"Now, of course, the fellows producing this model are physicists and they are not directly familiar with the socio-political factors that can strengthen or weaken a language, though they did attempt to factor some of these into their results. Their model nevertheless produced some interesting findings. They reckoned that there are three facto…

Ursula Le guin on swearing.

Manchester the rudest city in the (English-speaking) world; El Paso a close second, others (Pittsburgh, Bloomington) way behind.

I've always loved isoglosses. But am more used to the standard east-west ones in Germany.

If you really want to know the meaning of the Dutch phrase, "zo glad als een aal in een emmer snot", click on this link.

On diglossia in Tunisia.

"Imagine that your task for the day is to localize a piece of software -- and luckily for you, the only output the program emits is two messages, like this: 'I scanned 12 directories.' 'Your query matched 10 files in 4 directories.' So how hard could that be?"