• 80 Beats reports on a proposal to protect New Orleans from risk of inundation by restoring the marshlands that once provided a natural buffer for the metropolis against the ocean.
• Anders Sandberg argues against the surgical sterilization of the transgendered on the grounds that it's not only intrusive, it's linked to effort to enforce a gender ( Read more... )

One of the interesting things about the recent Tunisian revolution is the language that Ben Ali spoke in a televised address before his departure. Instead of speaking Standard Arabic, Ben Ali spoke Tunisian Arabic.

According to an email from Youssef Gaigi posted by Gillian York:

Today’s speech shows definitely a major shift in Tunisia’s history.
( Read more... )

Open Democracy's N. Jayaram recently wrote an article describing how the people of Guangdong province successfully resisted the displacement of Cantonese by Putonghua on local television.

It all started with a proposal aired by Ji Keguang, an official of a municipal-level advisory body, the Chinese People’s Political Consultative Conference, to ( Read more... )

Canada's really a bilingual country on the ground, is it?

Canadian Forces personnel stationed in Colorado will get French lessons through an American firm, after the military received poor grades for its record on bilingualism, the Ottawa Citizen reported Wednesday ( Read more... )

Keith Spicer's Ottawa Citizen article "Still bilingual after all these years" is one article among many commemorating the 40th anniversary of official bilingualism in Canada.

Forty years ago today, Canada became officially bilingual. Broadly, the federal government would serve French-speakers as well as English-speakers in the language it taxed ( Read more... )

Dhruba Adhikari at Asia Times has come up with an interesting article, "Nepal plunges into politics of language," which describes how the Maoists who now govern Nepal are trying to deal with the country's multilingualism by privileging minority languages as much as possible.

The issue of official language(s) has never been as sensitive in Nepal as ( Read more... )

Over at A Fistful of Euros, Douglas Muir blogs about his recent visit to Senegal. He finds that this successful west African country is far more Francophone than recently-visited Burundi.

Gallicization seems to run deeper here than in Burundi. No, that’s not exactly right. More like: the European influences seems more assimilated. In Burundi, rich ( Read more... )

Daniele Archibugi's recent Open Democracy article "Which language for Europe?" tackles the question of how the European Parliament--and by implication, wider Europe--is to coalesce if it's becoming unmanageably multilingual.

More than half of Europe's citizens did not vote in the elections for the European Parliament, but the institution faces ( Read more... )

Conservative federal cabinet minister Vic Toers is outraged that parliamentarians suspect him incapable of implementing official bilingualism in the Treasury Board on account of the fact that he doesn't speak French.

Tory cabinet minister Vic Toews accused Liberals of insulting all unilingual anglophones Tuesday after two MPs questioned his ( Read more... )

Solani Ngobeni, letter-writer to South Africa's Times, writes about the challenges facing South Africa's languages. Under various segregationist rules, first English then Afrikaans were imposed on the wider population. Why can't it be the turn of South Africa's other languages?

Given that we are now in power, can we use this leverage to develop ( Read more... )