Though English may be gaining an ever-greater toehold in the rest of the world, the United States appears to becoming increasingly polyglot. At the same time, first-generation immigrants are making landfall in far-flung locations throughout the U.S., rather than concentrating in a handful of urban centers. Those two trends spell trouble for courts with slim […]
Entries Tagged as 'linguistics'
Lost in Translation
March 10th, 2011 · 2 Comments
Tags:Arkansas·crime·Kiti·law·linguistics·Marshall Islands·Micronesia·Pohnpei·technology
Is Mili Spelin
April 23rd, 2010 · 2 Comments
Much love to Nicolas Sarkozy for showing off his language-geek credentials at a Parisian environmental conference. A less astute world leader might’ve taken the easy way out by namechecking Esperanto in an attempt to describe a United Nations draft treaty as difficult to parse. But Sarkozy dug much deeper into the linguistic crates, citing the […]
Tags:Esperanto·France·linguistics·Nicolas Sarkozy·Spelin·Volapük
First Contact: The English and the Inuit
July 1st, 2009 · 10 Comments
Continuing our ongoing First Contact series, today we’re gonna look back at the 1576 encounter between the English and the Inuit of Baffin Island. The details of the meet-up were recorded by one Christopher Hall, a member of a Martin Frobisher-led expedition in search of the fabled Northwest Passage to China. Upon first landing on […]
Tags:anthropology·Baffin Island·England·First Contact·history·Iniut·linguistics·Martin Frobisher