So far, we’ve looked at the multilingual nations South Africa and India. In continuing our look at countries with multiple official languages, our next visit is to North America. Come with us as we look at the languages of the Great White North, the land known for its maple syrup, kindness, and Canucks (other hockey teams(…)

The Bard may be long gone but his influence on the English language persists hundreds of years after he penned his last work. William Shakespeare created new words and phrases all the time for his plays and poetry, and a lot of them surprisingly still persist today. When we’re not making use of his plot(…)

The English language is both complex and quirky. Its idioms, words that aren’t pronounced at all like they’re spelled,  and confusing (or contradictory) rules, all from a part of the wonderful language we call English. So don’t be a nincompoop and stop your lollygagging, and read onto to learn about some of the craziest English(…)

In the Merriam-Webster dictionary the term politically correct is defined as “conforming to a belief that language and practices which could offend political sensibilities (as in matters of sex or race) should be eliminated.” While erasing problematic language from our rhetoric is great, it seems these days that people tend to get offended over every(…)

There are plenty of people who travel and live abroad, yet somehow manage to get by with only knowing English. The falling rate of people learning languages in the U.K. and U.S. perhaps points to a sort of English-speaker arrogance—because English is considered such a global language, we tend to assume that everywhere we go(…)

Believe it or not, English still remains today’s lingua franca. Whether you are a native English speaker from the US, Canada, the UK, India, Australia, South Africa, or any of the other numerous English-speaking countries around the world, there’s always some kind of variation between dialects. Personally having surrounded myself with quite a few expatriated Brits while living(…)

One of the great side effects of the massive breath of the English language is the slang to which it has given birth. As English has become the language of the world, the slang works its way into cultures and countries everywhere. Cool, kinky, crazy slang words of course. Hang out, chill out, freak out(…)

That word. Yes, That word. The word we all love to hate, the world that has our inner squick surfacing, our faces grimacing, and our fingers curling for purchase into any reassuring comfort we can get our hands on. But what is it about that word that we currently can’t even bring ourselves to type(…)

Learning English is incredibly difficult, which is something non-native speakers of English don’t always understand. The English language is insane, with rules that almost always have exceptions, homophones, homonyms, gerunds, and a ton of other things that make the language incredibly tricky to speak with native proficiency. So what’s an English language learner to do?(…)

This week’s pick for Travel Tuesday even sounds exotic; that’s how great a destination this one is! Zanzibar, an archipelago—another sexy word—off of the east coast of Africa, is a semi-autonomous part of Tanzania about 25-30 km off of the mainland. We are very excited to explore this place with you, so come take a(…)