All articles tagged with #languages
After removing English and Spanish, Chinese is the most-spoken language in 13 states (notably California and New York), German maintains a historic footprint in the Plains and Mountain West, and regional clusters emerge—from French in the Northeast and D.C. to Vietnamese across the South and Plains, Portuguese in New England, Navajo in the Southwest, and Indigenous languages prominent in Alaska and the Dakotas.
Google Translate is celebrating its 20th anniversary by rolling out an AI-powered pronunciation-practice feature on Android for English, Spanish, and Hindi in the US and India. The feature lets users choose “pronounce” to get real-time feedback on their speech and a phonetic guide, or “listen” to native pronunciations. It highlights pronunciation mistakes (like how to pronounce “jugo” in Spanish) and provides guidance. Google notes that about a third of mobile Translate users practice speaking and listening, and Translate now supports over 250 languages with more than 1 billion monthly users translating over 1 trillion words each month.
OpenAI quietly launched a dedicated ChatGPT Translate page that can translate text, voice inputs, and images into more than 50 languages, with automatic language detection and the option to rewrite translations to suit different tones (e.g., fluent, business-formal, child-friendly, or academic). The desktop version currently lacks voice input, image upload, offline use, and there’s no standalone app yet; launch timing isn’t formalized beyond a Wayback snapshot indicating early testing.
iOS 26.1 beta 1 introduces support for five new languages in AirPods Live Translation and eight additional languages for Apple Intelligence, expanding accessibility for users worldwide.
Google is expanding its AI-powered Search feature, AI Mode, to support five new languages—Hindi, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, and Brazilian Portuguese—making it accessible to a broader global audience after initially being limited to English. The update enhances the ability to ask complex questions in users' preferred languages and follows recent expansions into new markets and the introduction of agentic features for local services. Google aims to make AI Mode the default search experience soon, despite some concerns about its impact on website traffic.
Samsung is expanding the language and dialect support for its Galaxy AI features, with plans to add seven languages and five dialects over the course of 2024. This expansion aims to make the AI-powered features more accessible to users globally, allowing them to communicate across language barriers. Samsung's commitment to democratizing mobile AI reflects its goal of providing users with the tools to unleash their potential.
Samsung's Galaxy AI suite, which includes features like Live Translate and Interpreter, is expanding to include Arabic, Indonesian, and Russian in a new update, with plans to add Australian English, Cantonese, and Canadian French in the spring, and Romanian, Turkish, Dutch, and Swedish by the end of the year. These new languages will be available as an update in the Settings app for Galaxy phones that already support Galaxy AI.
Muslims around the world will celebrate Eid al-Fitr on Wednesday, April 10, marking the end of Ramadan. With approximately 1.9 billion Muslims globally, Eid is celebrated in various languages and traditions. The most common greetings include "Eid mubarak" and "Eid sa’id," with celebrations typically involving prayer services, visiting relatives, and exchanging sweets. Indonesia, Pakistan, India, Bangladesh, and Nigeria have the highest Muslim populations, and the holiday duration varies by country.
As Muslims around the world prepare for the holy month of Ramadan, which begins with the sighting of the new moon, various Muslim-majority nations have personalized greetings in their native languages to welcome the new month, including "Ramadan Mubarak" and "Ramadan Kareem" in Arabic. With approximately 1.9 billion Muslims globally, the month of fasting and festivities is a significant time for the community, marked by pre-fasting meals, iftar at sunset, and the belief that Ramadan is the month when the first verses of the Quran were revealed to Prophet Muhammad over 1,400 years ago.
iOS 17.4 introduces the ability for Siri to read messages in languages different from the primary language used for other tasks, with the option to add multiple languages in the settings. The update also includes support for invoking Siri with voice, more language support for the "Siri" feature, and upcoming support for third-party iPhone app stores in the EU, as well as new emoji.
A study published in PNAS Nexus suggests that languages spoken in warmer regions tend to be louder than those in colder regions. The study found a clear relationship between the mean sonority of language families and the mean annual temperature. The physics of air, influenced by temperature, affects the production and perception of speech sounds. However, there are exceptions to this trend, indicating that the effects of temperature on sonority develop slowly over centuries or even millennia. This research challenges the notion that linguistic structures are self-contained and not influenced by the environment, opening new paths for understanding human societies and migration patterns.
With the start of the Muslim holy month of Ramadan, people around the world are preparing for a month of fasting and festivities. Muslims believe that Ramadan is the month when the first verses of the Quran were revealed to the Prophet Muhammad more than 1,400 years ago. To welcome the new month, various Muslim-majority nations have personalised greetings in their native languages, including the common sayings "Ramadan Mubarak" and "Ramadan Kareem". Greetings also extend to sign language and Braille.