According to The Economist blog "Certain Ideas of Europe" in the 2008-05-31 "The Empire Strikes Back" article, the Portugese parliament has agreed to language harmonization with ex-colonies, notably Brazil.
Adopting the Rio accent, so to speak, means Portugal will also add three letters (k,z and y) to its alphabet.
What would this mean for the Englishes? Read more »
When politicians call for increased teaching of Asian languages (presumably with an emphasis on Chinese), I wonder if they have thought of the difference between written and spoken capabilities.
For one thing, there seem to be genetic differences between populations that use pitch as part of the spoken language (tonal languages, e.g. Mandarin), and those that don’t (non-tonal languages e.g. Proto-Indo-European). Occidental populations thus face significant hurdles to learning spoken Mandarin.
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