Best of 2013 – The 15 Most Popular Articles of the Year

First of all, I wish you all a New Year that brings luck and prosperity, fills your home with joy and spirit, and gives you new confidence and courage for a fresh start. Let me re-introduce the 15 most visited posts of 2013 on ‘I wish to be a polyglot!’. It seems to be quite a diverse list of articles, which encourages me to continue exploring a wide range of topic areas in the New Year. With over 5000 views and 120 comments, my blog has become my proudest achievement of 2013 – besides my GCSE results, of course. I would like to thank you all for being kind enough to sacrifice some time and have a quick look at the stuff that go through my mind. Oddly enough, your comments indicate that some of you even consider my articles ‘interesting’ – special thanks for that! A propos, I am aware of the issue with the comments and promise to answer them all as soon as possible.

Afrikaans, or South Africa’s Dutch?

Today, as our hopes are with Nelson Mandela who is spending his 95th birthday isolated in a Pretorian hospital room, I decided to show my respect towards him by presenting something “South Africa-related”. I have always been interested in the history of the Afrikaans language and the extent of its mutual intelligibility with the parent language, Dutch. For those of you who are even less familiar with the topic than I am, Afrikaans (or ‘Cape Dutch’) is actually a dialect of the well-known West Germanic language, which happens to be considered a separate standard language rather than a national variety for a number of historical reasons. So how has Afrikaans developed? And what makes it so unique?

Alex Rawlings, Europe’s human phrasebook

Over a year ago I came across an interesting article on the website of my favourite linguistic-themed magazine, the Hungarian ‘Nyelv és Tudomány’. This was the first ever time I read the word ‘polyglot’ and I was indeed very impressed by the existence of such an extraordinary talent. The only thing that managed to impress me even more was a video attached to the article, which showed a 20-year-old British student talking about himself in 11 languages. A few weeks later I found myself being asked to “show something inspirational” at the end of a Year 9 French lesson. I was aware that these pupils were about to make their choices regarding what subjects they wanted to carry on studying, so I was striving to promote languages as thoroughly as possible. As I was sitting near the projector with a class of not so enthusiastic 14-year-old language learners staring at me, I decided to let Alex Rawlings – the mentioned hyperpolyglot – transform the mood in the classroom into something more vivid. The video was yet to finish, but the room was already filled with whispers, each and every one of them questioning how such talent could exist, and letting their speakers reconsider their attitudes to learning foreign languages. In September, half a year after this amazing experience, I was pleased to hear Alex’s voice through the loudspeakers of the French room. Yes, showing “the boy who speaks many languages” to the youngest of the school has by now become a traditional element of French lessons.