SPAIN / BRITAIN (
El País / Jesús Ruiz Mantilla) The two predominating Western languages in the world had, until recently, looked askance at one another. Now, the challenges of survival and of holding on to their influence in the future are forcing them to align. Palabra por palabra/Word for Word, a new book drafted jointly by the British Council and the Cervantes Institute, constitutes a bilingual compendium of the challenges facing two languages concerned with the unbridled expansion of Chinese, Arabic and Hindi. The longstanding division of the West into an Anglo-Saxon north and a Latin - predominantly Hispanic - south is slowly becoming a thing of history. Combined, both worlds represent nearly a billion people who speak either English or Spanish.>>>
