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Posts in Language

Leigh Halfpenny’s close shave (or not)

Would you pay a fortune hiring a world-renowned star performer for your team and then leave him to fend for himself in a new world he doesn’t fully understand? We’ve blogged on exactly this subject before, but evidence continues to emerge that rugby clubs are just as bad as their footy counterparts when it comes

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Endangered language? Hooray!

“Critically endangered” doesn’t sound like anything much to boast about – but if you’re talking about the Cornish language, then it’s time to break out the bunting and uncork the champers. Up until December 2010, it was listed by UNESCO’s Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger as “extinct”, so this would appear to be

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Zuckerberg’s Great Wall of cynicism?

So the BBC are being their usual snarky selves about Mark Zuckerberg’s latest Mandarin exploit – a Chinese New Year speech in, yes, Chinese. Rather than lauding Zuck’s obvious linguistic achievement, Auntie chooses to lead with the insinuation that the whole thing was little more than a publicity stunt to butter up a country in

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Suis-je Charlie? Well, yes and no

Watching the wall-to-wall news coverage of the backlash to the recent events in Paris, I was particularly taken by the English-speaking media’s adoption of the « Je suis Charlie » slogan. And it got me thinking… Firstly, it’s commendable – indeed mandatory – that we should stand in solidarity with the victims of such an

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