about protesters' occupation of Taiwan's legislature following the ruling party's passage of a controversial trade agreement with China.

Zapatista Textbook Now Available in English

  19 March 2014

Put on your thinking caps because the first of four Zapatista textbooks from last year’s widely popular escuelita (little school) have been translated to English. For those who are not yet familiar, the Zapatista Escuelita (Zapatista little school), brought 1630 students from around the world to learn what it really...

Korea: English, Borrowed Words, Konglish

  15 March 2014

Words adopted from another language, or ‘borrowed words’ permeate the Korean language. R. Elgin wrote an informative post about how borrowed English words are being used in Korea compared to loanwords in other countries; many English words are, instead of being completely or partially naturalized, phonetically rendered into Korean, often...