New App Helps Save Endangered Language of Reindeer Herders Nicknamed ‘The People of Eight Seasons’

Language learning company uTalk has launched an app to help save the threatened Southern Saami language spoken by reindeer herders in Norway and Sweden. The herders are nicknamed the people of eight seasons because their culture divides the calendar year into eight or more seasons to tie in with the life cycle of the reindeer. … Read more

Le Musée de l’Homme – Paris

7000 languages, 7 billion people – one museum’s answer The word of God, children’s novels, recipes, drunken talk, rumours or political promises: everything is about speaking. It’s estimated that there are 7000 spoken languages in the world and a billion different ways to say all those things. This uninterrupted discussion among people of generations started … Read more

Wonderful Atmosphere at The Junior Language Challenge Final 2017

Wonderful atmosphere and heart-warming stories at the Junior Language Challenge final 2017 A total of 32 children battled it out at Junior Language Challenge 2017 Final on Friday Oct 13, each with their own motivations and stories. The winner, Jeevan Macro, from Salisbury, wants his success to send a message back to the children’s home in … Read more

Blog: Who would you like to say ‘Thank you’ to?

Our word of the month for the #LanguageDare is ‘Thank you’ (as all of you who have bravely posted your social media entry will already know). And it’s got me thinking about all the people who have helped me on my language learning journey, whether by teaching, correcting, encouraging or even just interacting with me, … Read more

Blog: European Day of Languages

26th September is European Day of Languages, and in honour of this special day we thought we’d have a look at some interesting facts about the European languages. Did you know that the root of many European languages can be found in the Indo-European language family, which has many subdivisions including the Italic, Celtic, Germanic … Read more

Blog: The problem of translating – does it ever end?

Last week, we talked about the problem of translating certain words and concepts into other languages (if you missed last week’s blog you can take a read of it here). This week we’re moving onto family and colours. Surely family correlates easily across languages, right? Words for ‘relatives’ are often some of the first things … Read more

uTalk enters the classroom via Kahoot

uTalk has launched 10 free language quizzes on popular game-based learning platform Kahoot. The fun and addictive quizzes are based on the free Starter Words in our utalk.com/app and covers core languages in the curriculum (list). There’s even a Learn English from Spanish quiz specially designed for the US where Spanish is the second language. The quizzes were … Read more

The Problem of Translating – Where Do We Start…?

Here at uTalk, we’re five years into our epic project to localise our app in over 200 languages. Lovers of uTalk will know that we’ve already released over 130 languages, and there are plenty more in production as we speak, including Manx, Dzongkha, Shanghainese and Lebanese Arabic. Whenever we produce a new language, we do … Read more

Blog: Meet our Project Manager – Adi

In this third week of ‘Meet our uTalkers’, I’d like to introduce you to Aditya (or Adi for short ), a very important and well-loved member of the uTalk family. Aditya is our Project Manager and is also responsible for consumer growth and analytics. He has been a part of the company since 2015, when … Read more

Is a Woman Always a Wife?

It’s International Women’s Day, and what better day to start a debate around the connotations of the word ‘woman’ itself? I recently had a moment’s reflection on what it meant to be called a woman whilst on a trip to Shetland, where I learnt that the word ‘wife’ is used to refer to any woman, … Read more