The print dictionary is dead. Or so says Michael Birch, the multi-millionaire founder of the social networking site Bebo.com. He’s announced the launch of his next business venture, an online video dictionary that resembles Wikipedia.
It’s called Wordia.com, and it’ll launch a week from today at the former home of Dr. Samuel Johnson, the author of the first "modern" English dictionary. Wordia.com will have traditional word definitions, but also professional and user-generated video content.
It comes at a time when the English language seems unusually volatile. New words come to us from hip-hop songs, from chat rooms and virtual worlds, from text messages, from non-native speakers combining English with their mother tongues.
To figure out just where our language is headed, we’re calling on Mark Abley. He’s a poet and journalist living in Montreal, and author of The Prodigal Tongue: Dispatches from the Future of English. He joins us to explore how the world’s languages are transforming, and being transformed by, their speakers.
