The Gecko Wears A Tiara [via mefi projects] Sumarian proverbs. Compare those with the 1600BCE Ashubanipal proverbs and Proverbs From the Ancient Egyptian Temples and indeed, modern Iraq and Arabic more generally. Enjoy, culture geeks. [more inside]
posted by jaduncan on Nov 6, 2009 - 32 comments

Linguists and Missionaries often find themselves in similar situations. The Jesus Film Project. [more inside]
posted by fcummins on Jul 24, 2009 - 17 comments

The site Omniglot has grown somewhat since its previous mention on the blue. Creator Simon Ager has added glossaries of useful phrases, tips on learning a foreign language, assorted "useful phrases" from other sources he's found amusing (an Esperanto book he quotes shows you how to say "there is a frog in my bidet", for instance) and even more writing systems. Plus -- a page telling you how to say "My hovercraft is full of eels" in 79 different languages.
posted by EmpressCallipygos on May 23, 2009 - 14 comments

"Thank you" in 465 languages Also, Hello! in 800 languages, I love you in 89, How much does that cost? in 93, I don't speak [this language] in 58 and Go fuck yourself in 20.
posted by psmealey on Jan 18, 2009 - 53 comments

"For over half a century, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory has collected recordings of hundreds of languages from around the world, providing source materials for phonetic and phonological research, of value to scholars, speakers of the languages, and language learners alike. The materials on this site comprise audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with phonetic transcriptions, plus scans of original field notes where relevant." (Description from website.) Many more recordings -- indexed by language, sound, and geographic location -- are available here.
posted by cog_nate on Dec 9, 2008 - 12 comments

At One Minute Languages you can learn greetings, talking about names, counting, and more in Catalan, Danish, French, German, Irish, Japanese, Luxembourgish, Mandarin, Norwegian, Polish, Romanian, and Russian.
posted by sveskemus on Nov 11, 2008 - 25 comments

Wordchamp lets you view foreign-language web pages with definitions in your language as mouseovers (registration-only). [more inside]
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Jul 5, 2008 - 10 comments

Amy Walker does a little tour of 21 accents in 2 1/2 minutes. From the UK and Ireland to Italy, Germany, Czech Republic, Russia, France, Australia, New Zealand, and around North America. [more inside]
posted by nickyskye on Mar 1, 2008 - 145 comments

Mango is a new beta service offering free online language lessons. 11 languages available (each with 100 lessons). For English speakers there are lessons in French, German, Italian, Greek, Mandarin Chinese, Japanese, Russian, Brazilian Portuguese and Pig Latin. For Polish and Spanish speakers, lessons in English.
posted by nickyskye on Nov 7, 2007 - 35 comments

We've discussed Simple English Wikipedia, and descriptions of other languages in English, but have you tried reading wikipedia in Scots? You asked if Scots is a language? How about any of the other 253 languages of Wikipedia?
posted by jacalata on Sep 5, 2007 - 43 comments

Qoolsqool is "a free and open educational resource for educators, students, and self-learners around the world."
posted by anjamu on Sep 29, 2006 - 9 comments

Que would happen if, wenn Du open your Metafilter, finde eine message in esta lingua? No est Englando, no est Germano, no est Espano, no est keine known lingua - aber Du understande! Wat happen zo! Habe your computero eine virus catched? Habe Du sudden BSE gedeveloped? No, Du esse lezendo la neue europese lingua: de Europanto!
posted by goodnewsfortheinsane on Sep 5, 2006 - 130 comments

FSI Language Courses
posted by anjamu on Aug 17, 2006 - 36 comments

Wikiwords is a collaborative project to create a dictionary of all terms in all languages.
posted by anjamu on Aug 11, 2006 - 18 comments

The New York Times profiles Special English, a 1500-word language used by the Voice of America "to spread American news and cultural information to people outside the United States who have no knowledge of English or whose knowledge is limited." The article notes that the language has the potential to play a valuable role in the bilingual education of recent immigrants to the U.S.
posted by NYCinephile on Aug 5, 2006 - 24 comments

New analysis of the language and gesture of South America's indigenous Aymara people indicates they have a concept of time opposite to all the world's studied cultures -- the past is ahead of them and the future behind. The morphologically-rich language, of which you can hear samples here, may also prove useful to computer scientists due to its unique ternary logic system.
posted by youarenothere on Jun 12, 2006 - 42 comments

Discovering Chylum: Swarthmore Professor David Harrison traveled to Siberia to learn about Chulym, a previously undiscovered local language that reflects its population's culture of hunting, animastic belief system, and bear worship. [More Inside]
posted by gregb1007 on May 21, 2006 - 17 comments

"When I read his work, I forgive him all his sins". Edmund Wilson disliked being called a critic. He thought of himself as a journalist, and nearly all his work was done for commercial magazines, principally Vanity Fair, in the nineteen-twenties; The New Republic, in the nineteen-twenties and thirties; The New Yorker, beginning in the nineteen-forties; and The New York Review of Books, in the nineteen-sixties. He was exceptionally well read: he had had a first-class education in English, French, and Italian literature, and he kept adding languages all his life. He learned to read German, Russian, and Hebrew; when he died, in 1972, he was working on Hungarian.
Edmund Wilson and American culture. (more inside)
posted by matteo on Aug 25, 2005 - 12 comments

If listening to sound of different languages is something you may be interested in, visit the multimedia language project website hosted by the Martin Luther University of Halle-Wittenberg. It features the sound files of a small blurb from Saint-Exupéry's The Little Prince read outloud in a 100 different languages. The blurbs are also textually transcribed. [See more inside]
posted by gregb1007 on May 17, 2005 - 22 comments

Simlish as 21st-century Grammelot? I love Simlish. Never heard of Grammelot, before now, but, well, as they say "Hoh! Abba Da No!"
posted by WolfDaddy on Mar 18, 2005 - 13 comments

Twisting Tongues in Other Tongues
This page was originally created to give a good group of tongue twisters to people in speech therapy, to people who want to work on getting rid of an accent, or to people who just plain like tongue twisters. I hope you enjoy them.
posted by miss lynnster on Dec 30, 2004 - 32 comments

Today is World Esperanto Literature Day. December 15th is the birthday of the creator of Esperanto, Dr. L. L. Zamenhof. Don't speak Esperanto yet? You can learn Esperanto on the web, via email, or at home. After all of that learning you may want to relax by playing a game, watching a movie (starring William Shatner!) or listening to some music.
posted by Doug on Dec 15, 2004 - 29 comments

I never realized how great Wikipedia was for quick-and-dirty guides to languages. For example, did you know that Esperanto uses affixes to cut the number of adjectives one must learn in half? Or that Finnish has fifteen noun cases, including six locative declensions? Or that Vedic Sanskrit was tonal? How about that Cherokee verbs each have 21,262 inflected forms? I could play with this forever.
posted by borkingchikapa on Dec 1, 2004 - 36 comments

Losing Languages. It's estimated that between one and four languages are lost every year, the result of the only remaining speakers dying off. Many have been actively surpressed in the past, such as the Mayan and Ryukyu languages - some of which are said to be further from Japanese than English is from German. Is it worth the effort to preserve languages? Are languages and culture intristically linked?
posted by borkingchikapa on Nov 28, 2004 - 57 comments

Native Languages of the Americas: Preserving and promoting American Indian languages.
posted by Ufez Jones on Sep 2, 2004 - 13 comments

Imagine how different politics would be if debates were conducted in Tariana, an Amazonian language in which it is a grammatical error to report something without saying how you found it out. Say No More. Some call it Murder that is a threat to survival. On Saving Dying Languages. A sample project: Iquito Language Documentation Project (PDF) Here are some Endangered language Resources. Here is a booklist by Andrew Dalby on lost and threatened languages and here you can put your money where your mouth is: Endangered Language Fund.
posted by y2karl on Mar 1, 2004 - 11 comments

Simon Swears
A puerile shockwave game. (Lots of swearing, as you might have guessed.)
posted by Mwongozi on Oct 5, 2003 - 11 comments

The Analytical Language of John Wilkins - the Decimal System post below reminded me of this exquisite essay by Jorge Luis Borges. Famous for its appearance in Michel Foucault's The Order of Things, the essay describes an attempt to create a non-arbitrary language. For fans of Borges' work, this is absolutely classic.
posted by Hjorth on Sep 21, 2003 - 9 comments

The Encyclopedia of Cajun Culture features everything from Acadiana to Zydeco. Two of the more interesting entries I've found are the Un-Cajun Committee and the unknown to me genre of Swamp Pop
posted by Ufez Jones on Sep 4, 2003 - 15 comments

99 bottles. 500+ languages.
posted by srboisvert on May 12, 2003 - 20 comments

Sometimes, the Americans with Disabilities Act makes us do funny things. Faced with mental patients who speak nothing but Klingon, an Oregon county department for human services scours the county/state/country/world/universe for Klingon-English interpreters.
posted by TheFarSeid on May 11, 2003 - 16 comments

How bona to varda your dolly old eek! Fancy a bevvy? If so, then you must know how to speak Polari, a language that is a mixture of romany, cockney, criminal slang and Italian. Many people first heard this secret language on the radio show round the horne with Julian and Sandy, but it still crops up now and again. Morrissey even used it on his album Bona drag (see the lyrics to Piccadilly Palare). Gives a whole new meaning to people who troll as well.
posted by ciderwoman on Apr 24, 2003 - 8 comments

Do Most Of You Yanks Really Understand What The Brits Here Are On About? Although the cultural mistranslations are probably more a question of tone and habits of irony and understatement, Jeremy Smith's online American·British British·American Dictionary, to be published next September, might be of some assistance. Although I still prefer Terry Gliedt's older but pithier United Kingdom English For The American Novice and even Scotsman Chris Rae's English-to-American Dictionary. Here's a little BBC quiz to test your skills. It seems that Canadians, Australians and [another cute quiz coming up!] New Zealanders are the only Metafilterians to completely capture all the varieties of English usage here. Perhaps it all comes down to the fact that non-U.S. users know much, much less about England, Scotland, Wales, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand et caetera than vice-versa? Does anyone else get the occasional feeling we're not exactly speaking the same language here?
posted by MiguelCardoso on Apr 5, 2003 - 66 comments

The World has at least 6,800 active languages and countless more dialects ranging from Alacatlatzala to Zoque Tabasco. These are the Top 10 languages.
posted by stbalbach on Apr 2, 2003 - 21 comments

Khoisan languages of southern Africa [NY Times link]
Do some of today's languages still hold a whisper of an ancient ancestral tongue spoken by the first modern humans? [more inside]
posted by Irontom on Mar 24, 2003 - 11 comments

A Vanity Fair advice writer thinks you shouldn't learn Spanish. Unless of course you want to talk to the Help. Got word of this in one of those darn petition emails this morning...anyone have a copy available to confirm this? Maybe they thought Latinos wouldn't read this issue? except...Oh yeah, Salma Hayek is on the cover.
posted by th3ph17 on Feb 7, 2003 - 38 comments

The Rosetta Project In Spaaaace. Agh, it's a great concept... I just wish they'd made the text something a little more secular. The aliens will probably take it all too literally.
posted by Pretty_Generic on Jan 13, 2003 - 6 comments

Happy New Year[in the language of your choice] Happy new year, my friends. See you on the other side.
posted by SandeepKrishnamurthy on Dec 31, 2002 - 11 comments

Linguistics in Bashkortostan. Russian philology within the Republic of Bashkortostan.
posted by plexi on Nov 26, 2002 - 5 comments

GeoNative. Placenames in minority and indigenous languages.
posted by plep on Nov 16, 2002 - 7 comments

This pidgin bible translation gives me the creeps. What happened to promoting literacy by example? Sure, it's important to use language that your readers are comfortable with, but come on already. Is it any wonder that education in Hawaii stinks?
posted by flestrin on Sep 15, 2002 - 37 comments

Why Are The English-Speaking Nations Crap At Foreign Languages? The standard explanation is that they're lazy and arrogant and expect everyone in the world to speak English. Well - surprise, surprise - that's not Philip Hensher's experience and it certainly isn't mine either. So why - or what - is it? [More inside.]
posted by MiguelCardoso on Aug 12, 2002 - 87 comments

God, you our Fadda. You stay in da sky. We like all da peopo know fo shua how you stay, an dat you good an spesho inside, an we like dem give you plenny respeck. We like you come king ova hea now. We like everybody make jalike you like, ova hea inside da world, jalike da angel guys up inside da sky make jalike you like. Give us da food we need fo every day. Let us go, an throw out our shame fo all da kine bad stuff we do to you, jalike us guys let da odda guys go awready, an we no stay huhu wit dem fo all da kine bad stuff dey do to us. No let us get chance fo do bad kine stuff, But take us outa dea, so da Bad Guy no can hurt us. Cuz you our king, you get da real power, an you stay awesome fo eva. Dass it!

Hawaii Creole English, from the Language Museum, which lists examples of 2000 languges.
posted by swift on Jul 18, 2002 - 14 comments

"Hello, world!" in 114 programming languages. Whenever picking up a new language, it's customary to write a program that prints "Hello, world!" to see how one goes about writing anything in said language. Now you never need be curious about what language to write your custom-designed CMS in.
posted by moz on Nov 26, 2001 - 19 comments

Linguistic competency Do you speak Arabic or Farsi? If you meet certain other qualifications, you can now spy for the FBI, whose homepage takes more care than news reports did and specifically lists Pashto, spoken in Afghanistan, as one of the desired language proficiencies.
posted by joeclark on Sep 17, 2001 - 1 comment

The Invent your own language site is a cool and fascinating example of creativity in this day in age. Flame me if you wish, for posting at such a critical time.
posted by HoldenCaulfield on Sep 11, 2001 - 9 comments

What do you say when it's raining and sunny at the same time? In Abkhaz, "the devils are getting married." In Amharic, "the hyena is giving birth." In Arabic, "the rats are getting married." In Dutch, it's a "fair in hell." In Galician, "the Devil goes to Ferrol." And so on...
posted by Mo Nickels on Aug 24, 2001 - 70 comments

Never be stuck without numbers ane twa thrie fower fyve sax seiven aicht nyne ten < Count to ten in scottish and over 4000 other languages.
posted by stevridie on Jul 8, 2001 - 8 comments

Google adds languages to interface including Pig Latin, Hacker and Elmer Fudd. And Bork Bork Bork has been supported for a few months! Just customize your display.
posted by bjennings on Jun 27, 2001 - 13 comments

Apple to NUblog: Drop Dead When Joe Clark went looking for information about OS X's out-of-the-box inclusion of multiple languages, Apple's PR agency decided he wasn't worth talking to because he wasn't "credentialed."

As Deborah Branscum writes: Weblogs and webloggers may not get respect at Edelman or, perhaps, at Apple. But they should. Time to wake up, folks, and get a clue. [found via NetworkWorldFusion]
posted by idiolect on May 4, 2001 - 55 comments