Test your Dutch knowledge - are social media good for language?

Are you better than the average Dutch student? Test your knowledge on this test for experts, organised by Knack. Find out why it's important below.

Languages have through the centuries been a source of power: the ones that master the elite's language, will have easy access to the elite, and hence a great deal of power. So the better one speaks a language, the higher the position in society.

Social media - good for languages? copyright 

An easy example is Arabic: the written language is especially challenging to learn. This advantage was used during the conquest by the Ottoman empire of large parts of Africa, Europe and the Middle East. Still today, a good mastery of the language is an advantage to get access to top-level jobs. 

Closer to Europe, Latin was used by priests to keep their privileged access to God. Only priests could read the Bible, which was exclusively written in Latin, so the Christians would be obliged to go to Church every Sunday to be a good Christian. That's one of the reasons why priests kept their power over whole towns. In fact, it was also one of the reasons why Protestantism was founded. Nowadays, only in the Vatican Latin is still spoken.

Still today, writing language mistakes in application letters is a bad sign. That is why the deterioration of writing skills in Dutch might become a problem. Even children and teenagers use their own language to form their own 'exclusivity ring' with their friends, the only ones who know what YOLO, OMG, ROFL and other mean. Moreover, with WhatsApp, Facebook and other social media, youngsters are encouraged to write as short as possible...

Oh, and OMG is Oh my God, ROFL is roll over the floor laughing and YOLO is you live only once, which is the same as carpe diem ("seize the day" in Latin), written 2000 years earlier.

Here's a list on 60 of these short words. Have fun translating the internet's chatrooms!

United Kingdom's languages of the future...

Ever wondered which languages the United Kingdom will need in the near future? Instead of making difficult calculations, asking your friends and write a PhD about it - just read what the British Council says in an interesting report.

instead of calling home, better call
Spain! copyright: public domain

They published a report, based on a range of factors: which countries the UK will do business with, which languages are needed right now and in the future for the labour market, and so on. Spanish comes first, Arabic second (sure that report will welcome the Arabic-speaking Syrian refugees to the UK). French, Chinese (that is, Mandarin) and German add themselves to the top 5.

Interestingly enough, according to a survey of the British Council, 3 out of 4 Brits don't speak enough of the top-10 of the future languages to hold a normal conversation. Not that the Brits have been studying the wrong languages, it's just that they haven't done enough.

If you compare those numbers to the rest of the European Union, the Brits are dragging behind. Difficult to blame them though: English is everywhere. According to a European survey, only 15% of the Brits say they can speak two languages or more. That's a figure even worse than the British Council's. Only Hungarians and Portuguese do worse, while the EU's average is about 25%...

In a world where emerging markets like China, Africa and South America will increase their share in the world's economy, this might sound quite alarming.

Why learn Maltese

Maltese - seems like a weird language to learn. Only spoken by half a million persons, most of them on an island in the middle of the Mediterranean. Difficult, since it's derived from the Arabic language. The only semitic language written with Latin characters. Here's a few reasons why learning Maltese isn't a bad thing or wasted time at all.

First of all, it's very close to Arabic. If you want to learn Arabic, learning Maltese can be a first and much easier step. Counting from 1 to 10 is more or less the same, but by learning it in Maltese you don't need to study all those Arabic characters. These characters were made difficult because it was the language used by the Arab's elite. So you can avoid it temporarily by studying Maltese.

Maltese is an official language of the European Union. What? Yes, it is. Only spoken by half a million, but one of the 24 official languages of the EU. That's less than for Russian, Catalan, Arabic, Turkish and even Tamil in the EU. What does it mean? Well, all the laws of the EU are translated in Maltese. That offers quite some possibilities to work in Brussels or for other EU Institutions.

If you live in Malta, or close to a Maltese community, it's great to learn it because with the language you'll discover a whole new culture. Maltese have their own cuisine, their own anthem, their own flag, their own newspapers,... If you like multicultural environments, you'll definitely love the Maltese environment.

And well, last reason: learning languages is anyway a good way to increase your intellect. Since Maltese may require some time and some effort to learn, this will look good on your CV. When an employer will ask: why do you know Maltese? You can answer: I like challenges - and those words will sound like sweet, sweet honey to your future employer...

Check out these resources!
And don't forget that this course is made by a grade-A professional!