Gozitan author, Charles Daniel Saliba has just launched his latest book on the Maltese language. This one, featuring the latest developments in Maltese orthography, is aimed at self-learners who want to bring their knowledge up to date and to improve their grammar and spelling.

“It is not as easy as it seems because we speak it every day and we assume that it is very easy to write pidgin but it’s just like in English language where you have people who can speak the language very fluently, grammatically perfect but when it comes to writing it is a bit difficult and its same with what is now known as Nigerian Pidgin,” he said.

A new infographic shows that Chinese will soon overtake English as the dominant language online. At the end of 2011, 27 percent of web content was in English, while 24 percent was in Chinese. Despite that, the graphic’s creators, the digital agency Smartling, lament that the web is still not bilingual enough, with “56 percent of online content [being] English-only.”

When Shen Yuning announced he was planning to compile a Swahili-Chinese dictionary, most of his friends thought he was joking. Since that online post in December, Shen has compiled nearly 5,000 words, working at least 15 hours a day in Kenya and Tanzania with help from some Africans.

At this juncture in South Africa’s history, it may seem an odd time to write a book about the use of English in South Africa. The notion might seem regressive, colonial, even a bit politically incorrect. Mesthrie is quick to correct this. “Despite being a minority language in South Africa, English is the most-shared language,” said Mesthrie.

This Inuktitut Bible publication marks many firsts. For the first time in Canada, the entire translation was done by mother tongue (first language) speakers of the language rather than by missionaries. This is the first full Bible produced in Canada using the cutting edge computer tools distributed and supported by our CBS Translations office, which are transforming the way translations are being done around the world.

If you're one of the five remaining speakers of "Yuchi" -- a near-extinct Native American language in Oklahoma -- your tweets will look insane, even to those within your linguistic group. That's because whenever you type in the "@" character, which is a part of your alphabet, Twitter will (wrongly) think you're trying to refer to a different user, such as @Joe_Smith.

In its dialectal meaning, Picard is the name of an important linguistic family which covers a large territory in the north-west of France and the western part of the Belgian province of Hainaut. It is one of the Romance languages that make up the “langues d’oïl”, such as Lorrain, Champenois, Normand, Poitevin, Walloon etc.

The digitization of old texts has become fairly common - for instance, the Hebrew University of Jerusalem recently announced it was expanding the digital version of its Einstein archives - but, in something of a switch for the Internet era, the Historical Dictionary of the Hebrew Language is aiming for greater comprehensiveness than researchers say computers can yield.

BHUBANESWAR: From just 500 articles over a year back to 2,400 articles till now, Odia Wikipedia (or.wikipedia.org) has seen a drastic growth, both in terms of quality and quantity. Of the 286 languages in the Wikipedia, Odia Wikipedia today stands at the rank of 176.

RUTH Blindell, a teacher at the Bunscoill Ghaelgagh in St John’s, has published her first book in celebration of the Manx language, culture and mythical legends. Finlo and the Fairy Kings follows the Little People (fairies) as they battle to save the beautiful Dhoon Glen from the destructive plans of Mr Pratt, a cliff full of seagulls and a squadron of ruthless rodents.

Among the nearly 90,000 active contributors to Wikipedia, there are many different motivations for editing. For some, it's a hobby; for others it's a mission to advance free knowledge. For Ruben Hilare-Quispe, contributing to Wikipedia is a way to promote and protect his language and culture.

Linguist David Crystal describes English as "a vacuum cleaner of a language" — speakers merrily swipe some words from other languages, adopt others because they're cool or sound classy and simply make up other terms. Crystal believes every word has a story to tell, even the ones as commonplace as "and."

The Culture Ministry has launched an updated version of its online Korean language learning center to promote globalization of the language, officials said on Monday.

Indeed, all jokes aside, people from other parts of the country often are puzzled at the esotericism of Northern New Mexico -- with place names in Spanish, Tewa and other languages, and natural, cultural or historical references unknown elsewhere. Mark Cross aims to acclimate tourists, newcomers and even people who have spent years here but remain ignorant of the finer points, with his newly published Encyclopedia of Santa Fe and Northern New Mexico.

A remote community in Western Australia's Murchison region hopes an Indigenous language dictionary will encourage the younger generation of Wajarri people to learn more about their traditional language and culture.

Now, thanks to an amazing project in progress at the University of Minnesota and spearheaded by their Department of American Indian Studies, there’s a new online resource called “The Ojibwe Peoples Dictionary” that opens doors to the sounds and context of the indigenous Ojibwe language and will help preserve it.

BHUBANESWAR: What can be a better Utkal Divas gift than an e-mail written in Odia script? A group of Bhubaneswar-based young techies have developed a unique web portal, Odiamail.com, through which one can send e-mail, chat and communicate in eight Indian languages along with English. The site, growing more and more popular everyday, already has over 500 members within a week of its launch.

On April 13 Hall's complete interviews will be available online for the first time in both audio and text form. A sampling of those interviews currently is posted on the Dictionary of Smoky Mountain English website at www.cas.sc.edu/engl/dictionary. After April 13, the public can visit that website to find the address of the new website dedicated to Hall's work in capturing the stories and speech of pre-World War II Appalachia.

For as long as people have lived in North America, the land has been home to a wide variety of languages. Even now, as English is the dominant language in the United States, pockets of other languages exist. Most U.S. speakers of other languages also speak, or are learning, English, but the tapestry of languages is an integral part of the cultural history of our country.

Japanese is concise too: fans of haiku, poems in 17 syllables, can tweet them readily. Though Korean and Arabic require a little more space, tweeters routinely omit syllables in Korean words; written Arabic routinely omits vowels anyway. Arabic tweets mushroomed last year, though thanks to the uprisings across the Middle East rather than any linguistic features.

Lingua Franca Nova (LFN) is a creole-like auxiliary language with a simple and logical grammar. It was created by Dr C. George Boeree of Shippensburg University, Penn­sylvania, starting in 1965. Inspired by the historical Lingua Franca that was once used around the Mediterranean, it draws its vocabulary from Catalan, French, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish.

Wikipedia co-founder Jimmy Wales, 45, says Yoruba is the most popular African language for Wikipedia, with 29,000 pages. The Swahili Wikipedia version is second among African languages with 23,000. Other African languages on Wikipedia include Afrikaans, Hausa, and Zulu. Speaking in Lagos this week, Wales says his website is branching out from English.

Among the Indian languages, Telugu Wikipedia recently hit the 50,000 mark, a milestone that few Indian languages have crossed. Categorised under the Dravidian languages, Telugu shares space with Tamil, Malayalam and Kannada.

A new book that examines the relationship between Mi’kmaq language and landscape will be on store shelves this week. “The Language of this Land, Mi’kma’ki,” was co-authored by Saint Mary’s anthropologist Trudy Sable and Mi’kmaq linguist Bernie Francis, and published by Cape Breton University Press.

The final volume of the Dictionary of American Regional English (DARE), covering words beginning with "Si" to "Z," includes many Minnesotans' favorite euphemistic expletives as well as such colloquialisms as the snow/dirt mashup "snirt," the salutation "hey ya" and "woodchuck case" (a situation of necessity, one in which there is no choice).

I wanted to trace the visual lineage of the glyphs. How did they move from longhand to shorthand? What aspects were retained? How might their visual lineage help users remember the 86 characters, when on the face of it, the print seemed so different from the script? It was that mystery of how it was learned so dang quickly and how there was no lag in reading and writing rates after it moved to print.

It was the great Sequoyah (ca. 1770–1843) who invented the Cherokee syllabary, thereby making reading and writing in that language possible. He labored on his creation for years while his peers derided his efforts, some going so far as to denounce it as witchcraft.

...His life among his fellow linguists, however, has been far less idyllic, and debate about his scholarship is poised to boil over anew, thanks to his ambitious new book, “Language: The Cultural Tool,” and a forthcoming television documentary that presents an admiring view of his research among the Pirahã along with a darkly conspiratorial view of some of his critics.

The world's largest social networking site could soon be translated into Jersey's native language Jerriais. Tony Scott Warren from the Jerriais Office is working on translations for Facebook so the site can be viewed in the language.