EuroVoc

http://eurovoc.europa.eu/drupal/

The World's Most Spoken Languages And Where They Are Spoken This beautifully illustrated infographic (above), designed by South China Morning Post’s graphics director Alberto Lucas Lopéz, shows the most spoken known languages in the world and where they’re spoken by the 6.3 billion people included in the study. Based on records collated from the database Ethnologue, the infographic illustrates the wide-ranging facts and figures of the world’s living languages catalogued since 1951. “There are at least 7,102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people.

Eurovoc Thesaurus EuroVoc thesaurus The EuroVoc thesaurus "eu:EuroVoc" is defined as an instance of “eu:Thesaurus”, itself a subclass of the SKOS "Concept Scheme" class. To this "eu:EuroVoc" instance is attached the list of languages for which the EuroVoc thesaurus concepts have a preferred label (via skos:prefLabel or xl:literalForm). The thesaurus supported languages are defined by values of the property "eu:supportedLanguage". Values of this property are instances of the class "eu:Language".

The case of the missing “u”s in American English Before you consciously became aware of your decision to read this article, your brain was already making the necessary preparations to click the link. There are a few crucial milliseconds between the moment when you’re consciously aware of a plan to act, and the moment you take action. This brief window is thought by some scientists to be the moment in time when we can exercise free will. It gives us the chance to consciously make a decision, suggesting we aren’t just slaves to our impulses.

AGROVOC Multilingual agricultural thesaurus AGROVOC is a controlled vocabulary covering all areas of interest of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) of the United Nations, including food, nutrition, agriculture, fisheries, forestry, environment etc. It is published by FAO and edited by a community of experts. AGROVOC consists of over 32,000 concepts available in 27 languages: Arabic, Burmese, Chinese, Czech, English, French, German, Hindi, Hungarian, Italian, Japanese, Khmer, Korean, Lao, Malay, Moldovian, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Slovak, Spanish, Telugu, Thai, Turkish, Ukrainian, Vientamese.

The secret language of South Asia’s transgender community — Quartz In South Asia, there is a hidden language known only to the region’s hijra community. Found in Pakistan, India, and Bangladesh, the hijra are an old and marginalized group, whose members identify as men born with the souls of women. Hijras call themselves she-males and effigies, as well as kwaja sera, or the “guards of the harem,” a title that recalls their historical role serving monarchs in the region. A 3D Map Of The Brain Shows How We Understand Language <img src="<a pearltreesdevid="PTD2167" rel="nofollow" href=" class="vglnk">http://pixel.quantserve.com/pixel/p-cafODhhaQOlCs.gif</a>" style="display:none" height="1" width="1" alt="Quantcast" /> None

The World's Most Efficient Languages Just as fish presumably don’t know they’re wet, many English speakers don’t know that the way their language works is just one of endless ways it could have come out. It’s easy to think that what one’s native language puts words to, and how, reflects the fundamentals of reality. But languages are strikingly different in the level of detail they require a speaker to provide in order to put a sentence together. In English, for example, here’s a simple sentence that comes to my mind for rather specific reasons related to having small children: “The father said ‘Come here!’” Wayback Machine The Wayback Machine is a digital archive of the World Wide Web and other information on the Internet created by the Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, based in San Francisco, California, United States. The Internet Archive launched the Wayback Machine in October 2001.[4][5] It was set up by Brewster Kahle and Bruce Gilliat, and is maintained with content from Alexa Internet. The service enables users to see archived versions of web pages across time, which the archive calls a "three dimensional index". Since 1996, the Wayback Machine has been archiving cached pages of websites onto its large cluster of Linux nodes. It revisits sites every few weeks or months and archives a new version.

Reindeer herders, an app and the fight to save a language The gates open and the herders take us into a 300ft-wide circular pen. Away at the other end, 200 reindeers are running in a tightly-packed circle. Amid the silence of the forest, all you can hear is the strange, dull “clck clck” noise of the tendons in their feet. It’s December and I’m deep in the snow-covered forests in Lapland, north Sweden with a group of Sami herders – the indigenous people of this region – and their reindeers. While it feels as if I’ve been dropped into an animated Christmas card, it’s the herders not the reindeers that I’m here to meet and the conversation is not exactly festive.

Lost forest language to be taught in Swedish preschool Elfdalian is only spoken in Älvdalen in northern Sweden. Photo: Jonas Ekströmer/TT Elfdalian, a rare Viking language, is getting a revival after local politicians agreed to build a new preschool in Älvdalen, the small forest community that still uses it. While its name might conjure up images from Game of Thrones or Lord of the Rings, Elfdalian is a real language that is believed to date back to Viking times and is in danger of becoming extinct. Fewer than 60 children can currently speak Elfdalian, but politicians in the remote town of Älvdalen in central Sweden have this week voted to try to save it, by setting up a new preschool where it will be taught.

Elfdalian language, alphabet and pronunciation Elfdalian or Övdalian is a North Germanic language spoken by about 2,500 people in the Älvdalen Municipality (Övdaln) in Northern Dalarna in central Sweden. Elfdalian is considered to be a separate language by some linguists, but many others believe it to be a dialect of Swedish, and it is not recognised as a minority language in Sweden. Elfdalian has developed in relative isolation since the Middle Ages and maintains a number of features of Old Norse not found in other Northern Germanic languages, not even Icelandic. As a result, Elfdalian differs markedly from Swedish and can be difficult for other Swedes to understand. Everyone Uses Singular 'They,' Whether They Realize It Or Not CSA Images/Vetta/Getty Images Talk about belated recognition. At its meeting in Washington, D.C., on Jan. 7, the American Dialect Society voted to make the 600-year-old pronoun "they" their word of the year for 2015. Or more precisely, a particular use of that pronoun that grammarians call the singular "they."