Laat man loopen!

Not just Europe, but the world as a whole has reached an unprecedented level of cross border communication, even connecting whole continents and people are becoming more mobile by the year. As a result, tourism has surged and the world’s population is becoming more mobile as a whole, with people not just travelling somewhere for a short period of time, but settling down for a couple of years, before moving to the next country. An example of which are students who, in recent years, start considering studying in countries other than their own more frequently.

All of this has propelled the need for a common language to serve as a means of communication, a role for which English appears to be the most prominent and promising contender at the moment. This is especially true for Europe.

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Drielandenpunt & the Linguistic Landscape

‘Vaalsberg’ (Mount of Vaals) is a hill with a height of 322.7 metres, making it the highest point in the Netherlands. However, besides the aforementioned fact, the location is also a tripoint between Germany, Belgium and the Netherlands and referred to as the Drielandepunt. Lia, Eva and myself were interested in exploring the place in order to find out what signs and maps are used in the area, and in which languages. Consequently, we went to explore the linguistic landscape at the Drielandepunt and this video is a representation of our findings. Enjoy!

Comhar’s Promotion of the Irish Language

Protecting the Irish language has been a topic of conversation for a countless number of years now. However, in a country where 95% of the people speak English as their first language, promoting Irish faces many challenges. It has been discovered that media is a powerful tool of helping such languages find their place in the society and hopefully help them survive and ideally, even flourish. Comhar is a prominent literary journal in the Irish language that was founded already back in 1942 and has published the work of many notable Irish writers. This article aims at analysing the aforementioned media outlet and how efficient it is in promoting the Irish language.

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Back to basi…English!

For someone who has been learning English from the age of 7, it is quite hard to imagine not being able to communicate in that language let alone not studying in English. Since as long as I can remember I have been studying the peculiarities, grammar and pronunciation of the English language and because I was so interested in it, English as a medium of instruction (EMI) is not necessarily anything new for me. However, the more I get acquainted with this language that I’ve know since childhood the more I start questioning the advantages and disadvantages of it is a language of instruction.

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Eestlane olen ja eestlaseks jään?

My name is Luca and I am a 23-year old girl from Estonia. I was raised in an Estonian-speaking environment and that is the only language that I knew until the age of 7 when I started school. Through education, love for travelling, and general curiosity, my knowledge of languages has slowly developed over the years to a point where I could safely call myself a bilingual now.

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