Freelang’s blog

An Englishman who woke up speaking with an Irish accent after an operation, a French patient who woke up speaking fluent English… this is called “Foreign Accent Syndrome”. A few days ago, a Croatian teenager caused a stir by speaking German when she came out of her coma. The young girl had only just started studying this language, with the plan to learn it quickly, in particular by watching German television. After a 24-hour coma, she woke up speaking German. Doctors and scientists are seeking a rational explanation for this, but are still only at the hypothetical stage: there is apparently a subconscious learning ability that enables the brain to register a lot more information than we think, and a trauma, by damaging the zone controlling our native language, could make another zone take over, corresponding to a language learnt.

Of course, it’s easy to envy patients who wake up speaking another language fluently, but foreign accent syndrome is not easy to deal with on a day-to-day basis. An English woman suffering from chronic migraines and learning Chinese found, after treatment, that she had a Chinese accent that she can’t get rid of even when she speaks English. Her voice has become higher, her friends don’t recognise her on the telephone, and she’s desperately trying to get her normal voice back, with the help of a speech therapist.

As for Mickey Rourke, despite his numerous alcoholic comas, he was not lucky enough to wake up with a Russian accent, so he had to use a more traditional method in order to put himself in the shoes of Ivan Vanko, the baddy in Iron Man 2. He went to Russia and took a course for 3 months, with 3 hours of Russian each day. The time spent will be useful to him after the film, as he’s been seen recently in the company of a certain Anastassija Makarenko, of Russian origin.

Good luck if you’re learning a new language, and avoid any violent methods!

We need your help again to identify another unknown language. It appears on a knife (you can click on the pictures to enlarge them). Thank you for your efforts!

We were sent an old postcard representing a plane during an air show in Reims, France, in 1909. The owner of the postcard would like to know what kind of language or code is written on the back. Can you help? (You can click on the pictures to enlarge them.)

This is the front of the postcard:

Thank you for your help!

Renato B. Figueiredo strikes again! We welcome 11 new dictionaries on the site.

Bosnian is probably the language you will all be familiar with. Now distinct from Serbian and Croatian, Bosnian has built its own identity. Some people insist that the name should be Bosniak, but we chose to remain neutral. Bambara is a language spoken in Mali, and we are very happy to add one more African language to our collection. Now let’s move on to Guatemala, where 7% of the population speak Kiche, or Quiché, a Mayan language.

The other dictionaries represent languages which are either extinct, or highly endangered. Sometimes it’s because an ethnic group has been reduced to no more than a few hundred people, like Ahtna, Kaska, Southern Tutchone or Northern Tutchone, four Athabaskan languages spoken in Canada and Alaska, and Tlingit, which also belongs to the Na-Dené family. Sometimes the people remain, but the language was forgotten and has almost disappeared. The Mohegan tribe, for instance, still has 1,700 members, but their language is extinct. In China, people of Manchu descent are more than 10 million, but the Manchu language is only spoken by a few elderly people in remote rural areas. Manchu is a Tungusic language, which means that it belongs to the Manchu-Tungus group of the Altaic language family. Evenki is another language that is classified in the same group, and, to end this presentation on a more optimistic note, let us mention that Evenki still has about 30,000 speakers in China and in Russia.

We hope you will find an interest in these new dictionaries. Many thanks to Renato for his wonderful work!

Our latest dictionaries, apart from Burmese and Khmer, bear such strange names as Rutul, Aghul or Tsakhur. We also have Khanty, Selkup, Nenets… Had you already heard of these language names? Personally I hadn’t, that is until our best friend Renato Figueiredo offered us these dictionaries. Before putting them online, we do our homework and we include very basic information on the dictionary pages, such as the main geographical area, the number of speakers, the language family and sub-group, and the other related languages. But sometimes a map also comes handy, so we searched the web for some language maps (free of rights, not copyrighted materials), and we put them on a special page here at Freelang. We retouched them a little, and we also added the maps that were on our language families page. The result is a new page of the site, called Language Maps, which shows 13 maps on various themes: North American languages, Slavic languages, the ethnic groups of Caucasus, Russia and China, the distribution of languages in India and Africa, etc. We hope you like this new section, and we will keep the collection growing, as we plan to add more maps (of Europe for instance).

We have finally finished! Every single page of the site has been upgraded to version 4.0, which is now up and running. We hope the site is easier to navigate, as we especially worked on the menus, to make them more user friendly. Our Magazine section has also been redone completely, with new sections offering language games and travel advice.

Renato Figueiredo went on sending us new updates and new dictionaries, and we had to keep them on the back burner while we were finishing the new design. Now it’s raining dictionaries! Yesterday we uploaded 12 new dictionaries, including a Burmese-English dictionary, and many other languages including Kabyle, Igbo, and less known Caucasian languages. Thanks a lot Renato, and keep up the amazing work!

We have almost finished converting the site to version 4.0. We hope you like the new design and the new navigation menus. As far as the coding is concerned, we now speak PHP and CSS. A small step for Freelang, but a giant leap for its webmaster!

Today we reorganized the Link Center, Freelang’s directory of websites. Now all pages dealing with a specific language are redirected to the corresponding page where the Freelang dictionary can be downloaded. For instance, our links to Hindi language websites can now be found on the Hindi dictionary page. So the Link Center only stores the general links, in categories such as Language learning, Dictionaries and translation, etc. There are also general categories for Asian languages, Indian languages, etc. In these categories, you can also find links concerning languages for which we don’t have a dictionary yet, like Khmer or Lao.

Please let us know what you think of the new design. Looking forward to your comments!

Mother’s Day is coming and our partner, Ectaco, is happy to announce discounts of up to $200 on Lingvosoft Suites!

LingvoSoft translation software (over 4500 products for Windows, Pocket PC, Palm, Smartphones) has received many awards as the best software online.

Following a brain surgery operation, a British man woke up speaking with an Irish accent. He had never been to Ireland, so of course it came as a shock for his relatives and friends. After an hour or so, though, his speech was back to normal. This strange phenomenon is known as the Foreign Accent Syndrome. There were several famous cases, like a Norwegian woman in 1941 who began to spoke with a German accent after her head was hurt by a bomb shell. More recently, in 2008, an American woman woke up speaking with a Russian accent after an operation. But the scientists and linguists say that the patients are simply enable to pronounce some sounds, and it makes them sound like they are speaking with a foreign accent. Anyway, don’t go hurting your head just because you want to improve your accent in Spanish! You may wake up with a broken head and a French accent…

I have considered myself a fan of Paul Auster since the time I read The New York Trilogy. I also read and enjoyed The Book of Illusions and The Brooklyn Follies, and I was really looking forward to reading Travels in the Scriptorium. A man locked in a room where there are labels for each object, that sounded so… Austerian! But I ended up really disappointed, as I felt I was reading some kind of caricature or parody of Auster by Auster. Even the old anagram trick (Trause for Auster) seemed worn-out. I read a few reviews on the net and most of them are positive, though there are some negative ones too. Anyone else read this book, if so, did you like it?