Set up by the Council of Europe, it was first celebrated in 2001 and will go off with a bang in 2009 on the 26 of Sept with over 45 countries involved.

The idea is to promote interest in languages and language learning for adults and children. So whatever your age and whatever your interest in language, there should be something for you among the 300+ events (over 50 in the UK and Ireland alone).

Activities range from the light-hearted to the serious – from games and quizzes to literary evenings and round-table discussions on language policy.

If you’re in central London on 25 September, drop in on the language stand at Victoria station and enter a competition to win an Italian course. Or find out more about language courses for adults at events dotted around the UK.

In Brussels and Luxembourg – the EU commission’s main sites – events will include a conference and press event on early language learning with multilingualism commissioner Leonard Orban.

According to European Union’s survey “Europeans and their Languages”, 56% of EU citizens (25 member states) speak a language other than their mother tongue, but 44% admit to not knowing any other languages than their native language. However, 28% master two foreign languages. 38% of the EU citizens indicate that they know English, followed by 14% mastering French or German.

For both English and the mother tongues, the new measure of success will be how well students can express themselves and communicate with punch – and this goes beyond scoring a good grade on their report cards.

This was the challenge Education Minister Ng Eng Hen lobbed at teachers yesterday when he made verbal communication skills a key thrust of his speech at his ministry’s annual work plan seminar.

Schools would have failed in their jobs if after 10 years of mother tongue language lessons, students are put off from actually using the language.  Their focus will need to shift from teaching students to pass a test, to getting them to use and appreciate the language, suggested Education Minister Ng Eng Hen at Ngee Ann Polytechnic yesterday, when he addressed teachers at their annual work plan seminar.

‘Put simply, we want our students, after all the effort in learning mother tongue languages for 10 years or so, to use it and better still, read the newspapers and books in their mother tongue languages because they have cultivated an interest,’ he said.

But that number could soon shrink even further.  Last week, national literacy and numeracy test results showed the Northern Territory once again lagged behind the rest of the country.

And the Northern Territory Government has been accused of plunging Indigenous children into further disadvantage through a mandatory policy for teachers to speak English in remote classrooms.

In October last year, the Government decided to slash bilingual education hours in eight public schools, blaming the policy for the poor educational outcomes in the remote communities where the program was in place.   Under the new approach, teachers must speak in English for the first four hours of each school day, meaning there is only one hour left in the afternoon for teaching Indigenous language and culture.

Some teachers say the approach is misguided because there are many factors – not just bilingual education – affecting school results, ranging from low school attendance to serious health issues.

An associate professor in bilingual education and applied linguistics at Charles Darwin University, Dr Brian Devlin, visited the Territory’s former education minister, Marion Scrymgour, after she introduced the policy.  He said she admitted the policy was made too quickly.

However the former principal of the Lajamanu school, Christine Nicholls, says there is proof bilingual education has been effective.

“In 1989, in both year three and year five, Lajamanu school topped all the Aboriginal schools in English literacy,” she said.

“And … they were only the kids who’d been through the bilingual program.”

She says learning in traditional language is something very important for Indigenous communities.

“It’s their original instrument of expression, their own language,” she said.

“And it’s also a matter of common sense that in all education, whether you’re teaching people of five, nine or 90, you’ve got to go from the known to the unknown.”

The Government says it is not prepared to back down on its new approach because it has to try a new way of teaching in order for children to meet national testing benchmarks.

“We’re not banning the speaking of Indigenous languages, the teaching of Indigenous cultures in our schools,” said Chief Minister Paul Henderson, who is also Education Minister.

“What we are saying very explicitly is that we should have the same expectations for these kids to get to benchmark in years three, five, seven and nine along with all other kids.”

The new feature, tucked away in a settings menu, has the smarts to automatically detect in which language the original document is written. It then opens the translated version in a new window, allowing you to compare and contrast the two side by side, more easily checking whether the translation has bungled any words or phrasing.

This new version can then either replace the original or be saved as a copy, though Google makes no visual indication in your document source list that its contents are in another language.

Over the last six months, Google has been quite busy adding translation to its other products, including its Gmail and Friend Connect services.

In Gmail’s case, users can translate entire messages into one of Google Translate’s supported languages; however, this feature must first be enabled in Gmail’s Labs settings menu.

The translation implementation in Friend Connect is a little more interesting, as it’s able to unify the language on any comment thread, regardless of how many languages in which the user comments are written.

A project led by Gi-Hyun Shin at the Australian University of NSW has won $485,000 over two years under the National Asian Languages and Studies in Schools Program.

But in a sign of Korean’s vulnerability, one of the universities that put together the successful proposal for NALSSP money has decided to abandon the language. From next year, Curtin University of Technology will take no new students.

Korean is one of four priority languages under this program, which has $62.4 million to spend over fouryears. Dr Shin said the money would allow work including teacher training and the development of materials on Korean culture for non-language subjects in schools, such as social sciences.

“What we’re trying to do is to get high school students informed about what is happening in Korea at the moment and when they get to university they might be interested in signing up (for Korean),” he said.

Dr Shin said that despite the rapid rise of South Korea as a trading partner, the country and its culture had yet to create “any particular image” in Australia, which shared its status as a middle power. Among the priority languages, Korean lacked the strong profile of Chinese or Japanese.

This year Curtin decided it had too few students to maintain its Korean program, according to Will Christensen, head of the school of social sciences and Asian languages.

The pilot program enables U.S. Marine Corps Special Operators to double as translators. 17 Marines are enrolled in the program. They’re learning to speak one of five languages fluently, including Urdu, Poshtu, Dari, French and Indonesian.

Linguistics program manager Todd Amis said Marine Special Operators will no longer have to rely on a third-party to communicate while deployed.

“I’m not saying that when you utilize a translator that things get out of place, but unfortunately it is better that we are the person being represented and our goals and ideas are being accomplished,” Amis said.

Marines are selected for the program by performing well on a language efficiency test.

The software, called “Language Pal” can program audio recordings in multiple dialects from multiple speakers. It allows the ability to program electronic flashcards, archived recordings, multiple-choice games, and tens of thousands of audio files with searchable database for use on the Nintendo DSi.

“Our approach to language tools has always been to make language learning fun,” said Thornton Media President Don Thornton. “Your kids will be playing with video games anyway, they might as well be learning their language.”

Thornton noted that two keys to language revival are; to teach kids, but also to teach other members of the family to put the language back into the home.

“Your community can have a million speakers but if the kids aren’t learning the language then your language is in trouble. Kids today grew up in a world of handheld devices and video games. Often the technology competes with traditional culture. The technology is not going to go away so we need to use it to help retain our various languages and cultures. Our technologies are adaptable to any tribal language.”

The Cherokee Basic app consists of 467 audio files, including words, common phrases and 84 syllabary sounds. The app also has a “zoom-able” Cherokee syllabary chart. Thornton notes that Cherokee, Okla. dialect is the only language that his company offers for sale. They don’t sell the languages of other tribes simply because their clients make all distribution decisions. “Three of the five speakers are my mom, my grandma and my aunt in Tahlequah, Okla.” The other two are expert speakers from the Cherokee Nation and the Keetoowahs.

“We can produce a whole host of apps for any endangered language. Our upcoming apps include Cherokee Baby Flashcards, Animated Storybooks in Cherokee, How to Write the Cherokee Syllabary (using stroke animation). We can create these apps for any endangered language. The stories we create in the storybooks can be for example ‘Three Little Pigs,’ ‘How the Coyote Got His Tail’ or your tribal creation story. Whether or not tribal members can speak and understand their heritage language has long been considered by United States courts an important indicator of the ‘authenticity’ of the tribe.

New research is showing just how children’s brains can become bilingual so easily, findings that scientists hope eventually could help the rest of us learn a new language a bit easier.

“We think the magic that kids apply to this learning situation, some of the principles, can be imported into learning programs for adults,” says Dr. Patricia Kuhl of the University of Washington, who is part of an international team now trying to turn those lessons into more teachable technology.

Each language uses a unique set of sounds. Scientists now know babies are born with the ability to distinguish all of them, but that ability starts weakening even before they start talking, by the first birthday.

Kuhl offers an example: Japanese doesn’t distinguish between the “L” and “R” sounds of English – “rake” and “lake” would sound the same. Her team proved that a 7-month-old in Tokyo and a 7-month-old in Seattle respond equally well to those different sounds. But by 11 months, the Japanese infant had lost a lot of that ability.

Time out – how do you test a baby? By tracking eye gaze. Make a fun toy appear on one side or the other whenever there’s a particular sound. The baby quickly learns to look on that side whenever he or she hears a brand-new but similar sound. Noninvasive brain scans document how the brain is processing and imprinting language.

Mastering your dominant language gets in the way of learning a second, less familiar one, Kuhl’s research suggests. The brain tunes out sounds that don’t fit.

“You’re building a brain architecture that’s a perfect fit for Japanese or English or French,” whatever is native, Kuhl explains – or, if you’re a lucky baby, a brain with two sets of neural circuits dedicated to two languages.

It’s remarkable that babies being raised bilingual – by simply speaking to them in two languages – can learn both in the time it takes most babies to learn one. On average, monolingual and bilingual babies start talking around age 1 and can say about 50 words by 18 months.

The National Foundation for Educational Research says overall language provision in primaries is increasing.  There is a target for language lessons to be available for seven to 11 year olds by 2010 – with foreign languages set to become compulsory the following year.

Languages ceased to be compulsory for secondary pupils after the age of 14 in 2004. Instead the focus switched to increasing the number of younger pupils learning languages in primary school.

The report, commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families, was intended to establish what progress was being made in primary schools. It found that in 2008, 92% of primary schools were offering foreign languages in some form. This was a rise of 22 percentage points from 2006.  It also found the vast majority of primary schools were “making good progress” towards offering the full entitlement.

However, the NFER researchers found up to 18% of primary schools will not be able to offer the opportunity to learn a language to any seven to 11 year old child. This non-statutory target was introduced as part of the National Languages Strategy last year. But a higher proportion of schools – 26% – may not be ready to implement languages as part of the compulsory curriculum in 2011. About 30% of schools were currently not offering this level of language learning to their pupils, the research found.

One of the main barriers the researchers found was lack of time to fit languages into lessons. Languages will become a compulsory in primary schools from 2011, following a review of the primary curriculum by Sir Jim Rose.  Numbers of GCSE entries in languages have declined since they were no longer compulsory.

A separate study undertaken by Cambridge University has found that a majority of head teachers feel there is a lack of continuity between primary and secondary school language learning. Almost 50% of heads questioned for this research said a language should be compulsory after the age of 14 for most pupils.

Schools minister Diana Johnson said: “We know that when children start learning a language at an earlier age they can absorb more, build more confidence and become more passionate about language learning. “That is why we are making languages compulsory in primary schools from 2011 and will continue to ensure schools teach them until age 14.”

The agreements stem from a lengthy investigation by Mr. Cuomo’s office that found that pharmacies across the state, in violation of the law and at great risk to customers, routinely failed to provide information about medication in a language their immigrant customers could understand, officials said.

State law requires that pharmacists personally provide to patients spoken and written information about the dosage, purpose and side effects of prescription drugs, officials said. The law also prohibits pharmacies from discriminating against non-English speakers.

Complying with the law has become an increasing challenge for pharmacies in a state where the foreign-born population has grown to 4.1 million, or 21.3 percent of the total population in 2007, up from 3.8 million in 2000, or about 20.1 percent of the total population then.

According to census data, about 3 in 10 residents of New York State, and about half of the residents of New York City, speak a language other than English at home. There are an estimated 170 languages spoken in the state.