Salon.com has a cool review of Arika Okrent’s book In the Land of Invented Languages (2009). By invented languages, she means “a language with its own fully constructed vocabulary and grammar, which is potentially or hypothetically capable of replacing the flawed, irregular, piecemeal “natural” languages virtually all of us speak.” Here’s a fun […]

Hi Fitizens, it’s been a while since the last poll, and by popular demand (in my head), I decided to bring back the FIT Poll! Get crackin’! I expect to see at least three votes by the time this night is over. 😛

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A Republican Texan legislator, Betty Brown, created an uproar Tuesday by suggesting, during House Elections Committee testimony, that Asian-American voters should use names which are “easier for Americans to deal with.” Ramey Ko, a rep for the Organization of Chinese Americans, had earlier stated “that people of Chinese, Japanese and Korean descent often have […]

Last Thursday, UNESCO unveiled the new (online) Atlas of World Languages, claiming that 2,500 (36%) of the 6,900 languages spoken worldwide are endangered. The top three countries facing the loss of the most languages are: 1. India (with 196 endangered languages); 2. The United States (with 192); and Indonesia (with 147).

Nearly 200 languages […]

“Western technology companies have misunderstood the linguistic landscape of India, where English is spoken proficiently by only about a tenth of the population and even many college-educated Indians prefer the contours of their native tongues for everyday speech,” according to Quillpad creator Ram Prakash, the New York Times reports today. In the last […]