October 16th, the birthday of Noah Webster,  is Dictionary Day.  As word nerds, we are big fans of dictionaries, and couldn't do our jobs without them.  Here are a few suggestions on how you can celebrate an importance resource which we often take for granted.

Prevent a word from becoming extinct.  You can find words that are rarely used at www.savethewords.org.  The idea is you adopt a word and begin to use it so that the word doesn't disappear.  If you have a favorite old word that is in danger of dying, you can contact Save the Words and suggest they add it to their list.

Learn a new word. Sign up for the daily email from A.Word.A.Day to learn five new words a week, or just open your favorite dictionary at a random page to discover a new word.

Coin a new word. The Washington Post's Mensa Invitational asks participants to take a word and alter it by adding, subtracting, or changing a letter, and create a new definition.  Recent entries included:

• Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high.
• Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn't get it.
• Incoulatte: To take coffee intravenously when you are running late.

 If you've ever made up a new word, share it with the world!

The LPGA now offers mobile language labs for players who want to improve their language skills.  This is a notable change from the tour's position two years ago when it proposed penalizing or even suspending players who did not speak English fluently. The sessions are optional, and players pay the $40 hourly fee out of their own pockets.

Read more about this language initiative here.

Source: NPR

Since its earliest days, the Internet filled us with the hope of uniting all of humanity. With information traveling at the speed of light, we thought, geographic location wouldn’t matter and anyone who shared our interests would be within reach.

But there’s an age-old problem working against our utopian dreams of the web uniting the world: the language barrier. After all, it doesn’t matter what you have access to if you can’t read it.

In the first couple decades of the Internet, we had a simple, if unsustainable, solution. Most people used English — even if it wasn’t their native language.

Click here to read more.

Source: Memeburn

"The overwhelming power of the English-speaking media would have you believe that social networking services such as Facebook, Twitter and MySpace are the only web spaces where people are connecting. But when you consider that the vast majority of people using the internet are non-English speakers, then you start to realise that there are huge, successful social networks in the world that are under-reported by major global news organisations."

A list of 11 world-wide social networking sites that are popular outside the United States and among non-English speakers can be found here.

As China swiftly expands its reach across Latin America, a pilot program in Aguascalientes aims to introduce students to the Mandarin language and make them more competitive in the job market.

State authorities launched the pilot language program in Aguascalientes, a working-class city, in hopes of jumping on the Chinese bandwagon. As China swiftly expands its reach across Latin America, Mexico is experiencing a flurry of new Chinese investments in traditional targets like nickel mines and in newer areas like car-part factories and electronics.

Chinese was introduced this school year for fourth-, fifth- and sixth-graders, a total of 126 students, and will be continued every year.

Since 2001, students at Pedro Garcia have been immersed in English from first grade. In hopes of maintaining the English, the students are taught Mandarin in English. In other words, the translation goes from English to Chinese, not Spanish to Chinese.

They take five hours a week of Mandarin, four hours a week of English.

 

You can read the complete article in the LA Times.