A successful actor has the ability to place themselves inside the head of another person/see the world from a different perspective; which, when you think about it, is not too dissimilar to the modus operandi of a successful linguist. This started me wondering whether you might expect actors to have an above-average proficiency with languages (well OK, it was rather a slow day in the office), which in turn led me to an interesting online article about actors who are read more

It’s Friday, and the BBC is featuring “favourite franglais phrases” (try saying that three times) in preparation for le weekend. It’s OK, I do have a slightly more insightful blog post on the way; but in the meantime, I wanted to make sure regular readers didn’t miss out on the fun.

I’d have liked to add a little beauty I found in a translation yesterday, in which users of a small piece of safety equipment were advised to “clipser” the read more

Thanks to Antonio for pointing me to an interesting article in The Economist on the subject of invented languages. Not surprisingly, Esperanto gets a prominent mention – but following the flurries of interest from that esteemed community in response to our recent articles on the language, I’ll try to avoid poking that hornet’s nest again for the near future.

The Economist article seems to have been prompted by the author’s observation that over five million people are exposed every week to read more

I do not personally speak any of the Scandinavian languages, but I have always found it interesting how Norwegian, Danish and Swedish are meant to be mutually intelligible. They are listed as separate official languages, though – so surely there must be a fairly substantial difference between them, right? It’s sometimes claimed that Italians, Spanish and Portuguese can understand each other to some extent when they speak slowly, but not to the point of having a fluent conversation.

Could the difference read more