The French-speaking Walloons, and a smallish cohort of German-speakers, in the economically less prosperous south, are afraid that devolution will lead to Belgium breaking up along its linguistic faultlines, leaving the Walloons isolated and economically vulnerable.

Cuban-born Maria Carreira, the co-author of two college Spanish textbooks, can glide easily between her native tongue and English. But in her daily life in Southern California, picking which language to speak can be very complicado.

In an earlier life, Xin Meng chased stories as a reporter for a Chinese-language newspaper in New York. Now he spends his days figuring out how to translate mysterious phrases like “empowerment school” and “English language learner” into Chinese.

Some 6,500 languages spoken in the world today. And, according to the 2000 census, you can hear at least 92 of them on the streets of New York. You can probably hear more; the census lumps some of them together simply as ''other.''

Edinburgh experts are attempting to find out whether being bilingual affects how people read in English.

A deflating housing bubble has global finance players moving in to scoop up dud loans on the cheap.

A drive to encourage more students to study languages is being launched after a drop in undergraduate numbers.

STANLEY H. BARKAN recalls how his stepfather, Jack Stitzer, used to kid him about his writing, saying, “How much money does a poet make?”.