Languages Online: The Best of November 2017

Here are our favourite stories about language from last month. Let's dive straight in...

10: 6 Steps To Listen Your Way To A Better Accent In Any Language on I Will Teach You a Language

If you're struggling with accurately replicating the accent in your foreign language, this article shows you how to do it by just listening. While it only features 4 steps when we first published it on our Facebook Page, two more steps have been added. This article just keeps on giving.

9: Kazakhstan Is Changing Its Alphabet - Here's Why on The Independent

This article covers the news that Kazakhstan is looking to adopt the Latin alphabet. While the country has traditionally used the Russian Cyrillic script, decisions have been made to use the same alphabet as many countries in the West do in order to improve the country's global integration.

8: J.K. Rowling's 'Harry Potter' Translated To Scots, Marking 80th Language on NPR

Harry Potter fans north of the border (if you're in the UK) should rejoice at the news that the first book has been translated into Scots. You should listen to the interview on NPR to hear a sample of it.

7: We put Google's new language-translation headphones to the test with 10 different languages — here’s how they did on Business Insider

There's been a lot of buzz about Google's headphones and how they'll do away with translators by giving everyone access to live interpreting wherever they go. However, as Business Insider found out, they're not ideal.

6: Why written languages look alike the world over on Science

While you wouldn't say that the Latin alphabet and the Cyrillic script are the same (Kazakhstan is looking to change from the latter to the former, after all), there are a number of characters in both that have very common roots. In this article, you'll find out why there are so many similarities between human writing systems.

5: No more middots: French PM clamps down on gender-neutral language on The Guardian

The French language's latest controversy comes in the form of gender. French is now trying to include gender-neutral versions of words to rectify the problem with middots, a punctuation mark that looks like a full-stop but in the middle of a line. Traditionalists, including the French PM, are not happy.

4: Five languages Brexit Britons should learn on Financial Times

Without trying to speculate on the future of the UK, it's fair to say that it probably wouldn't be able to survive as an isolated nation like North Korea. This means that languages are still going to be useful in the future and here's an interesting article on which languages might be useful for those in the UK.

3: From inboxing to thought showers: how business bullshit took over on The Guardian

If you're like me and you hate business English, you should definitely check out this article. Unfortunately, it looks like the ridiculous use of English employed in offices and boardrooms around the country isn't going anywhere, though.

2: What are the Most Spoken Languages in the World? on Fluent in 3 Months

Which is the most spoken language in the world? Should you just count native speakers or should you consider how many people speak it as a foreign language? What about those who learn the language as a foreign language? There are a lot of questions to answer just to answer a seemingly-simple question. This article aims to address a few of them.

1: A ‘critical juncture’ for language learning in the UK on Times Higher Education

Our most popular article this month was on the future of learning languages in the UK. As you may have heard, the UK is leaving the European Union. With a potentially-massive political shift occurring, the UK has a lot of questions to answer about how it's going to conduct itself in the future and how it teaches foreign languages is one of the biggest questions.

Were there any great language articles in November that we missed? Feel free to tell us and our readers about them in the comments below.

Kazakh Constitution Day: The Languages Of Kazakhstan

Today marks Kazakh Constitution Day, just as yesterday marked the Slovak National Uprising. In honour of this Kazakh national holiday, we'll be honouring the country with a look at the languages spoken there. Unfortunately, Kazakhstan isn't a massively well-known country in the West and the majority of westerners' knowledge is made up from fallacies portrayed in Sacha Baron Cohen's film Borat.

Though we can still enjoy the film knowing that the country was purposely picked because many viewers had never heard of the place, today we'd prefer to at least dispel some of the myths garnered from the film that was better at exposing American ignorance than insulting Kazakhs.

The Parliament of Kazakhstan in Astana, the capital.

The country of Kazakhstan is the world's ninth largest country and the largest landlocked country, meaning it has no coastline, in the world. While this may be disappointing for you beach dwellers, it should be noted that the country is subject to an interesting linguistic landscape.

The country's two official languages are Kazakh and Russian. The principal official language, Kazakh, is spoken by around 11 million people worldwide. Though the majority of its speakers reside in Kazakhstan, it is also spoken in China, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Tajikistan, Turkey, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, Uzbekistan, Russia, and Iran.

Of the 11 million speakers of Kazakh, 10 million of them live in Kazakhstan, making this Turkic language principally found in today's country of interest. In Kazakhstan and Mongolia, the language is written using the Cyrillic alphabet, though in China it is written using an abjad derived from Arabic.

From roughly 1813 to 1907, Kazakhstan was under the rule of the Russian Empire. It was during this time that the Russian language was introduced into Kazakhstan in an official capacity, particularly in schools, where it was somewhat resented. That said, the Russian language still holds official capacity in Kazakhstan and though it isn't the language of the state, it is still expected to be used in official documents and other important-sounding stuff.

A large number of Russian immigrants began arriving in the late 19th century leaving Kazakhstan with a large Russian-speaking population. Following the rule of the Russian Empire, it only took until 1920 before Kazakhstan was then under rule by the Soviet Union, albeit as an autonomous republic, which left the country with Russian influences.

On December 16, 1991, Kazakhstan was the last nation to become independent from the Soviet Union and though the nation is just over 3 months from celebrating its independence, we much preferred the idea of celebrating August 30, 1995, when Kazakhstan approved its constitution, outlining "freedom, quality and concord."