The Latest Breaking News from Languages

Yiddish is a familiar presence in contemporary English speech. Many people use or at least know the meaning of words like chutzpah (audacity), schlep (drag) or nosh (snack).

With the 78th Cannes International Film Festival underway this week, there is little doubt that one topic will be central to conversations among filmmakers, sales agents and journalists: United States President Donald Trump’s threat to impose a 100 per cent tax on foreign-made films.

I’m in Basel, Switzerland – host city of this year’s Eurovision Song Contest – to present research about treatment of songwriters in the contest. While I’m here, I’ll be conducting field research and attending one of the shows. Here’s what I’ll be looking out for during this year’s competition.

For the time being it’s dominant – but as the Romans could tell you, nothing lasts for ever

If there are few speakers left of a language, how does a community revive it? In our current era, 3,000 languages are at risk of extinction due to the pressures of colonization, globalization, forced cultural assimilation, environmental devastation and other factors.

From ensuring your swearwords are in languages other than English to outrageous euphemisms, contestants in the famously camp extravaganza have ways to avoid being toned down …

Co-organised by translator Polly Barton, Translated By, Bristol will feature conversations between writers and their translators, plus a ‘translation duel’

With iOS 18.4, Apple is adding local language integration into the OS, and it's a move that makes iPhones that much more accessible to a wider audience in India.

Google has rolled out multilingual support for Audio Overviews in NotebookLM. The Audio Overview feature is one of the most popular features, and now it

Google NotebookLM’s Audio Overviews have added dozens of new languages to its AI-generated podcasts.

From the moment we are born (and even before that, in utero), we tune into the languages around us. This includes the accents they are spoken in.