A Language Dies Every 14 Days

“The Earth’s population of seven billion people speaks roughly 7,000 languages…Seventy-eight percent of the world’s population speaks the 85 largest languages, while the 3,500 smallest languages share a mere 8.25 million speakers. Thus, while English has 328 million first-language speakers, and Mandarin 845 million, Tuvan speakers in Russia number just 235,000. Within the next century, linguists think, nearly half of the world’s current stock of languages may disappear.”

Prominent Canadian Writers Petition Government For Understanding Canada

A group of prominent Canadian authors and academics, including Margaret Atwood, Rudy Wiebe and David Staines, the University of Ottawa literature professor who helped found the Giller Prize, are calling on the Harper government to “create a system to replace” Understanding Canada, a program started in 2008 to fund international Canadian studies.

Clive James Says He’s ‘Getting Near The End’

“The Australian star, best known for his ITV show Clive James on Television, but also a prolific novelist, poet and cultural critic and commentator, was diagnosed with leukaemia, kidney failure and lung disease in 2010.” In an interview on BBC Radio 4, he said, “I don’t want to cast a gloom, an air of doom, over the programme but I’m a man who is approaching his terminus.”