Uncle Sam can now teach you Czech, or any other major language you’d like to learn. A group of volunteers recently put all of the US Government’s language learning materials (which are in the public domain) online where they can be accessed, for free, by anyone interested. The site boasts over forty languages, and while not affiliated with the government, the site contains the same materials used by the Foreign Service Institute.

Of course, no online course is a replacement for being immersed in the culture, or even taking an intensive class at your local university. But it could provide a valuable head start, and hey, it’s free. When the site first went live, traffic overwhelmed the servers, so be prepared for slow loading.

I took a look around the site, and was very impressed. It won’t be much help if you’re already an advanced language student, but with lessons like “Italian FAST,” you can learn the basics very quickly. A valuable tool to utilize before a trip overseas, or simply for your own personal betterment and linguistical fulfillment.

Once more, that’s http://fsi-language-courses.org

Understanding Afrikaans is not terribly hard for a native English speaker (the above example is in Afrikaans). Lowland Scots does not prove much of a challenge to an English speaker, either: “D’ye see yon hoose ower yonder?” English is said to have a high degree of mutual intelligibility with these two languages.

Mutual intelligibility describes the degree to which speakers of two different languages could understand one another without previous knowledge of the other language. For example, Norwegian has a high degree of mutual intelligibility with Swedish and Danish, as does Bosnian with Croatian and Serbian. However, intelligibility is not always the same for both speakers – sometimes, the conversation can be rather one-sided.

A Spanish speaker asking for directions in Portugal would probably be understood by a Portuguese speaker, but the visiting Spanish speaker would probably have a more difficult time understanding the response. According to a study, Portuguese speakers generally have an easier time understanding Spanish than Spanish speakers do Portuguese (the languages have an 89% lexical similarity, but Portuguese speakers understand 58% of spoken Spanish whereas Spanish speakers understand about 50% of spoken Portuguese).

This phenomenon is not restricted to Spanish and Portuguese – it is also easier for a Dutch speaker to understand Afrikaans than the other way around. As to date, there have been no conclusive studies with an explanation for non-mutual intelligibility. Sometimes, Romances just are not mutual.

This week, the Wall Street Journal reports on the Academie’s attempts to come up with French equivalents for English-language computing terms such as cloud computing (which, for those not in the know, consists of accessing remote data over a network, so as to preserve the resources of the computers on the receiving end). The suggested phrase was “informatique en nuage,” literally “computing in cloud,” a phrase which left the board of the Academie cold.

The reaction, as reported by Max Colchester:

“What? This means nothing to me. I put a ‘cloud’ of milk in my tea!” exclaimed Jean Saint-Geours, a French writer and member of the Terminology Commission.

“Send it back and start again,” ordered Etienne Guyon, a physics professor on the commission.

Although the French should, on the one hand, be commended for trying to preserve their own culture, one can’t help but wonder if it’s futile in a way, particularly considering the immense influence of the largely English-speaking internet as it continues to grow, evolve, and change the way we communicate with one another on a global scale.

Read Max Colchester’s full article on the Wall Street Journal: The French Get Lost in the Clouds Over a New Term in the Internet Age

There are about 800 inhabitants and a majority of them are elderly individuals. The inhabitants of this island have their own specific dialect that a native, standard-Japanese speaker would consider unintelligible. The dialect is called Ikema…

Ikema is believed to have separated from the mainland Japanese language in the mid 3rd and 6th centuries. This speech is used only in two other communities aside from that of the island of Ikema, both of which are composed entirely of individuals over the age of 65. Because of this, it is estimated that the language will die out in the next 30 years. To prevent this from happening, the Ikema Project was established in 2005.

Read more about the Ikema language and the efforts to protect it in this article by Shoichi Iwasaki of UCLA’s Asian Languages and Cultures Department: The Ikema Project: An Attempt to Preserve an Endangered Language of Ryukyu

Photo via tizumi3 at Panoramio.

The UK’s Telegraph has recently reported on her new book, Pimp Your Vocab, which “aims to demystify the jargon adopted by British youngsters.”

What’s most interesting when reading the some of the examples of colorful and varied slang words and phrases contained within is that the slang used may be as foreign and baffling to American ears (of all ages!) as they do to the British parents for whom the book is intended. Take for example…

Big up: to praise or congratulate someone.

CBA: “can’t be arsed”

Frape: a compound of Facebook and rape, describing someone’s social networking profile being hacked into and changed.

Long: an adjective used to describe something as irritating, time-consuming or boring.

Neek: a combination of nerd and geek.

That a need exists for us to translate words and phrases even within a single language (never mind dialects, or between two different languages), be it for matters of age or culture, just goes to prove how complex language really is!

Read the full story at the Telegraph: Dictionary of teenage language published to help adults understand their children

Image shamelessly stolen from CrunchGear.

The thirty linguists who worked on the Atlas believe that Cornish died out as a first language in 1777. This news was not welcomed by the Cornish Language Partnership, who says the number of speakers has risen in the past 20 years. They want a new section for revitalized languages to be added to the atlas for languages such as theirs.

At the moment, there are 300 fluent speakers of the Cornish language. Last year, the Partnership agreed on a single form of Cornish, which brought together other languages. Christopher Moseley, editor-in-chief of the Atlas, responded: “[Cornish] is among a group of languages that turned out not to be extinct, but merely sleeping.”

Read the full story here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/cornwall/7900972.stm

Duden, which was first published in 1880 and consisted of just 27,000 words, has included many English phrases such as “After-show-party” and “It Girl” to its already 135,000 word dictionary. The German Language is well-known for its exceptionally long compound words, such as “Vorratsdatenspeicherung,” which means the saving of data relating to supplies.

Read the full article here: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/europe/8163541.stm

Some individuals will argue that the Armenian descended from Iranian. It is believed that the language was produced by an error, so to speak, as a result of the vast number of loan words from that language. Even so, Armenian is an independent branch of the Indo-European family. The Armenian language is spoken by 5 million people in Armenia, Georgia and parts of the ex-Soviet Union. Armenian has also spread to some countries in the Middle East. In every region there are different varieties of the language. It is broken up into two denominations “western” and “eastern.” In the eastern portion there are various complex dialects, while the western portion is mostly spoken by small communities in Turkey and emigrant communities.

More here: http://translation-blog.trustedtranslations.com/armenian-an-independent-branch-of-the-indo-european-language-family-2009-07-06.html