2008 is the UN year of languages

Yes it's all about languages in 2008! This is the UN international year of languages - though as you can see from this article there seems to be some dispute about what this actually means - lost in translation perhaps? Sorry cheap joke.
There are some fascinating websites on languages out there and I'll try to give some regular updates on my surfing as the year progresses.
The folk running the language log do a great job and some of their work has been published as a book wittily titled Far from the madding Gerund. They even have a post about science, theology and global language change.
Meanwhile on the Eurolang website you can learn that Estonia has launched a linguistic beauty contest - how brilliant, and how totally subjective!

Now in case you didn't know 2008 is also the year of the potato and of course they have a really lovely official website, but at least it is in five languages. And you can read about other years here - with comments by Kermit!