How secret languages thrive behind bars
Prison language, or language created by inmates while incarcerated, has a long and vivid history, and is likely as old as the modern prison itself.
Opinion: Study Latin if you want to talk like a supervillain
Any modern language offers more practical benefits than Latin. But Latin has all the pleasures of a puzzle, a time capsule, and a secret code.
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Learning a foreign language revealed a world I never knew existed
Growing up in a small town in North Carolina, Lauren Collins never needed to speak a foreign language outside of high school Spanish classes. It wasn’t until she met her French-speaking husband and moved to Switzerland that she felt the…
More than 2,000 years of India’s lost literature is coming back into print
For more than 2,000 years, several volumes of classical South Asian texts remained locked away in languages that have either died, have a dwindling number of speakers or no one bothered to translate these stories for a global audience.
Linguists have traced the roots of English, Hindi, Greek and all Indo-European languages to a common ancestor tongue first spoken on the Russian steppes as much as 6,500 years ago.
There are over 6,000 languages spoken around the world today. But by the end of this century, fewer than half of them will remain. That's the driving concern of the new documentary "Language Matters," from poet Bob Holman and filmmaker…
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