Finland has two official languages: Finnish and Swedish. The government also recognizes an additional handful of regional languages like Sámi or Karelian, as well as local signed languages—of all the languages with some sort of legal status in Finland, none of them are English. Despite this, the mayor of Helsinki—the nation’s capital and largest city—recently…
The Caribbean Sea encompasses over 7,000 islands, including the famous tourist destinations of Trinidad and Tobago, Jamaica, and Barbados. Taken all together, the Caribbean islands, sometimes referred to as the West Indies, are incredibly diverse, yet they share distinct historical traits, behaviors, and values which have created a Caribbean culture and identity. For countries like…
It’s no secret that English is the most widely spoken language on the planet—with a native speaker population of 370 million and a learner population of 1.5 billion worldwide, the language remains on an upward trend, oftentimes at the cost of linguistic diversity in regions that have historically had high levels of multilingualism. For example,…
The director of Spain’s Instituto Cervantes applauded the country’s linguistic diversity and said that people should “understand the enormous wealth of living in a country with so many languages.” During a meeting with the heads of organizations that promote Galician, Basque, and Catalan, Luis García Montero affirmed that the co-official languages contribute “different ways of…
Long-established group of English-language schools, British Study Centres (BSC) is now offering free English lessons for local, non-native speakers. The classes aim to increase the quality of their students’ lives, so they can be independent and live without language limitations. The free course was established as part of BSC’s Teacher training, so their CELTA students…
The English language has progressed over time without a handbook or guidance, so one would think that the structure within the language would be nonexistent. A new study, however, proves otherwise. The study, by Kristian Berg of the University of Oldenburg and Mark Aronoff of Stony Brook University is titled “Self-Organization in the Spelling of…