Deaf Voters ‘Unheard’ By Politicians

An estimated 90,000 deaf people in the UK rely on British Sign Language (BSL) to communicate – but only one political party has ever used it in its election broadcasts.

Tessa Padden, a television presenter and BSL translator currently involved with the BSL:UPTAKE project at Heriot-Watt University,believes this leaves many deaf people excluded from the democratic process.

Read more about British Sign Language and the election>>

Aliens go multilingual in Doctor Who

The new series of the epic Doctor Who hit the UK’s TV screens last night … Geronimo! and the Tardis hit Earth to find the Eleventh Doctor (Matt Smith) and his assistant Amy Pond (Karen Gillan) …

Scaringly the Doctor finds that Prisoner Zero can broadcast its messages through a live feed to all the people on Earth – in all their native languages. Read more

Millionth English Word Declared

A US web monitoring firm has declared the millionth English word to be Web 2.0, a term used to describe the latest generation of web products and services.  Other recent additions include Jai ho and slumdog, obviously from the film Slumdog Millionaire.

Global Language Monitor (GLM) searches the internet for newly coined terms, and once a word or phrase has been used 25,000 times, it recognises it.

Read more about how English words are monitored and recognised on the web>>

Irish Language Newspaper Closes

Ireland’s largest Irish language newspaper, Foinse, has closed down.  The paper which was published weekly on Saturdays had been struggling since 2007.  It is the second Irish language newspaper to fail in the last seven months – Lá Nua was closed in December 2008.

Read more about the loss of Irish language media>>

How Do We Sound?

Have you ever wondered how many accents there are in the UK? Or thought about the diverse range of words pronounced differently across the nation? The BBC website holds a whole archive of voice recordings as well as interesting information about the way we speak in the UK.

Listen to the UK’s interesting mix of accents and dialects>>

Here is the new www.languageadvantage.com!

Welcome to the new www.languageadvantage.com.   We have just completely redesigned www.languageadvantage.com, so that we can bring you more of the best and innovative courses in the language world more easily.   Plus, you can add your own stories, questions and reviews.   This means we will all get the language advantage much more quickly and claim our competitive advantage!

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