This study seeks to assess the competence in, and current perceptions of, the traditional regional ancestral variety, Picard, among school students in Lille. In the first part, dialect retention is evaluated by a series of language tests, administered in two rounds of fieldwork, the first carried out between 1995–1999 covering the whole of Lille-Métropole and the second undertaken in 2004–2005 focusing on the urban heartlands. The results show that competence in Picard, as measured by the tests, is highest among European or Metropolitan French subjects in the north-eastern part of the urban area (Roubaix-Tourcoing) despite significantly greater ethnic diversity among the school populations.

In the second part of the study, the subjects’ perceptions of a range of Picard and Regional French varieties, as represented by a series of sample recordings, covering most of the picardophone areas are evaluated against a linguistic analysis of ‘picardité’ as measured by the density of Picard features in the extracts concerned. The results show a lack of correspondence between the two evaluations. Subjects’ perceptions are further clarified by their metalinguistic comments regarding the value of Picard and its place in their linguistic repertoire. As this variety is rarely if ever used in peer-to-peer exchanges, relative competence does not correlate with indicators of socialisation that proved significant with regard to other aspects of the students’ linguistic repertoire and was also found to correlate negatively with measures of regional loyalty and cultural value.

The ‘real-time’ aspect of the study appears to point to some degree of ongoing erosion of awareness and confidence in recognition of the varieties concerned among the population investigated, despite some important cultural events which might have been expected to counter this trend.

The Armenian-Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky completed a painting of a polar seascape entitled Ledyanyye gory [Ice mountains] in 1870. The picture has usually been taken for an Antarctic scene depicting HIMS Mirnyi, one of the two ships of the Russian Antarctic Expedition of 1819–1821, in the presence of icebergs, ice cliffs and floes. The author contends, first, that this identification is open to considerable doubt, and second, that other aspects of the painting are also problematic. The painting is in the Aivazovsky Museum in Ukraine. The Museum kindly supplied him with high resolution photographs of the painting but personal scrutiny has proved impossible hitherto. Further research, especially into Aivazovsky's papers, might resolve some of the questions which it raises.

This commentary, which presents an expanded version of the keynote address at the 2012 Conference on ‘Global Climate Change Without the United States’, outlines Palau’s role in attempting to motivate international action on climate change. It explains two initiatives: the passage of a United Nations (UN) General Assembly resolution highlighting the security implications of climate change, and the attempt to obtain an advisory opinion from the International Court of Justice on the responsibility of states for climate change. The two avenues are located ‘inside the system’ in that they target well-established organs of the UN system. However, they are ‘outside the box’ because they seek to bypass and ultimately jump-start the international negotiation process that has unfolded under the auspices of the UNFCCC.