Nation Oct 10 Analysis: How Indigenous languages can be preserved, and why those efforts help revitalize culture By Daryl Wade Baldwin, The Conversation
World Dec 23 In Africa, rescuing the languages that Western tech ignores Computers have become amazingly precise at translating spoken words to text messages and scouring huge troves of data for answers to complex questions – as long as you speak English or another of the world's dominant languages. By Matt O'Brien, CHINEDU ASADU, Associated Press
World Aug 25 Why are so many languages spoken in some places and so few in others? Collectively, human beings speak more than 7,000 distinct languages, and these languages are not uniformly distributed across the planet. By Marco Túlio Pacheco Coelho, Michael Gavin, The Conversation
Arts Jun 03 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
Dec 07 Watch 2:59 Learning a foreign language revealed a world I never knew existed By PBS News Hour 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… Continue watching
Mar 09 More than 2,000 years of India’s lost literature is coming back into print By Laura Santhanam 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. Continue reading
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