Multilingual Literature submission deadline: 12/15/09!

The White House website announced that the State Department has prepared translations of President Obama’s major “A New Beginning” speech delivered at Cairo University .

There are translations into 13 languages so far: Arabic, Chinese, Dari, French, Hebrew, Hindi, Indonesian, Malay, Pashto, Persian, Punjabi, Russian, Turkish, Urdu and Portuguese. And at the […]

Many of you may have seen this or even written about it (wink) but for those who haven’t, it seems backwards thinking of the 20th century has carried well into the 21st: There’s been coverage recently of the U.S. Army’s recent dismissal of Lt. Dan Choi, an openly gay Arabic “linguist” who had served in […]

From the Lion King, one line from the Hula Song in 17 languages: Arabic, Brazilian Portuguese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Hebrew, Italian, Mex. Spanish, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, and Swedish. A video tailor-made for FIT!

On Sunday Jen, a fellow CAL student, and I went to the San Francisco International Film Festival (SFIFF) at the Sundance (formerly the Kabuki) to view New Muslim Cool. This film is a documentary about Islam, Muslim youth, identity, and Hip Hop culture. I found out about the screening because it was on my friend’s […]

A recent post on Lexiblog has a list of the top ten languages hardest to learn, according to “language enthusiasts”:

1. Icelandic
2. Russian or Mandarin
3. Arabic
4. Mandarin
5. Hungarian
6. English
7. Hindi
8. Cantonese
9. Chinese
10. Tamil

What are some of the hardest languages YOU have acquired? What made them hard?

After being gently prodded to do a “post” on this, rather than simply offer an “aside,” I thought I’d write up “25 Language-Related Random Things” about me, inspired by the Facebook phenomenon taking the Internet by storm.

1. Sometimes when I am writing quickly in Bengali, I use Hindi letters.
2. When I was […]

This has been a rather eventful month for road signs across the globe, so here’s a short round up of some of the more interesting news that caught my attention in January..

The Birmingham City Council, UK, has decided to drop possessive apostrophes from road signs, to the dismay of many, particularly the Apostrophe […]