MEITS Blog

In a few weeks I’ll be moving to England from my native Northern Ireland. I’m an Irish speaker, and last week, in the library, it occurred to me that I wouldn’t have easy access to a well-stocked library of books written in Irish for very much longer, so I took a quick browse in that aisle to see if there was anything to catch my eye. On one of the shelves there was a thin black hardback with Dónall Mac Amhlaigh in gold lettering on the spine. Apparently, I had written a book.

June's parliamentary elections in France were a great success for the burgeoning centrist movement founded by Emmanuel Macron with his year-old party La République en marche (LREM) securing 308 seats in the National Assembly, an outright majority in the lower house.

As an English language assistant at a school in suburban Paris in 2009, I remember thinking that the way the pupils spoke was far removed from the French I’d learnt at school and university, and that no amount of book-learning could make me understand them. This experience might be familiar to language learners seeing a foreign language used in its natural habitat. If you’re used to Molière, Booba’s a shock. (In any case, he’s better, as he’d tell you himself.)