The software developed during the Cold War to translate English to and from Russian is said to have turned the English phrase our of sight, out of mind into blind lunatic in Russian. The software is, however, used today in the EU to translate documents, and is highly regarded, though it takes a while to get used to its idiosyncrasies. There's a new Tower of Babel device that allows user to silently mouth a word, which will then be translated into another language.
A few weeks ago, I contacted Leon Robinson from Kingston, Jamaica, who writes a blog called My thoughts...on stuff, and asked him if he would write something about Jamaican English as I have found his blog interesting and wanted to know his ideas about Jamaican English, which I hoped would add to the range of our view of English. We have contributors from many varieties of English, but little about the Caribbean. He agreed to do it and his thoughts can be read here.
English as an International Language (EIL) is being debated quite a lot at the moment. The idea sounds fine to me in many ways- most interactions in English nowadays are between non-native speakers, so we should focus on international communication rather than solely attempting to teach learners to strive towards native speaker competence. The idea of familiarising students with the Englishes used by people from other nations and cultures makes sense as that is what most will have to do when they use their English in their lives.
The Word Frequency Tool also displays a Word Frequency List underneath the box with the general information. The list contains an alphabetical list of each word used in the text, together with the number of occurences and how many syllables it contains:
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