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Irish Gaelic, or Gaeilge, or simply Irish, is the national language of the Republic of Ireland. The language is related to Scottish Gaelic, as well as Manx, a language used in the “Isle of Man.” “Gaelic” is actually a term that describes various languages the…
In Sanskrit, the name Sri Lanka means “Venerable Island.” The name comes from the words sri, meaning venerable, and lanka, which means island. The island nation is surrounded by the Indian Ocean, though it is in close proximity to India and Maldives. Sri Lanka is…
Spanish. One of the romance languages. A language spoken by roughly 406 million native speakers; with 60 million people speaking it as their second language and around 20 million more studying it as a foreign language. Spanish is the second most spoken language in the…
Annyeonghaseyo! This is the basic greeting that you are bound to hear when you meet a Korean national. This is a formal greeting that is applicable to everyone, particularly for people that you have just met and for elders. The informal greeting is a shortened…
Change is the one thing we can expect. Whatever social and cultural changes are going on in the world, our language is the first to reflect it. We have to constantly come up with new words and new definitions for new things that we do….
Vietnamese or “tiếng Việt” in the vernacular, is the official and national language of the Vietnamese people or “Kinh” living in Vietnam and the Vietnamese people located in many parts of the world since 1954. Several ethnic minorities in Vietnam also speak Vietnamese as their…
Language experts and other agencies, including UNESCO are one in being concerned about the fast disappearance of world languages. In the United States alone, there are close to 170 native languages that are already categorized as vulnerable, endangered, severely endangered languages and critically endangered. UNESCO…
The year 2012 has given us much to remember by, and as with any year, it has also given us some new words in our daily language. These words may not yet necessarily be in any recently published dictionary, but they can be heard spoken…
Everyone knows that as a world organization, nothing symbolizes unity, cooperation and understanding more than the United Nations. Better known as the UN, the United Nations is an international organization founded in 1945, at the heels of the Second World War. The UN was intended to…
With less than half a million native speakers, Aramaic, the language of Jesus is about to be extinct. Aramaic is a living language that belongs to the Semitic language group, which includes Arabic, Tigrinya, Amharic and Hebrew. It has been spoken by countless peoples for 3,000…
Travelers to foreign countries usually rely on a traveler’s guide to tour a new country with ease, and a phrase book is an invaluable basic source of information when it comes to communicating in a foreign language. However, there will be instances when you would…
When Victor Hugo first published his classic novel Les Misérables, little did he know that his French historical novel would be translated into other languages and evolve into various adaptations on stage and film, including an award winning movie version in 2012. Hugo’s highly complex…
