The World in Words

Colombian ballots contain only numbers, not names. So candidates have to get noticed in other ways. The favorite method: a memorable jingle.

When a TV host criticized others for their "pretentious" pronunciations of French names, Canadians of all stripes rounded on him-- and he was forced to apologize.

Sid Caesar, who died this week, was a master of what comedians call double talk: gibberish masquerading as a foreign language. Carl Reiner pays tribute to Caesar's mastery of double talk, while Moshe Waldoks traces it back to Caesar's multilingual upbringing.

Sochi, the venue for the Winter Olympics, is usually anglicised as SOTCH-i (-o as in not, -tch as in catch, -i as the "y" in happy)

German designer Otl Aicher created the pictograms for the 1972 Summer Olympic Games in Munich. His designs influenced not only future Olympic pictograms but many signs we see every day.

Handbills, political tracts and posters are created for instant, fleeting consumption. But collecting ephemera is big business-- and in the age of the internet, it's only getting bigger.

You'd never guess that this blonde singer performs in completely fluent Cantonese. Carinna Chamberlain, aka Chan Ming Yan, has become something of a Cantopop sensation in Hong Kong.

Gary Shteyngart writes in English, but his memoir draws on the Russian and Yiddish of his Leningrad childhood, and the Hebrew of his schooling in New York.

Disney has released a version of the Oscar-nominated song from "Frozen" that includes lyrics sung in 25 languages. It sounds global and inclusive but most of languages are European.

Bruce Willis, Jim Carrey and the Simpsons are all voiced for the Latin American Spanish market by Mexican actors. But low wages and outsourcing to other countries are chipping away at Mexico's monopoly.

The words that athletes from India, Germany and Costa Rica draw on to prepare for big games.

Patrick and Carol talk language stories in the news, including: two new studies on infant language acquisition; why some cultures love to say sorry; and the mysterious presence across many languages of the expression, 'huh?'

It's hard to be an entrepreneur in France these days, what with government regulation and a French attitude that failure is just bad form. So some French entrepreneurs are settling in Silicon Valley and bringing their French style with them.

'Selfie' is topping some word of the year lists. Its rise to fame has been so rapid that it doesn't exist in most other languages. Speakers of those languages just use the English word, and they don't have much choice about it if they want to be part of the conversation on social media.

Marco Antonio Tabin Garcia has never left Guatemala. When he was younger, he considered moving to the United States. But he decided against it and instead taught Spanish at a local school in Antigua for over 20 years. But in the past few years, he's found a way to make a better living, by teaching Spanish lessons over Skype.

Linguist Alison Wray talks about how different cultural attitudes around the world about dementia may be key to helping us cope better with the disease at home.

Two decades after the end of apartheid, South Africa's eleven official languages don't always sit well together. And their relationships are changing.

Why is saying something like "The Sheik's Sixth Sheep's Sick" so darn hard to say? A psycho-linguist wants to know, so she can help people with speaking disorders.

The last emperors of China, the Qing Dynasty, were Manchus. Their language is close to dying out in modern China, so now there's a last-ditch effort to save it, and the link it provides to China's history and traditional medicine.

Beijing wants all Chinese citizens to speak Mandarin, but that's easier said than done.

Beijing has long wanted the world’s most populous country to be unified under a single language. Now, it may actually happen, thanks to increased mobility and migration.

If you want to learn English as it's spoken, you have to practice phrases like "the guy's a total flake." That's how students learn at UCLA Extension's American Language Center, where the slang is snappy and up-to-date.

Writer and musician Alina Simone loved the comforting anonymity of her adopted name — until she met another woman with the same name.

A University of Pennsylvania professor tweeting as “Nein Quarterly" has attracted more than 40,000 followers with his wry observations on everything from US politics to the sexiness of the German umlaut.

Fans of 19th century novelist are split over the Bank of England’s choice of image for the new £10 note.