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Showing posts from June, 2015

Quiz night with pop music and languages - questions and answers

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Are you interested in drinks, languages, pop music and/or winning over others? How about a quiz night with pop music and languages of the world? What song is it? What language is it in? What’s the deal with Eurovision? Yesterday here in Canberra we had a quiz/trivia night with languages and pop music. If you ever thought of arranging anything similar, I'll here share with you our questions and answers  for that night. The questions and answers are found in the comments, and you can find the playlist of all the relevant songs here . If you use it, I'd be keen to know how people do :)! It's not as easy as it might "seem" when you look at the questions and see the titles of the videos - for example: Swedish was mistaken for Croatian and Cantonese for Romanian. It's hard to hear the lyrics and the language of a song - and it's even tricker when the language has tone ^^! One of the evenings favourites was a musical number from the Telugu movie "

That infographic on languages of the world - some context to help you understand what's going on

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Have you seen this infographic ( click here for original post and larger size )? It's been floating around various linguistics blogs, been shared of 32 thousands times on the book of faces and been reblogged and retweeted in many other places.  I bet you found a flaw in it! Did you read the fine print and look up the sources (it's mostly from just this page )? No? It's ok. Allow me to give some explanation and context, as a diversity linguists working with public outreach - I'd like to take this chance to explain some things about data on languages of the world. © 2015 Alberto Lucas López, South China Morning Post  Publishers Ltd The international edition of the newspaper South China Morning Post (SCMP)  published this infographic of languages of the world  on the 27th of May and later updated it. SCMP is an English language newspaper based in Hong Kong. They have a great internet presence and have made several neat infographics  on other topics. This on