· April, 2010

Stories about Language from April, 2010

Algeria: Mauritania's Language Struggle

“A short post on the struggle among Mauritanian students over Arabic and French language will appear here sometime next week. Mauritanians on the front lines are encouraged to send the blogger their thoughts and accounts either in the comments field here or by email,” writes Algerian blogger The Moor Next...

Bangladesh: Let Language Be Free

  20 April 2010

The Bangla blogosphere and Bangladeshi Facebook users are angry with protests as 'Avro', a freeware and one of the popular and widely used Bangla input systems, was accused as a pirated version of another proprietary Bangla input system 'Bijoy' and the Avro team was mentioned as hackers.

Central Asia: Writing “About Each Other, For Each Other”

  12 April 2010

Sarah Kendzior of Registan.net writes about the significance of Kyrgyzstan's and Central Asian social media and points out some external observers’ distorted view of them: “There is another internet, a secret internet, in which meaningful political conversations take place in Uzbek, Kyrgyz, Kazakh, Turkmen, and Tajik, yet the majority of...

China: Chinese version of ChinaGeek

  12 April 2010

China Geek announced the launching of its Chinese version. The blog will translate China commentary from the English-language blogosphere, giving Chinese readers a view into the Western discourse on China and a way to get involved in that discourse.

Lebanon: ArabNet discussed the future of Arabic web in English

Arabnet 2010 is a tech conference that was held in Beirut recently. While many of the participants considered it a success, there was a major criticism that kept people talking and writing about it days after the conference was concluded. The problem was that while the conference supposedly focuses on Arabic web it adopted English as its official language and the website, discussions, and presentations were all in English.