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Twitter will support Chinese language in the coming weeks, according to a research report published today.

It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.

Verify, a concept testing application from interaction design firm ZURB, just added language support for German, Spanish, French, Portuguese and Dutch. The Verify team found that the app has large user bases in Europe, Central & South America, so the new languages will help them better serve those customers.

Verify helps Web designers create evaluative tests for their design elements and receive audience feedback. Users can upload an image of a design, create a test for it, and then offer it to users to evaluate its effectiveness. Several kinds of tests are available, such as memory tests and A/B preference tests. Here's a working demo of a Verify test.

A lot of foreign language instruction is geared toward the travelling experience. But what that typically means is a few vocabulary lessons on shopping and a few key phrases on how to order from a menu. If you aren't really interested in local dining or boutiques, then you'll probably find that even mastering all the vocabulary or phrases in a language guide will do little to help you on your particular journey.

A set of new apps hits the iTunes App Store today that offers a much better way to help you customize what you want and need to know about a particular language - whether you're travelling for business or for pleasure. TripLingo launches its first 4 apps with Mexican Spanish, French, German, and Brazilian Portugese versions.

If you've never read The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, know three things - the guide is this really cool book that knows everything about the universe, everyone in that universe can communicate with each other, and you're really missing out on a great story. What's that have to do with anything?

Google today added even more languages to Google Translate for Android and it reminded us of how much closer we are getting to a reality where smartphones will break down language barriers in real-time as we wend our way through the world.

Of the approximately 6,000 languages alive in the world today, 60 percent or more are said to be dying out. The majority of the world's languages are, in fact, "minority" languages, used in the shadow of a more politically powerful tongue.

On St. Patrick's Day, Prof. Kevin Scannell of St. Louis University launched a project called Indigenous Tweets. Using a web-crawling statistical software he wrote called An Crúbadán, Scannell identifies which minority languages are being tweeted, by whom and how.

Researchers from the University of Aberdeen joined forces with IBM's LanguageWare research team over the last year to understand a key moment in history.

Using LanguageWare as a basis, the team created a set of digital language analysis tools, including one they called Wordsmith, and used them to understand the creation of propaganda in the aftermath of the 1641 Irish Rebellion.

No technology can keep a language from going extinct. Languages require a context of culture that no electronic tool, however sophisticated, can reproduce. But what it can do, and what Cambridge University's Endangered Language Database does, is collect and document those threatened languages. As they themselves describe their mission:

"Researchers at the World Oral Literature Project have compiled a database of language endangerment levels with references to collections and recordings of oral literature that exist in archives around the world."

The social web is increasingly multilingual. About half the updates on Twitter are in a language other than English, according to a study released in February. Facebook has been translated into more than 50 languages for its 500 million users are all over the world. The day when English is no longer the dominant language on social networks may not be far off.

Social Translate is a new open source extension for Google's Chrome browser that translates updates on social networking sites into your native language using Google Translate.

The American Dialect Society (ADS) has named google - the verb - as its Word of the Decade. According to the ADS, the verb google (meaning to "search the Internet") won out over blog, which, according to Grant Barrett, the chair of the ADS's New Word Committee, "just sounds ugly." Tweet was named the top word of the year for 2009. Fail - "a noun or interjection used when something is egregiously unsuccessful" - was 2009's most useful word.

In anticipation of the upcoming European Union elections, Berlin-based language site Babbel just launched a "Politics and Voting" section to their Vocabulary Trainer. Co-founder Markus Witte believes the training package will help his 330,000 members exchange opinions despite their language barriers.