The Search for Non-Binary Pronouns in Chinese
As businesses strive to reach wider audiences, gender-inclusive language has become imperative. Businesses have learned that any association to bigotry, racism, or sexism, however...
Study Highlights Need for Education in Native Language
In one of the largest studies of written language development among bilingual students to date, a team of researchers at universities across the United...
Kriol interpreting efforts misunderstood in Western Australia and abroad
Earlier this month, Australian politician Mark McGowan received harsh criticism for a video campaign intended to disseminate COVID-19-related information to Aboriginal people living in the state of Western Australia (WA). MultiLingual an Australian interpreter about the video and why the outrage against it is largely unjustified.
Turkey floats idea of officially changing name to reflect native spelling,...
The Turkish government recently announced plans to change its official name in the United Nations’ registry of country names to “Türkiye,” which more closely resembles the country’s name in the Turkish language.
Kingdom of Characters: How linguistic innovation turned China into a modern...
Kingdom of Characters, a fascinating new book by Yale University professor and historical scholar Jing Tsu, argues that China's most daunting challenge after its meteoric economic rise over the last century was a linguistic one.
Algospeak: a new language to circumvent AI-powered content moderation
Recently, social media saw the birth of a whole new language coined Algospeak, employing code words and phrases to prevent posts from being removed, demoted in rank, or demonetized by automated content moderation systems.
Language advocacy groups outraged over airline’s Afrikaans language test
Ryanair, Europe’s largest airline by number of passengers, has come under a wave of criticism after forcing UK-bound travelers flying with a South African passport to prove their nationality by taking a test in Afrikaans.
Emoji Use May Lead to Intergenerational Miscommunication
What does the “🙂” emoji mean to you?
If it’s just a normal, happy-go-lucky smiley face to you — you know, one you might use...
Conversations with Character(s)
Of the world’s approximately 7,000 languages, around 4,000 are written. Though many of us, certainly those of us from secure linguistic communities, take the...
Solving the language gap in scientific research
It estimated that non-English language research could expand the geographical coverage of biodiversity scientific evidence by 12% to 25% and the number of species covered by 5% to 32%. All this raises a pressing question: Just how much scientific research is being obscured due to language barriers?
Helsinki Mayor Wants to Declare City an English-Speaking Area
The mayor of Helsinki, Finland attracted no small amount of controversy recently with a suggestion from the city’s mayor that the capital rebrand itself...
What the localization of travel websites can tell us about the...
We took a look at a variety of tourism websites to try to get a good feel for the market. We could not consider every tourism website out there, so these are the results for the sample we selected. The results of the study are as follows....
