Misclassification of Ukrainian Sparks Outcry
Despite years of coverage on the language conflict in Ukraine in Language Magazine and many other media outlets, and a heartfelt, poetic explanation of the subjugation of Ukrainian, there are still commentators who question the status of Ukrainian as...
Cuba Introduces Secondary Chinese
Over 100 seventh graders from Fructuoso Rodríguez school in the central Havana district of Plaza de la Revolución will start Chinese classes during the new academic year. “I am opening the doors to my...
Ubongo Promotes Pan-African Early Literacy
Africa’s leading creator and producer of children’s educational media, Ubongo, has announced the launch of Season Four of Akili and Me: “Words and Sounds with Akili.” The popular African preschool show helps kids discover...
South Africa Classifies Afrikaans as ‘Foreign’
South Africa’s government has touched off a storm after it moved to classify native Afrikaans as a “foreign language.” For clarity’s sake, here is a hypothesis: this move would be similar to the US...
UNESCO Sees Role of EdTech in Multilingual Learning
The theme of last month’s International Mother Language Day, “Using technology for multilingual learning: Challenges and opportunities,” raised the potential of technology to advance multilingual education and support the development of quality teaching...
Académie Française Rails Against ‘Californisms’
France’s official authority on the vocabulary and grammar of its language has targeted a new threat: “les Californisms.”That’s the name the Académie Française (or in English, the French Academy) has come up with to...
Developing Machine Translation for ASL
Though automatic translation engines like Google Translate are far from perfect, they have become useful tools to help individuals communicate, particularly for high-demand language pairs like English and Spanish. However, machine translation for...
Encouraging Spanish/Portuguese Collaboration
During last month’s Second International Conference on Portuguese and Spanish Languages (CILPE) in the Brazilian capital, Brasilia, leading Ibero-American language experts came together to create an action plan to strengthen Spanish and Portuguese in...
The Metaverse and Language Education
In the 1990s, the animated television series The Magic School Bus became well-known for its louder-than-life main character Ms. Frizzle, who took her students on wild and zany field trips that defied all...
Ethiopian War Sparks Conflict in Ohio
The original trustees of the Holy Trinity Ethiopian Orthodox Tewahedo Church in Columbus, Ohio, have accused its clergy of switching the language of services from Amharic, the national language of Ethiopia, to Tigrinya, the...