A new study by the U.S. Broadcasting Board of Governors (BBG) and Gallup on women and media in Africa says education and language skills play a big role in influencing which platform women access most frequently.  And while daily TV usage for men and women is similar in most places, the same cannot be said for radio, mobile phones and the Internet.

Albert Royo-Mariné, secretary general of the Public Diplomacy Council of Catalonia, a government-supported group that seeks to raise awareness about Catalonia, says that regardless of its outcome, the Scottish referendum is a "victory for democracy and common sense, and thus, it is a great example to Catalans."

What kind of relationship would Scotland have with the rest of the UK if independence were to happen? UK Chancellor George Osborne says Scotland and the rest of the UK would become foreign countries. However, Scotland's First Minister Alex Salmond says that to Scots England, Wales and Northern Ireland would never be foreign.

Seomra ranga - "classroom", in Ireland's indigenous language - reads a cardboard sign tacked onto a door. A little further down the hall, a leabharlann is filled with books. It is a very Irish scene, but in a very unlikely place: East Belfast Mission on Newtownards Road. Across the street, a mural commemorates the Protestant paramilitary Ulster Volunteer Force. Union Jack flags fly from lampposts in the shadow of the shipyards that built the Titanic.

When I first drove down to live in Cornwall more than 20 years ago, I was met by a graffiti message on a railway bridge near Truro: "Go home, English!" I should have taken it personally. I should have politely turned around to head back across the Tamar.

As languages go, English is a notoriously promiscuous one, borrowing caricatures from Italian, chutzpah from Yiddish and faux pas from French. And yet despite the English-speaking world’s deep and wide confluences with Chinese culture, for some reason, few Chinese words have lately entered the English-speaking world’s vocabulary.

Organizers of the Rio 2016 Olympics on Thursday revealed plans to provide language training for more than a million people ahead of the event. Brazil ranks behind many of its counterparts in the language learning stakes, comparative international studies show, and few people speak English outside major cities.

Gambia will drop English as an official language soon because it is a colonial relic, President Yahya Jammeh has said, without indicating which language the tiny West African country would use in its place. "We no longer believe that for you to be a government you should speak a foreign language. We are going to speak our own language," Jammeh said in an address in English last week that was broadcast on Tuesday.