World Languages and Cultures: Websites

Membership in the American Translators Association is an invaluable asset to translators and interpreters working in the industry. This site offers webinars, joblinks, and blogs.

The International Organisation of La Francophonie represents one of the biggest linguistic zones in the world. Its members share more than just a common language. They also share the humanist values promoted by the French language.

The mission of the LSA is to advance the scientific study of language. The LSA aspires to a world in which the essential nature of language and its central role in human life is well understood.

"provides opportunities for its members to share their scholarly findings and teaching experiences with colleagues and to discuss trends in the academy."

"This site is dedicated to making these language courses freely available in an electronic format. This site is not affiliated in any way with any government entity; it is an independent, non-profit effort to foster the learning of worldwide languages. Courses here are made available through the private efforts of individuals who are donating their time and resources to provide quality materials for language learning."

"The speech accent archive is established to uniformly exhibit a large set of speech accents from a variety of language backgrounds. Native and non-native speakers of English all read the same English paragraph and are carefully recorded.1 The archive is constructed as a teaching tool and as a research tool."

An encyclopedic reference work cataloging all of the world’s 6,909 known living languages.

is a comprehensive catalog of language-related Internet resources. The more than 2000 links in the HLP database have been hand-reviewed to bring you the best language links the Web has to offer

"Modern languages and area studies provides free access to high quality resources on the Internet. Each resource has been evaluated and categorised by subject specialists based at UK universities."

"The LINGUIST List is dedicated to providing information on language and language analysis, and to providing the discipline of linguistics with the infrastructure necessary to function in the digital world. LINGUIST is a free resource, run by linguistics professors and graduate students, and supported primarily by your donations."

Site by SIL International. They serve language communities worldwide, building their capacity for sustainable language development, by means of research, translation, training and materials development.

Translates and directs to multilingual dictionaries.

Slang, profanities, insults and vulgarisms from all around the world.

From the University of Notre Dame.

Translates into many languages and dialects.

Conjugating verbs in many languages.

The WordReference Dictionaries are free online translation dictionaries.

This site provides links to a variety of information related to American Indians and Alaska Natives.

"provides information on the history, people, government, economy, geography, communications, transportation, military, and transnational issues for 266 world entities."

Country Insights -- a Canadian website.

From Canada, you may only download and print materials for non-commercial, educational use.

The Library of Congress collects materials from all over the globe. its collections are the finest and most comprehensive research collections outside the country of origin. Start your search here for information on other countries.

Regional and Cultural Information

International Etiquette Guide - "Understanding other people's languages, cultures, etiquettes and taboos is of great value to the traveller or visiting business person."

"a compendium of online materials about more than 800 indigenous languages of the Western Hemisphere and the people that speak them."

Free foreign language lessons, free audio books and podcasts in 37 different languages. Download lessons to your computer, MP3 player...

"Chronicles the arts, history, sciences and popular culture of the times."

You can use this site to search and obtain histories of every civilization, empire and event that you are looking for.

Educational world atlas with visualized information about geography, history, demographics, and economy of world countries.