Anyone who shares my fascination with language and uncovering the obscure will enjoy browsing the UNESCO Atlas of the World’s Languages in Danger. There are reckoned to be over 6,000 languages in the world with some half of those under threat of extinction this century.

The atlas’s excellent print edition was updated last year and there is an searchable online language map, which is great for random investigation.

For instance, there are 144 languages listed for China: from Adi, spoken by about 170,000 people in Siang, to Zaiwa with only a thousand speakers. There are 11 languages listed for the UK, including Cornish and Manx. The latter is listed as “critically endangered” with the atlas noting:

The last speaker of traditional Manx, Ned Maddrell, died in 1974. Since then, however, the language has been undergoing active revitalization in family, school and institutional contexts.

Personally I have found the atlas an absorbing way to wile away an hour or two. Of course, beyond pure fascination, there is a serious point about how we are all culturally poorer by allowing these languages to die:

With the disappearance of unwritten and undocumented languages, humanity would lose not only a cultural wealth but also important ancestral knowledge embedded, in particular, in indigenous languages.

So if you find yourself with an hour or two to spare this long weekend, I urge you to have a look round … and let us know of any gems you uncover!

OK is a strange and unique word or expression and its meaning and origin are contested. We usually use it to to mean that something is agreed or accepted. It can also conclude a conversation to indicate the discussion is finished such as “OK, Bye”, especially on the phone. It could be used in less positive ways, something can be OK as in not too bad but not brilliant either.

It is mostly considered to have originated in American English in the nineteenth century as a version of “all correct”, but there are other possibilities such as from the term okeh in the Native American Choctaw language or waw-key from Wolof and Bantu. It may also come from the Greek Ola Kala “All Good”.

We don’t know where in the world it came from, but has it taken over the world?

It has equivalents in many languages, with subtle variations of usage and meaning. It can be considered in-polite at times in India. Sometimes such as in Cantonese it will be used as part of a smattering of English terms, but usually it has its own version in the language.

While it is not used much in print, we use OK in everyday speech all the time. We will encounter OK frequently when engaging with technology. We click on the word OK often while negotiating our way round the internet or using software on computers. I sometimes even think of the action of clicking on the dialog button as “Ok-ing that” but maybe that is just me!

Is that OK?

10:10 is helping to coordinate 10:10:10, the biggest-ever day of positive action on climate change, on Sunday 10 October, 2010. From sumo wrestlers cycling to training in Japan to 10,000 schools planting trees in Croatia and Russia, from a carbon-cutting telethon on national TV in the Netherlands, to hundreds of people in the UK sitting down to low-carbon Sunday lunches, this is going to be a really inspirational day. What are you doing for 10:10:10?

Regular readers of the blog may remember WorldAccent was the 1010th business to sign up to the campaign.

Suggestions to mark 10:10:10 include making a low-carbon Sunday lunch, draft-proofing your home or making your workplace more efficient.

You can read more on the 10:10 website.

“I’m Not Hanging Noodles on Your Ear and Other Intriguing Idioms from Around the World” takes its title from a Russian saying which is broadly similar in meaning to the English phrase “I’m not pulling your leg”. Often, we are so used to these absurdities in our own languages that they pass us by in everyday speech – although of course they often present a challenge to the foreign language translator!

The book is best viewed as a something to dip into, considering idioms from the Russian “To look like September” (to look miserable) through to the French “to fart in silk” (be very happy).

The chapters are arranged by subject matter (love, health, work, and so on) with a short introduction to each, and translations from a range of languages including French, Italian, German, Spanish, Russian, Japanese, Chinese and Arabic. Several of the idioms are illustrated in cartoon form, adding to the entertainment value.

Sadly the book doesn’t really delve into the background of the idioms. An academic study would have been out of place, but you can’t help but wonder if a more thorough exploration of a phrase and its etymology would have added to the fun. Also, as foreign language typesetters and translators, we would have liked to see more emphasis on the original saying rather than just the literal translation.

That said, it’s all good fun. Even better, it’s inspired the Guardian newspaper to produce a fun quiz of foreign language idioms. Give it a go and, as they point out, you can find out if you’re “a walking donkey killer or simply carrying owls to Athens”

Earlier this month, an OECD report suggested that Britain’s economy would fare worst amongst those of the G7 in the last two quarters of 2008. This gloomy message was reinforced yesterday when the European Commission also predicted that the UK would fall into recession in the second half of this year.

The web is flooded with “recession help” sites. It would seem that everyone wants to put in his or her piece on how to avoid economic doom, and I’m afraid I’m no exception! But here I want to consider one way of keeping company finances healthy that is often overlooked: translation into one or more foreign languages.

Although the downturn is global it’s by no means uniform – for a small outlay you can tap into an international market, effectively “recession proofing” your company. Even near-by in Europe, you can find more reasons for optimism. France and Italy, for example, look set to be spared recession, while Poland is considered to have one of the fastest growing economies at present, with an annual growth rate of 6.0%.

On top of that, the weak pound may have been painful during our summer holidays – but it makes UK goods and services attractive to global consumers.

It seems almost paradoxical to expand in order to avoid recession, but business strategist Richard Denny disagrees: “When the going gets tough, business owners should step up their sales and marketing activity rather than cut back”. And what better way to do this than to break into a market less burdened with downturn?