Language Museum

I like a bit of language fun, and also think llamas are awesome. So I thought I’d share with you the amazing Llama Font!

The website is very simple – just type in whatever you like and click ‘llamify’ and the site will convert into cute llama letters. Here’s an example.

For me, alpacas are superior to llamas. Anyone know of an alpaca font website??

Today is Día E, a day celebrating the Spanish language. Spanish is the second most spoken native language in the world (after Mandarin), and the third most spoken on the internet.

The Cervantes Institute is hosting 78 free parties in 44 countries to celebrate the day. Events will be held in London, Leeds and Manchester in England. If you can’t make it to any of these cities, take a look at the Día E website to see videos of Spanish speakers saying their favourite words – Shakira’s is meliflua.

As regular readers will know, I have been attempting to learn Spanish, and I’m going to use Día E to re-motivate myself. I don’t have a favourite word yet, but will update you when I do.

A New York City linguist is giving hope to a dying language in Croatia.

Zvjezdana Vrzic is originally from Croatia, and grew up in a household with Vlashki roots. The historical homeland of the Vlashki language (also known as Istro-Romanian) is the Istrian Peninsula in Croatia’s north-west. The language has been dying out since World War II, when emigration made the population smaller.

Vrzic initiated a project to save the language after she became a professor at New York University and connected with the community of Vlashki speakers in the city.

“I want to create a digital archive — a regional digital archive — where all the materials available on the language, including those that I’m collecting myself, will be deposited,” Vrzic says. “[I want to create] an archive that will become available to the community members. And I’m kind of bringing a different angle to it by making it very technologically-inspired.” (Source: Radio Free Europe)

Crucially, Vrzic realises that to save the language, the community needs to work to revitalise it. And it seems Vrzic has had some success – in Croatia her team is working with locals to plan a Vlashki heritage centre and has already organised well-attended language workshops.

To listen a proverb spoken in Vlashki, as well as a folk song, click here.

I found an interesting article on ScienceDaily.com reporting on research that says bilingual people can’t ‘turn off’ their second language when not using it.

Not being bilingual myself, I have always assumed there is some kind of switch in the brain when you choose to speak in a different language. This appears not to be the case:

According to a recent study published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science, it appears humans are not actually capable of “turning off” another language entirely. Psychologists Eva Van Assche, Wouter Duyck, Robert Hartsuiker and Kevin Diependaele from Ghent University found that knowledge of a second language actually has a continuous impact on native-language reading.

The article goes on to say:

According to the psychologists, it is the overlap of the two languages that speeds up the brain’s activation of cognates. So even though participants did not need to use their second language to read in their native-language, they still were unable to simply “turn it off.” It appears, then, that not only is a second language always active, it has a direct impact on reading another language–even when the reader is more proficient in one language than another.

I’d be interested to hear any anecdotes from bilinguals about their experience with this.