Picture this: a leading financial institution, eager to expand its global reach, decides to translate its website into Spanish. Excited about tapping into a new market, they hand over the task to an individual without expertise in financial terminology. Little did they know, this decision would lead to a monumental blunder. In the process, the ...

If you are a foregner traveling to Bavaria, in Southern Germany, and you have a good ear for languages, you might notice that other than German something else is spoken there which you might not be able to place. It is Bavarian, also known as Austro-Bavarian, Boarisch, or Bairisch. Other than Bavaria, it is spoken in ...

As a lover of the Germanic languages and having had the chance to learn some German and Swedish, I've always been curious about Icelandic, the language of the North Atlandic island discovered and populated in the 7th century by Norsemen from different points of Scandinavia, most notably Flóki Vilgerðarson, one of the main characters of ...

How much do you really need to say to put a sentence together? 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, ...

Across America, it’s becoming increasingly common to hear the use of the Southern contraction “Y’all,” a linguistic fusion of the words “you” and “all.” It may be partly because of the spread of Southern influence nationwide, but it also fills an important need in the English language, said Southern linguist Thomas Nunnally. “It’s being adopted ...

The first "regulator" in history was created in Barcelona in 1401. That year, a bank of exchange and of common and safe deposit was established under the authority of the municipal magistracy, that ended up working as a de facto regulator of commerce and bankers. The Casa de canvi ("house of exchange" in Catalan) was the ...

Many people think that we linguists speak lots of languages. While this is not usually true, it is a fact that we are curious about all of them - that is certainly my case. I took up Hebrew a while ago when I was a student at the University of Barcelona. This was my fisrt contact with a ...