As a bilingual person I have often written about the joys and dangers of “linguistic passing.” Depending on where I found myself, I could remove or change my accent — speaking QuĂ©bĂ©cois French when I needed to, Europeanizing my French on occasion and then making my French tones disappear in an English context. My goal was to disguise my origins if I sensed hostility, back when linguistic tensions were at their worse in la belle province. I confess to thinking that this was unique to Canada so was surprised to discover, as I travelled to over 50 countries, that virtually every place has a version of this, with dialects, patois, accents and more, either strictly regulated, judged or celebrated.

Growing up in Montreal, with a mother who couldn’t speak French and a father who couldn’t speak English, I had an uncanny understanding of the power of words.

It sometimes is interesting as to why God gave humans speech. I recently came across two YouTube videos from Ascension Presents, a Catholic apostolate, which tackles the issue of using obscenities, an area of improvement for myself. Like all of our gifts, we are called to use the virtue of modesty with this one as well. 

Mondegreens are those wonderful phenomena in language where a misheard phrase is substituted for the real thing, usually in music. The term comes from American writer Sylvia Wright who explained that she misheard the phrase “and laid him on the green” in a Scottish ballad as “and Lady Mondegreen.” 

OTTAWA – Service CanadaöĎÓăĘÓƵapp directive to employees to use gender-neutral language met with derision in social media, but some Catholic observers say the move represents a dangerous trend.

To see the impact of engraining Indigenous cultures and languages into OntarioöĎÓăĘÓƵapp schools — a practice encouraged by the Ministry of Education — one needs to simply look north.

Pope Francis has urged Christians to engage with the Holy Spirit, and to open their hearts to the Spirit before taking important decisions.

VATICAN CITY – Existing in some form since several hundred years before Christ, the Latin language seems like an unlikely subject to still be generating brand new research, especially among young scholars.