Nick Nasev

It was surreal to see Nairobi so muted. The number of people about in the evening was much reduced than normal

Kenya holds state funeral for revered Odinga, some injured in crowd crush Odinga's body will next travel to his family's home region of western Kenya, where more huge crowds are expected.

I arrive into Nairobi just as they're burying former Kenyan PM Raila Odinga
www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/10...

AI is saving endangered languages? Perhaps not

Unlike in Ethiopia, if a Mauritian mentions "Yugo", they're not talking about anything related to #Yugoslavia.

Yugo is the name of the main Uber-type rideshare and food delivery app in Mauritius.

In Addis Ababa, the former Yugo(slav) Club is now the You Go evangelical church.

Evening in Port Louis, Mauritius

Got fooled by a Sora clip. It was my 11-year-old niece who pointed out what Sora is to me.

She also tells me that when the kids at her school in Australia call some a "Sora", that means they're fake.

Australian English: peanut butter or peanut paste? The extraordinary story of this tasty Australian regionalism and how it can ignite passions

A friend of mine has alerted me to yet another Australian social media comments battle over the terms "peanut butter" and "peanut paste". These battles always get extremely nasty.

But rarely do Aussies know the story behind the usage of these terms. Here it is...

#AustralianEnglish

Poor ramp. It's disabled.

Australian English: Abbo Australian English loves shortening words and names and banging an '-ie' or '-o' at the end. But you need to be careful when to do it, as this case shows...

Australian English loves diminutives, i.e. shortening words and names and banging an '-ie' or '-o' at the end of it.

But you need to be careful when to do it, as this case shows...

#AustralianEnglish #AussieEnglish #English

My sojourn in Perth, Australia is over this time. I'll be back in exactly four months' time. Now to reverse-back the way I came. Off to Mauritius once again.

Just saw on a social media group for Bulgarians in the UK someone asking for help to file his British citizenship application.

What was the strong advice from some commenters?

Use AI! Apparently it'll tell this person exactly what needs to be done.

A recipe for disaster.

Me too!

So I go all the way to Australia to do this... Off to the beach? Avoid the snakes and sharks? No... something completely different but expected from me.

I go to Australia twice a year and I end up doing this...

Goodbye to ‘Dear Sirs’, as Society changes guidance Chancery Lane says outdated term is no longer accurate or representative of legal profession.

Still using 'Dear Sir' in correspondence?

Best don't then. The Law Society recommends if you do not know the identity of the recipient, use neutral terms such as ‘Dear legal team’, ‘Dear all’ or simply ‘greetings’ or ‘good morning’

The journey of a Balkan song: its chilling present and obscured past This is not your usual story. It's about a Balkan song's unlikely journey from obscurity to ultra-right-wing rallying call.

Many a Balkan tune goes from country to country, but this one has been extraordinary in its path from obscurity to its worrisome latest iteration…

That's brilliant! I remember when the Melbourne Aces baseball field was being constructing.

How Australians are slowly dominating the K-pop music industry Rosé, who grew up in Melbourne, reached number one on the ARIA Singles Chart with Apt. late last year – becoming the first solo K-pop female artist to do so.

Latest Australia vs New Zealand spat...

Who can claim Blackpink's Rosé as their own?

The K-Pop star was born in New Zealand but raised in Melbourne, Australia.

Then there are Stray Kid's Bang Chan and Felix – Aussies.

It was their pronunciation of "no" that prompted K-Pop fans to coin "naur"

A year ago today I saw that very Aussie/NZ dessert, the Pavlova, for the first time on a restaurant menu in Bulgaria. So I had to try it out. It wasn't that much of a true Pav, sorry to say.

Interesting, almost abjad-like use of text here. Outside a supermarket in Perth, Australia

What was so extraordinary about the popular resistance in WWII not only in Macedonia but all throughout the Balkans was how women were fully and equally involved. A quantum leap for such a traditional, patriarchal society. 80 years later and much of that progress has been lost.

While looking up English-language sources about my hero partisan Vera Foteva on the net, I find that Goodreads has my quote of her in Kapka Kassabova's To The Lake...

11 October in Macedonia is Uprising Day, commemorating the start of the (Communist-led) resistance to Nazi occupation in 1941.

As a child in the '80s, my Macedonian school teacher in Australia would tell us kids that the meaning of “fashisti” (“Fascists”) is simply "Germans”. No subtlety there!

Australian English: donga Dongas come in many sizes and are often found Down Under in the outback. What's an Australian donga and the disputed origin of the term...

Have you heard that many miners have dongas Down Under, some bigger than others?

The meaning and disputed origin of the Australian term "donga"...

#AustralianEnglish #AussieEnglish #EnglishLanguage

I'm a translator from Southern Slavic languages into English, as well as an adaptor/localiser of English texts for Australia.
Lately I've been translating Balkan history and current affairs texts, and have just finished editing a re-release of a book about Balkan Roma musicians.
www.nicknasev.com

As Sarajevo, Bosna and Herzegovina and the whole of ex-Yugoslavia farewells legendary singer Halid Bešlić, let's reflect on the past with this rarely heard Bešlić song – a lament about the fate of Bosnia's children recorded during the height of the Balkan wars.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=9EeP...

Australian English: FIFO, DIDO and BIBO Three work-related Australian acronyms heard very often throughout the country. Do you know what they mean? And what work is associated with them?

Australian English: FIFO, DIDO and BIBO (pronounced Fie-Foe, Die-Doe and Buy-Boe)

More on what these work-related acronyms mean here...

#AustralianEnglish #AussieEnglish #EnglishLanguage

It was yesterday that I found out that

"mallee" /ˈmali/

is a uniquely #AustralianEnglish word, believed to derive from an indigenous word for "dwarf eucalyptus tree"

"mallee" is any semi-arid area of mainland Australia that has mallee scrub (low-growing bushy eucalyptus) as its main vegetation.

Thank you Linguistic Discovery and Useless Etymology for this one:

"Sideburns" are named after Union Civil War General Ambrose E. Burnside. Starting around the 1870s, they were called "burnsides", but shortly thereafter, the words were transposed.

This quote by Bulgarian/Romanian journalist Vladimir Mitev:

"The model of governance (that is) probably the dominant paradigm in Eastern Europe over the last 20 years looks like this: politically authoritarian, capitalist and neoliberal in economics, and nationalist in ideology."

Buck = Dollar

... and more!

#Australia #AustralianEnglish