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A 2018 photograph taken in Italy shows a man passing a sign reading "welcome" in different languages.

World Aug 25

Why are so many languages spoken in some places and so few in others?

By Marco Túlio Pacheco Coelho, Michael Gavin, The Conversation

Arts Jun 03

A guard stands behind bars at the Adjustment Center during a media tour of California's Death Row at San Quentin State Prison in California. Picture taken December 2015. Photo by Stephen Lam/Reuters
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.

By Elizabeth Flock

Arts Apr 11

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.

By Frankie Thomas

Education Dec 07

Watch 2:59
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…

By PBS NewsHour

Arts Mar 09

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.

By Laura Santhanam

Feb 20

Linguists link English, Hindi to single ancestor language spoken 6,500 years ago

By Laura Santhanam

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.

Continue reading

Jan 23

Say what? Half the world’s languages will vanish by the end of the century

By Frank Carlson

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…

Continue reading

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