The World's Most Spoken Languages And Where They Are Spoken
This beautifully illustrated infographic (above), designed by South China Morning Post’s graphics director Alberto Lucas Lopéz, shows the most spoken known languages in the world and where they’re spoken by the 6.3 billion people included in the study. Based on records collated from the database Ethnologue, the infographic illustrates the wide-ranging facts and figures of the world’s living languages catalogued since 1951. “There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people. The 23 languages make up the native tongue of 4.1 billion people,” says Lopez on his infographic.
Everyone Speaks Text Message
Illustration by The Heads of State Illustration by The Heads of State How do you spell “N'Ko” in N'Ko? For years, the Web’s lingua franca was English. Speakers of French, Hindi and Urdu, Arabic, Chinese and Russian chafed at the advantage the Internet gave not only American pop culture but also its language.
Activities for correcting writing in the language classroom
How can teachers encourage learners to correct their own writing? Second-time winner of TeachingEnglish blog award, Cristina Cabal, offers a few tried and tested error-correction activities. Does every single writing error need to be corrected? In the learning of a second language, this is a question that stirs up great controversy.
12 Awesome Language Resources for the Word Nerd
I’m an unabashed word nerd. I majored in English and have been a high school English teacher for almost 30 years. I run an online program helping homeschoolers develop writing skills, and I manage this wordy blog and a wordy Facebook page.
The case of the missing “u”s in American English
Before you consciously became aware of your decision to read this article, your brain was already making the necessary preparations to click the link. There are a few crucial milliseconds between the moment when you’re consciously aware of a plan to act, and the moment you take action. This brief window is thought by some scientists to be the moment in time when we can exercise free will. It gives us the chance to consciously make a decision, suggesting we aren’t just slaves to our impulses. But, as the New Scientist reports, a study published in Neuroscience of Consciousness last year found that impulsive people have a shorter window of time between their awareness of an impending action and the act itself.
Why Do Americans and Brits Have Different Accents?
In 1776, whether you were declaring America independent from the crown or swearing your loyalty to King George III, your pronunciation would have been much the same. At that time, American and British accents hadn't yet diverged. What's surprising, though, is that Hollywood costume dramas get it all wrong: The Patriots and the Redcoats spoke with accents that were much closer to the contemporary American accent than to the Queen's English. It is the standard British accent that has drastically changed in the past two centuries, while the typical American accent has changed only subtly. Traditional English, whether spoken in the British Isles or the American colonies, was largely "rhotic." Rhotic speakers pronounce the "R" sound in such words as "hard" and "winter," while non-rhotic speakers do not.
The full transcript of Michelle Obama's powerful New Hampshire speech
My goodness! You guys are fired up! Well, let me just say hello everyone.
The subtle art of translating foreign fiction
Last year, I decided to treat myself to a new copy of Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan, a novel I have loved ever since I first read it as a teenager, and whose dreamy opening line in its original translation from the French by Irene Ash – “A strange melancholy pervades me to which I hesitate to give the grave and beautiful name of sadness” – I know by heart. But which one to get? In the end, I decided to go for something entirely new and ritzy, which is how I came to buy the Penguin Modern Classics edition, translated by Heather Lloyd. Some days later, in bed, I began reading it.
The secret language of South Asia’s transgender community — Quartz
In South Asia, there is a hidden language known only to the region’s hijra community. Found in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, the hijra are an old and marginalized group, whose members identify as men born with the souls of women. Hijras call themselves she-males and effigies, as well as kwaja sera, or the “guards of the harem,” a title that recalls their historical role serving monarchs in the region. These days, the hijra are known as performers and panhandlers.
Hip hop vocabulary compared between artists
Matt Daniels compared rappers’ vocabularies to find out who knows the most words. Literary elites love to rep Shakespeare’s vocabulary: across his entire corpus, he uses 28,829 words, suggesting he knew over 100,000 words and arguably had the largest vocabulary, ever.I decided to compare this data point against the most famous artists in hip hop. I used each artist’s first 35,000 lyrics. That way, prolific artists, such as Jay-Z, could be compared to newer artists, such as Drake.
Trump recorded having extremely lewd conversation about women in 2005
In this video from 2005, Donald Trump prepares for an appearance on “Days of Our Lives” with actress Arianne Zucker. He is accompanied to the set by “Access Hollywood” host Billy Bush. The Post has edited this video for length.
Stop. Using. Periods. Period.
Washington Post illustration; iStockphoto Have you ever watched parents try to text with their children? One hilarious type of misunderstanding goes like this:
