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Love comes in all different shapes, sizes and languages. Helena Halmari, English and Linguistics professor, held a forum on Friday that examined love letters between Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and his wife, Aino. Halmari has been studying the letters through which the couple corresponded. What Halmari has found to be so interesting is that Jean wrote mostly in Swedish, while Aino wrote in Finnish. She talked about the different ways she studied the languages. "I wanted to get a general idea of how the languages were divided," said Halmari. "I knew that it could be very simple because Sibelius uses Swedish and Aino uses Finnish, but it wasn't always simple because they sometimes mixed each other's languages together. Most of the time, though, they stick to their own languages, which didn't make it hard for them at all because they were both bilingual." One would expect the use of two different languages to affect communication in some way, especially negatively. However, Jean and Aino were able to clearly understand each other, and even appreciated the other's use of their first language. Halmarin discussed the relationship between the two. "I don't think their use of two different languages impeded their communication because they both knew each other's languages," said Halmari. "For Jean, Swedish was the preferred written language, because he always worried that he would make mistakes when writing in Finnish." While she has examined forms of bilingual audio communication, such as medieval sermons and recordings, the letters are the first written form of bilingual communication that Halmari has come across. "I haven't looked at letters that were like this before," Halmari said. "In my research, I've looked at bilingual spoken language like recordings, and even email correspondence. They tend to follow the same patterns, though it's not as clear, because some people mix the languages sometimes within the same senten

Memrise is a British technology start-up that makes vocabulary learning into a fast, effective, and fun game. A million people are already learning on the platform and, with monthly active users growing at 30 per cent month-on-month, it is one of the fastest growing learning tools in the world. Free online learning and teaching site, with an associated mobile app. The language learning modules combine neuroscience principles, fun online-gaming-style leveling-up and leaderboards, and a social community. You can learn a bunch of different languages--200, in fact--from Chinese to Finnish to Arabic to French (Macedonian or Xhosa, anyone?), as well as content in other subjects: math and science, arts and literature... I'll keep you posted on whether it works by trying to learn a new language or several. I did check out the Chinese language component, and it seems legitimate so far... There's also a unit on "Brain and Mind" that would be of use to WRU students.

It seems like a lot of people can't get enough of being told how to live their lives by Scandinavians. That's what you might assume by the truckload of English-language books, articles, and TED talks emerging in recent years, all urging readers to adopt lifestyle philosophies that hail from various Nordic cultures. First came the craze for Danish hygge (pronounced HOO-guh) a striving for cozy, primarily domestic wellness that some authors claimed lay behind Danes' apparent satisfaction with their lives. Then we discovered Swedish lagom (LAW-gm), a term broadly meaning "just enough," whose use as a moderating folk principle, boosters suggested, has helped Swedes achieve their unusually high levels of happiness. Now, as Sweden's neighbor Finland tops this year's Northern European happiness league, Finnish writers and pundits are getting in on the act, tossing their own mythologized national mental attitude-called sisu-into the crowded Nordic life-hack market. Sisu= fortitude; inner stamina; grit.

Writer JRR Tolkien took bits of his favourite real-world languages and spliced them together. Listen carefully to the dialogue in the forthcoming movie of Return of the King and you might recognise some old English, a Welsh lilt here and there, and even some Finnish. "They are invented languages but they are completely logical and they're linguistically sound," says Fred Hoyt, a linguistics researcher at the University of Texas in Austin who also teaches a course on Elvish.

The accents we take for granted in our fantasy stories are informed, like almost all of the genre, by J.R.R. Tolkien's influence. Tolkien, author of the _Lord of the Rings_ trilogy had his orcs speaking with a working-class Cockney accent, whereas dwarven language reflected Semetic language inspiration, and Elvish, Finnish and Welsh roots. When Tolkienʻs stories were adapted as radio plays and films, the dwarvesʻ accents took on a Celtic character, whereas the elvesʻ accent reflects the upper-crust accent associated with English royalty.

This article looks at Finnish language and talks about how verbal repetition of new words helps with vocabulary development, and can cause the brain to have neural response enhancements. This response also indicated how well they were able to retain the vocabulary. The language background of this study's participants was observed, and they found that those who had learned more languages earlier had greater brain flexibility to acquire new phonology.