Australia and its immediate neighbours are home to a third of the world's languages, most of which could disappear without trace. A national archive project is capturing what it can, and making the resource available online to researchers and regional cultural centres.

The Pacific and Regional Archive for Digital Sources in Endangered Cultures (PARADISEC) project has been recognised with the Victorian eResearch Strategic Initiative (VeRSI) Award in humanities and social sciences. The project team will receive a server worth over $26,000 thanks to the prize's sponsor, Dell.

Coinciding with Maori Language Week, the company yesterday launched Google Aotearoa to cater specially for people who speak the language of New Zealand's indigenous people.

Aotearoa is a Maori word often translated as Land of the Long White Cloud, and commonly used by North Island Maori as the word for New Zealand.

A spokeswoman from the Maori Language Commission said 29 people had been part of the team working on the project during the last year, including three key translators.

More than 8750 words were translated as part of the project.

The Russian administration has decided to do everything possible to make Russian the official language in all countries of the former USSR (currently known as the Commonwealth of Independent States, CIS). However, the leaders of some of those countries are not eager to follow Russia at this point.

SEN. BARACK OBAMA (D-IL), PRESIDENTIAL CANDIDATE: Instead of worrying about whether immigrants can learn English, they will learn English. You need to make sure your child can speak Spanish

This is an interesting study, especially for people who have a multi-cultural background.

COURT cases could be thrown into chaos because workers employed to take notes can't understand the Scots accent, it was claimed yesterday.

Leading lawyers have complained that official court papers are littered with mistakes because English stenographers are baffled by names and language used north of the Border.

They said Scottish names such as Barlinnie have been wrongly transcribed as "Barrel Annie" and that words such as "libelled" and "fanciful" have been replaced with "liable" and "fanciable".

It was claimed the mistakes and omissions could affect the outcome of appeals and lawyers have complained to Scotland's Lord Advocate Eilish Angiolini.

They need some help. A translation for their new sign. They want it to be bilingual. No, not Spanish and English.

Spanish and Welsh.

Because this is Welsh Patagonia, the place where, in 1865, emigrants came from Wales seeking a refuge where they could speak their own language and practise their nonconformist religion in peace...

Britain is multilingual yet there are few teachers of community languages and even fewer training courses. Spanish, French and Latin are considered to be prestigious qualifications but community languages are often dismissed as irrelevant or second rate...

Are Welsh speakers interested in climate change? Not as much as they should be, according to Dafydd Watkin, who works as a freelance translator.

"I tend to think we spend too much time using the Welsh language to talk only about speaking Welsh," said Mr Hywel Davies, the editor of Y Papur Gwyrdd ('The Green Paper'). "We need to use the language to discuss one of the world's main talking points at the moment, which is the planet's future"...

If there is one foreign language that English speakers always seem to crack, it's Franglais.

Its rules are simple. Insert as many French words as you know into the sentence, fill in the rest with English, then speak it with absolute conviction.

Bodged attempts at foreign languages are as important as food poisoning to a good holiday anecdote, but Franglais is a daily reality for millions working in Europe, Africa and Canada...

The international dominance of English-language channels such as CNN or BBC World has long been an irritant to France, and prompted the previous President Jacques Chirac to launch a French rival called France 24 in 2006.

Current President Nicolas Sarkozy said on Tuesday he wanted to set up a new umbrella group called "France Monde" (France World) and it should broadcast only in French, which has caused consternation at France 24 and been opposed by Foreign Minister Bernard Kouchner.

Once the medium of international discourse, French has long had to cede dominance to English as a global language...

"People just begin to hate a language if it's forced on them so it will flourish under encouragement, but if it's forced on people, people will just reject it and they'll go against it."

The status of the Irish language in Northern Ireland has prompted bitter debate in the assembly after Culture Minister Edwin Poots said he would not introduce an Irish Language Act.

But in one of the few remaining Irish-speaking areas in Ireland, there's another debate, this time demanding that more English and less Irish be spoken in a new secondary school in Dingle...

After funding more than $10 million dollars of scientific research and study projects during the last three years to record and analyze some of the world's most endangered languages, the National Science Foundation (NSF) recently made its Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) initiative a permanent program.

The program was established in NSF's social, behavioral and economic sciences directorate in 2005. It was part of a collaborative arrangement with the National Endowment for the Humanities as a funding partner and the Smithsonian Institution as a non-funding partner.