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Johnson: Different tongues, common homes
IT’S not easy being a multilingual country. But that is no excuse for making it harder on yourself. Shortly after taking power following the ousting of Victor Yanukovych, Ukraine’s new government made the unforced error of revoking a 2012 law which granted the Russian language an official status (alongside Ukrianian) in regions where Russian-speakers predominate. […]
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What Britain’s county dialects can tell us about the national character
Take a linguistic tour a holus-bolus fidge-fadge, if you will around some of Britain’s most charming forgotten words When I examined the wonderful collection of glossaries of county dialects I realised just how monastic was the zeal with which the Victorian lexicographers went about their compiling. Just as they collected the rocks, butterflies and ancient […]
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Bright Passages
Before the fault-finding resumes, here’s another small sampling of sparkling prose from recent editions. After Deadline http://ift.tt/1fk9TkK
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Mind your slanguage, and don’t be an erk. YOLO
Slang should be celebrated, not condemned. It enriches our language from bloomers to booty, from cool to ceebs, and from doing a Lohan to LOLZ The borderline-cult film Mean Girls contains an amusing insight into young people’s eagerness to leave their linguistic trademark on the world. Schoolgirl Gretchen Wieners describes any pleasant situation as "fetch" […]
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Johnson: OK computer
JOHNSON’s first foreign-language class was typical: a gaggle of 14-year olds, hormones raging, are gathered in a classroom when Señora White strolls in. ¡Hola y bienvenidos a la clase de español! Puberty is a terrible time to begin a language. One’s own parents are embarrassing enough. But to repeat nonsense words with strange gurgling and burbling sounds […]
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Lose the language and you lose Shakespeare
His plays don’t become ‘accessible’ by translating them into ‘yoofspeak’. There’s nothing left to access Down with the Bard The news that Shakespeare is being translated into yoofspeak ("Dere was somefing minging in de state of Denmark," et cetera), while revolting, of course, struck me as not exactly news. Hasn’t this been done before? Or […]