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Speaking a second language could delay dementia by five years

New study by the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) shows that speaking a second language can delay the onset of Dementia and Alzheimer's for up to five years. Both the Telegra...

READ MORE | 26 Feb 2011

Twitter's New Translation Centre

Fancy doing a bit of translation? Twitter has created a new Translation Center to harness crowdsourcing to provide local versions of its interface in more languages. Twitter is looking for translators...

READ MORE | 18 Feb 2011

¡Increíble! Google Turns Your Android Phone Into An On-The-Fly Conversation Interpreter

A recent article on Techcrunch looks at the future of interpreting courtesy of Google Translate. The latest version of Google Translate for Android comes with a new feature: Conversation Mode.  T...

READ MORE | 10 Feb 2011

Are ugly fonts more memorable?

Fascinating interview on BBC Radio 4's Today programme with Jonah Lehrer who has written in this month's Wired magazine on how ugly fonts, rather than making it more difficult for us to absorb and rem...

READ MORE | 13 Jan 2011

Pardon My French

Fun piece on the BBC web site on the hilarious Pardon My French web site dedicated to spoofs in French of famous English songs. The idea of the site is to have a light-hearted jibe...

READ MORE | 6 Jan 2011

Does Your Language Shape How You Think?

Guy Duetscher's article on Does Your Language Shape How You Think? that appeared in The New York Times Magazine in August gets our vote for the best writing on language in 2010. In this fascinati...

READ MORE | 19 Dec 2010

Do most languages need more space than English?

Fascinating Q & A post on the English Language and Usage web site that explodes some common misconceptions about the space efficiency of English on the page in relation to other popular languages....

READ MORE | 14 Oct 2010

Babylonian, dead for millennia, now online

The sound of the ancient Babylonian language has been brought back to life thanks to Cambridge academic, Martin Worthington. His website speechisfire.com hosts some 30 audio files of this&nb...

READ MORE | 8 Oct 2010

European Day of Languages

Sunday 26th of September 2010 marks the European Day of Languages. Set up by the Council of Europe in 2001, the idea of the European Day of Languages (EDL) is to show people across Europe how importan...

READ MORE | 26 Sep 2010

Should British pupils give up studying French?

The aftermath of the decline of languages at GCSE continues with a story on the BBC News Magazine web site which explores some of the key reasons for this. Language learning expert Paul Noble, who tea...

READ MORE | 21 Sep 2010