such as market research, seeking out potential customers, studying the competition, and so on. In fact, you may have been so busy thinking about these elements that you have overlooked the important impact that languages and translation can have on this process.

Although it can seem involved, internationalisation opens your business up to a whole host of new opportunities, especially when this last part is done right.

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streets of the Latvian capital. But eavesdrop on residents and you're just as likely to hear Russian as you are the national language, Latvian.

The prevalence of Russian in public life is one reason why Latvia's government has passed a law that will limit Russian as a language of instruction in the country's schools, beginning next year. The move by the tiny Baltic nation has angered not only members of Latvia's sizeable ethnic Russian minority, but Moscow as well. Russia's foreign ministry called the decision "odious."

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Parents help their toddlers out of cycling helmets and jackets. Teachers greet the children with a cuddle and a chirpy “Buenos dias!”. In the playground, a little girl asks for her hair to be bunched up into a “coleta” (Spanish for ‘pigtail’), then rolls a ball and shouts “Catch!” in English.

“At this age, children don’t learn a language – they acquire it,” says the school’s director Carmen Rampersad. It seems to sum up the enviable effortlessness of the little polyglots around her. For many of the children, Spanish is a third or even fourth language. Mother tongues include Croatian, Hebrew, Korean and Dutch.

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Reykjavik. Not so many years ago, such a billboard would simply have read: “Kaffi og kleina” – in the language of the Vikings, the official language of Iceland.

It is a privilege of the few to be able to read and write Icelandic, a language understood by only around 400,000 people worldwide. Icelandic, in which the historic Sagas were written in the 13th and 14th centuries, has changed so little since then on our small and isolated island, that we can still more or less read them as they were first written.

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“textspeak.” With the rise of Web 2.0 at the turn of 21st century, instant messaging slang and the bevy of acronyms that resulted have become a de facto marker of age, if not cool-factor. Down under, in the remote village of Lajamanu located in Australia’s Northern Territory, recent generations of Indigenous Australian Warlpiri people have created a language much less ubiquitous. Light Warlpiri, a mixed language no more than 40 years old, is spoken almost exclusively by people aged 35 and younger.

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I am an immigrant who has spent nearly as much time in the United States as I have in my home

country, Spain. I am also the director of Dartmouth’s language programs in Spanish and Portuguese. Both facts explain, but only partly, why I feel a special fondness for the FX drama “The Americans,” in which Keri Russell and Matthew Rhys play Elizabeth and Philip Jennings, a husband-and-wife team of undercover K.G.B. agents living in suburban Washington. I can’t be the only one who nodded approvingly when they were both nominated for Emmys last week.

What interests me as a linguist is that the Jenningses are, as the pilot tells us, “supersecret spies living next door” who “speak better English than we do.” Even their neighbor, an F.B.I. agent on the counterintelligence beat, suspects nothing.

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brain prefers to communicate simply, new research finds.

Despite there being an estimated 7,099 languages spoken throughout the world today, almost a third of them are endangered while just 23 represent more than half of the global population. 

However, a new study led by University of Arizona researcher Masha Fedzechkina suggests that this might not have happened by chance.

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The Early Lingo Language Series App offers interactive lessons, games, activities, flashcards,

videos and a written test section.

It can help young children learn a second language easily and effectively.  In early childhood, foreign languages are stored in the same part of their brain as their native tongue.

In order to get by in a foreign language, one needs to know about 1,200 words.  The Early Lingo Language Series App offers more than 450 words and phrases, creating a solid foundation for a child's language learning.

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On a residential block at the border between Brooklyn and Queens, Gottscheer Hall appears like a mirage from 1945.

education, from preparing for exams to writing papers. But there are glaring differences when it comes to foreign language education – or lack thereof – and the result is that far lower shares of American students study a foreign language.

Learning a foreign language is a nearly ubiquitous experience for students throughout Europe, driven in part by the fact that most European countries have national-level mandates for formally studying languages in school. No such national standard exists in the U.S., where requirements are mostly set at the school district or state level.

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of visual interface, the voice-activated home assistant isn't very useful for deaf people—Alexa only understands three languages, none of which are American Sign Language. But Fast Company reports that one programmer has invented an ingenious system that allows the Echo to communicate visually.

Abhishek Singh's new artificial intelligence app acts as an interpreter between deaf people and Alexa. For it to work, users must sign at a web cam that's connected to a computer. The app translates the ASL signs from the webcam into text and reads it aloud for Alexa to hear. When Alexa talks back, the app generates a text version of the response for the user to read.

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distinction, the way there is between a quasar and a pulsar, or between a rabbit and a hare? Faced with the question, linguists like to repeat the grand old observation of the linguist and Yiddishist Max Weinreich, that “a language is a dialect with an army and a navy.”

But surely the difference is deeper than a snappy aphorism suggests. The very fact that “language” and “dialect” persist as separate concepts implies that linguists can make tidy distinctions for speech varieties worldwide. But in fact, there is no objective difference between the two: Any attempt you make to impose that kind of order on reality falls apart in the face of real evidence.

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choice. France is just across the English Channel, the language is widely spoken, and it is influential on the world stage.

But now, Brits are finally expanding their horizons beyond the languages of Europe, to China, the Arab world, and Latin America. While French remains the most-studied language among secondary school students in the UK, its popularity is falling dramatically. Spanish is risking along with non-European languages like Chinese and Arabic. The same trend is also happening in the US.

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Korean is rapidly growing in popularity, in a language-learning boom driven by the popularity of the country's pop stars.

A desire to learn the lyrics of K-Pop hits like Gangnam Style has boosted the Korean language's popularity explode in countries like the US, Canada, Thailand and Malaysia.

A report by the Modern Language Association shows that Korean uptake in US universities rose by almost 14% between 2013 and 2016, while overall language enrolment was in decline.

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The potential impact Brexit could have on Wales looms over the country, but it’s not just the farming industry that’s at stake.

A Brexit-shaped blow to the industry, which relies so heavily on lamb exports, could have serious implications for the country’s heritage and language, both of which have their foundations in rural areas.

The Welsh language is heavily steeped in agriculture, with research revealing those speaking it within the ‘agriculture, energy and water’ category make an essential contribution to its preservation

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The language services and technology market is huge and very traditional (read “old fashioned”). The market is worth between USD 40-45bn a year, depending on who you ask, and is serviced by 21,000+ language service providers (LSPs) and about 600,000 linguists, most of them freelancers, in almost every country in the world.

The industry is highly fragmented and the top 30-50 LSPs only control about 15% of the market. This is unusual; consider the technology space for example, where a few top players control 80% or more of the market…think Facebook, Google, Amazon etc.

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Do you know what your country or region's second language is? And if so, do you know how

to speak it? The website MoveHub.com is a resource for people who want to move abroad, and they recently released this fascinating infographic that shows the popular second tongue of every region around the world.

Some places, like Canada's knowledge of the French language, are fairly predictable. Others might surprise you, and this graphic gives an overall idea of the world's history from the past hundreds of years and whose influence traveled where. We also learn that English is the most popular second language to know, followed by French, Russian, and then Spanish.

So, if you're looking to take a vacation or make a long-distance move, this illustrative map is your guide to what language a country's residents are likely the most familiar with. Maybe it's one that you know, too.

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a number of cognitive, economic and academic advantages in being bilingual.

Parents who speak different languages understand the family home is an important setting to learn both, and seek various ways to help their children thrive bilingually. One of the best-known approaches is the “one-parent-one-language” strategy (OPOL). Each parent uses one language when communicating with their child, so their offspring learn both languages simultaneously.

OPOL emphasises consistency – sticking to one language each – as key to its approach. But this creates the myth that mixing languages should always be avoided. My recent study, part of a new wave of multilingualism studies, would suggest this received wisdom is just that: a myth.

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187 measures in nine “action areas”, including Education, the Gaeltacht, Family Transmission of the Language, Services and Community and Media and Technology.

The plan is an effort to breathe new life into the Government’s 20 Year Strategy for the Irish Language 2010-2030, a wide-ranging statement of intent which aims to promote and develop Irish in the Gaeltacht and outside it.

Minister of State for the Irish Language and the Gaeltacht, Mr Joe McHugh, said that the new approach was “the result of public consultation organised by my Department and is designed to build on the 20 year strategy for the language. Implementing this plan is critical to the survival of our language.

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Despite Romansh being one of Switzerland’s four national languages, less than 0.5% percent of Swiss can answer that question – ‘Do you speak Romansh?’ – with a ‘yes’.

Romansh is a Romance language indigenous to Switzerland’s largest canton, Graubünden, located in the south-eastern corner of the country. In the last century, the number of Romansh speakers has fallen 50% to a meagre 60,000. Travellers in the canton can still see Romansh on street signs, or hear it in restaurants when they’re greeted with ‘Allegra!’ (Welcome in). But nearly 40% of Romansh speakers have left the area for better job opportunities in places like Zürich and it’s rare that you will see or hear Romansh outside the canton. In such a small country, can a language spoken by just a sliver of the population survive, or is it as doomed as the dinosaur and dodo?

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Linguistic Survey of India. It took Grierson 30 years to gather data on 179 languages and 544 dialects. The survey was published in 19 volumes, spanning 8,000 pages, between 1903 and 1928.

For a very long time, Grierson’s achievement remained unsurpassed. After India became independent, the government initiated but never completed a second language survey. In 1961, the Census of India published The Language Tables, which identified 1,652 “mother tongues.” But the data for the Language Tables was obtained while collecting other census information and is not considered an authoritative language survey. In the absence of an extensive modern-day audit, the government cites 122 languages as the official number based on available data. The state does not individually recognize those languages spoken by less than 10,000 people.

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sentiment—it’s a fact, reinforced by our dealings with more than 1,000 libraries throughout the US and beyond. We are proud to work with librarians to bring language learning opportunities to their communities.

Despite the US position on the world stage, politically, economically, and socially, our country faces a language deficit so serious that the Boston Globe recently called it a national emergency. Language skills are in high demand from employers, but schools continue to cut language programs to balance their budgets.  A national report commissioned by Congress called for “closing the language gap”, lest we risk being left out of any conversation not taking place in English.

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emergence of the quintessential human trait: language. Many scholars work on the topic nonetheless, but few of their findings have achieved consensus.

On one thing, at least, most agree: though animals communicate, only humans have true language, with the power to organize complex thoughts into a string of words, often about absent or abstract things. And most scholars also reckon that Homo sapiens is the only species ever to have had such language. They think it must have emerged somewhere between 200,000 and 50,000 years ago.

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Baghdad – and the occupying force faced many challenges once it arrived. In fact, Britain’s overwhelming predominance over Iraq from 1917 to 1947 was a time of rough and violent political and economic “communication”.

But the interesting number of English “loanwords” in the Iraqi dialect of Arabic tell us that the communication was not always defensive. More important, the quality of borrowed words and the way they are twisted to fit Iraqi usage reflect the fact that Iraqis were fascinated by the language and culture of their occupiers whom they ironically nicknamed “Abu Naji” after the commonly held belief that Iraqi monarch Ghazi bin Faisal had been murdered at the behest of the British by his driver, Abu Naji, in a faked car accident.

However, while I can clearly identify many words as English in origin – for example, biskit, tȏrch, rādīȏ, shȏrt – there are many other words altered enough to look like anything but English, including timman, paīcha, fuṣṣ glāṣṣ, and others.

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