Recently, Bonaventure Dossou learned of an alarming tendency in a popular AI model. The program described Fon—a language spoken by Dossou’s mother and millions of others in Benin and neighboring countries—as “a fictional language.”
This result, which I replicated, is not unusual. Dossou is accustomed to the feeling that his culture is unseen by technology that so easily serves other people. He grew up with no Wikipedia pages in Fon, and no translation programs to help him communicate with his
Hundreds of
the world’s endangered
and threatened languages
are spoken
in and around New York City.
One project set out to document them.
The Endangered Languages of New York By
Humans are incredibly diverse – and it’s marketing’s job to respect, engage, and nurture that.
Expanding a B2B business from English-only strategies to regional, multi-language campaigns can absolutely be the turning point of your success. In fact, it’s hard to believe that not everyone’s taking advantage of it.
Mass-market, English-only campaigns cost a ton of money. And, with today’s expectation for a high level of personalization across the customer experience, they don’t really bring much to the table.
Multi-language ad
Growing up in the bilingual city of Kyiv in the 1990s, I studied the Ukrainian language like a museum object—intensely, but at a distance, never quite feeling all of its textures or bringing it home. Back then, in that part of the country, Ukrainian was reserved for formal settings: schools, banks, and celebrations, often infused with a performative flare of ethnic pride. Russian dominated the mundane and the intimate: gossiping with friends during recess, writing in a journal, arguing with
Princess Anne impressed crowds in Aachen earlier this week when she opened the CHIO Equestrian Festival with a short speech in German.
The Princess Royal, 72, has travelled to Germany more than 50 times and has also visited every continent, so perhaps it’s no surprise that she’s brushed up on her language skills along the way, but what about the rest of the royal family?
Travelling the globe for engagements and overseas tours means they have the opportunity to be
For big fans of James Cameron’s Avatar, the 13-year wait between the original and this year’s sequel probably felt near interminable. But die-hard fans might have counted with a bit more agony and say it’s actually been vomrra zìsìt, or “15 years.”
I’m not implying that Avatar rots the brain. Rather, the blue-skinned Na’vi people, who inhabit the planet Pandora in Cameron’s universe, have four digits per hand. As a result, their language—painstakingly built from scratch for the
There are many programming languages to learn.
For SEO, the programming language you choose depends on what you plan to do with that language and how you plan to implement changes from that language.
When SEO professionals create programs for SEO, they typically want to do some combination of these four things:
According to Yoko Tawada, literature should always start from zero. She is a master of subtraction, whose characters often find themselves stripped of language in foreign worlds. They are, for the most part, at the mercy of circumstances: a literate circus bear betrayed by her publisher, an interpreter who loses her tongue, a nineteenth-century geisha discussing theology with an uncomprehending Dutch merchant. But their creator—a novelist, a poet, and a playwright—has chosen her estrangement. Tawada, who was born in Tokyo
There are many languages throughout the world that have survived only in the tiniest of pockets.
There is a language in Nepal that doesn’t have a word for green, a language on two Pacific islands invented by the mutineers of HMS Bounty in the late 18th century, a language in the U.S spoken fluently by just six people and one in Mexico that calls a radio ‘a thing that stands there singing’.
These and many more are explored in fascinating
