I love when something mundane comes out and surprises. Did you know there is African American sign language, just as there is African American English (AAE, or more popularly, Ebonics)? It is a distinct version of American Sign Language, often including signs and mannerisms entirely different from the standard counterpart. Researchers have been studying this phenomenon [...]
More interesting thought on the differences in culture and outlook caused by language… just because since reading about languages recently, I’ve picked up again a book I got about halfway through a few years ago. Dreaming in Hindi is a book on language, and India, and friendships and drama, and culture, and battles with cancer, and seeing and [...]
Two things I love to talk about have collided: National Geographic has published in their July 2012 issue a stunning 33-page spread on the crisis small languages face in a world run by business, the Internet, and a demand for global citizens to all be able to communicate across political and cultural boundaries. On my [...]
I collect names. I love spotting a new one (my job working in naturalization records, etc. at the national archives means I get many opportunities to collect and find new muses), saying it, relishing the syllables and imaging what type of person is a Josefina or a Beryl or Basilia or Louise. But many of [...]
When we think of languages, there is a tendency to see them as always having been there, as changing maybe slightly over time, but being unending mostly. English speakers tend to have an overly bold attitude about their language, even without consciously being aware of it. English dominates the modern, global world–on the internet, airports, [...]
Not my mom. Translator Aya Watanabe has been translating tweets coming out of Japan in the weeks following the devastation they have been facing. I found her story, actually, also via Twitter, and she was reading some of her favorites. The translations are obviously longer than 140 characters in English, since in Japanese, far more can be [...]
“And what would your good name be, sir?” asked the greeter, with the Dickensian formality that only India has preserved. So begins writer Benjamin MacIntyre’s visit to the Jaipur Literature Festival (read it all here), an event that’s been held the last six years to relish in and appreciate the colorful wordplay, rhyming, and dose [...]