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Spoken tomahtoes, sung tomaytoes
My English has a Dutch flavour, especially in speech. I’m not much aware of it while I’m talking, but when I listen to my recorded voice (here for instance), I can hear the tell-tale signs. Scratch off...
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Vietnamese (12): Lindsay’s take
Lindsay Williams ‘learns, teaches, blogs, vlogs, eats, sleeps and breathes everything language’, as she herself puts it. In a word: Lindsay does languages, and that’s the name of her website. Earlier...
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Catalan or Spanish: Deciding which language to speak in Barcelona
Alex Rawlings is a Barcelona-based polyglot who recently exited from Britain. If you want to peep into the mind and daily life of a person speaking a dozen or so languages, follow his blog. Here’s a...
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Around the world in 12 publishers (so far)
Babel is on a translating spree! Today I learnt about the twelfth edition (without counting the audiobook), and this one is particularly close to my heart: Vietnamese. Nhã Nam of Hanoi will publish it....
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Learn one language, get one free
My Dutch-language book Taaltoerisme (2012) included a chapter about Limburgish, the regional language that ‘I was fed with the porridge spoon’, as the Dutch idiom goes – my mother tongue, that is to...
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Around the world in 14 publishers (so far)
Babel is on a translating spree! Today I learnt about the fourteenth separate edition, and it’s frankly quite an unexpected one: Greek! Metaíchmio (or Metaíxmio, Metaíhmio – several transcriptions of...
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Linguistics in Dutch society
Linguist Marc van Oostendorp is a professor of Dutch language and academic communication at Nijmegen, as well as a prolific writer pouring out high-quality popular books, columns, daily blog posts,...
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An m hidden in plain sight
You know how things can stare you in the face and you still somehow manage to overlook them? As in that famous video where a big guy in a gorilla outfit escapes most viewers’ attention? It’s happened...
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A cosmonought from Awestria
You know that game where you keep translating a sentence back and forth between two languages, until the original statement is only a vage memory? It also works with transcription between alphabets. I...
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Podcast: Africa’s relaxed multilingualism
Chapter 12 of Babel, which is about Swahili, discusses how Africans think nothing of mastering several languages. Many people speak at least three: their mother tongue, their region’s or country’s...
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Living Yiddish: an insider’s observations
I recently had a fascinating correspondence with a reader who grew up in a Yiddish-speaking environment. She has allowed me to publish her emails, but prefers to remain anonymous. As per her request, I...
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John McWhorter: ‘When I learn something I want to share it’
During the interview Why is it important for a linguist to engage with a general audience? If languages go extinct, why is that a loss people should care about? These are two of the questions that I...
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A professor at boiling point
My invitation to the readers of Babel and Lingua to let me know what they think has produced a steady stream of emails, most of them interesting and many heart-warming. Occasionally, however, the...
View ArticleBabel: global languages in a provincial town
The world’s most widely spoken languages – the subject of Babel – are also widespread outside their countries of origin. In my city, for instance. And probably in yours as well.
View ArticleTen reasons to study Vietnamese (and 5 to regret it)
Last year, my friend Huyền and I gave a presentation at the Polyglot Conference in Ljubljana titled ’10 Reasons to Study Vietnamese (And 5 to Regret it)’. Since she couldn’t come to Europe at the time,...
View ArticleA prize for Babel!
On Saturday 5 October, I was honoured to win the Onze Taal/ANV Language Book Prize 2019. The prize-giving ceremony took place during the biennial conference of Onze Taal, an NGO dedicated to the Dutch...
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“Those reviewers on Amazon are ____________ [fill in the blank]”
Blogger and teacher Larry Davidson from Weston, MA had a close look at the reviews of Babel at amazon.com. And like myself, he didn’t like what he saw. And he went on to do what I could never do:...
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Welcome back to Indo-Europe
It’s happened again. In spite of good resolutions, and before even making a full recovery from the previous bout, I’ve contracted a new language. For over two years, I suffered from Vietnamese. That...
View ArticleCape Week’s End: week 11
In which I’m dismayed to discover that even the most basic linguistic jargon may cause confusion. Also, what was my Peak of the Working Week moment? (Dutch spoken, English subtitles. Or Dutch...
View ArticleA Dutch hoe and other non-hip hop words
English has hundreds of expressions containing the word Dutch or Dutchman. Some are in common use, whereas others are specialised, regional or outright archaic. This video has me mucking about with...
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