Street Signs title image: a sign shop on Șoseaua Ștefan Cel Mare It’s always good to know the language of the country you are traveling through or living in because it’s helpful to know what’s going on in the public sphere. Street signs tell a good story. Here are a few... read more
Integrame are my current leisure-time obsession. They’re theme-based crossword puzzles that I can kinda, sorta do in Romanian. Look at the title image where I gathered a bunch of integrame collections I’ve worked through. UȘOARE and UȘURELE are both versions of the word ‘easy.’ Look further and you’ll see pentru începători... read more
The question can now be asked: What the heck were we doing in Angola? And why was our next stop Portugal? The answer is: a curiosity to experience a part of Lusophonia, namely Lusophone (= Portuguese-speaking) Africa. The title image map tells the story. How did we come up with... read more
Ge’ez is the Ethiopian script in use all around the country. Ethiopia is the only sub-Saharan country to have its own script and it is hundreds of years old. You might be tempted to call it an alphabet, but it is really a syllabary, where each symbol represents the combination... read more
On Monday March 26 Hae-Young Kim, the Chair of Asian and Middle Eastern Languages at Duke University, organized a symposium on the Korean language. It was entitled “Politics of language and identity: Korean speakers in the peripheries of the national and transnational.” In the title photo you see, from the... read more
First thing to do: distinguish MeToo Monologues from the #metoo movement. Two weeks ago I wrote on the #metoo movement in a post-Valentine’s Day blog. The #metoo movement is a social media effort mobilized to highlight the problem of sexual assault and harassment, particularly in the workplace. In contrast, MeToo... read more
African American Vernacular English is also known as Black Vernacular English. For many decades now linguists have studied African American Vernacular English, and their most significant finding about this particular variety of English is that it is not a defective or inferior form of Standard English. It is variety in... read more
Kia Kaha Te Reo Māori ‘Learn the Māori language’ Kia Kaha Te Reo Māori is the theme of New Zealand’s official Māori language week for 2018. Since 1975 the government has sponsored such weeks as part of the effort to keep Māori alive. How is the effort going? Māori language... read more
Foreign Accent Syndrome? I learned about it yesterday while watching a stand-up special on Netflix, and Tom Segura told a joke about it. Foreign Accent Syndrome: Quick and Dirty Research Immediate google search. It seems Foreign Accent Syndrome is a thing – a rare neurological condition with no known cause and no... read more
Endangered languages are intertwined with world-wide social, physical and mental health issues. I offer three examples: Endangered Languages #1: The Case of Mayan in Guatemala An already-available February 2018 issue of The Lancet, a well-known medical journal, has an article concerning endangered languages and the health outcomes of their speakers... read more
