Language is Everything

Aiming high

Language is Everything was featured in the Goole Times last week as we launched our latest training and development programme: within two years, every one of our operations staff will have a Level 3 NVQ in Customer Service.

 

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Promoting the use of Spanish on the internet

The Royal Spanish Academy, the official guardian of the Spanish language, has launched a project to 'crowd-read' the classic novel Don Quixote. The book, which was written by Miguel de Cervantes in 1605, has been divided into 2,149 segments, each of which will be read by a volunteer (in Spanish) and uploaded onto YouTube.

  

"The Spanish language does not occupy the space that it deserves on the Internet," said Dario Villanueva, the secretary of the academy. "We want to denounce that and do something to correct it."

You can sign up for the project here.

In our 2009 annual report, Language is Everything asked the question: "Which languages are 'punching above their weight' online?" We looked at 117 languages with more than 5 million speakers and calculated the 'relative online strength' of each one. Our list was headed by languages from the Nordic countries, with English ranked 15th and Spanish 38th. You can read the full story here (pages 8-9).

Meanwhile, the Swedish Academy announced yesterday that Peru's Mario Vargas Llosa, one of the Spanish-speaking world's most distinguished authors, was the winner of the 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature.
 

305 and counting

The Languages Work Pledge Counter is up to 305 (see our previous post). Signatories include Arsène Wenger, the Arsenal manager, who said: "Learning languages helped me to get where I wanted to be in English football. When I learned English, I never imagined that one day I would manage Arsenal, but learning a language completely changed my life."

When Language is Everything signed the Pledge we said:

"We fully support the pledge. We would also welcome wider debate on the question of which languages young people should be learning: we are encouraged by the strong rise in the number of GCSE entries for Mandarin, Arabic and Japanese, for example. We also believe that the UK could do more to capitalise on its 'hidden' multilingual talent: according to one study, 30% of all London schoolchildren speak a language other than English at home."

You can sign the Pledge here.