In 1815, the catastrophic eruption of Mount Tambora didn't just cause a "year without a summer" across the globe; it…
Forget the weathered notebook and tape recorder. Modern linguists are deploying a high-tech toolkit to document endangered languages, using portable…
Imagine being the first outsider to document a language with no written form. How would you create its first-ever dictionary?…
In 1974, UNESCO declared the Manx language extinct with the death of its last native speaker, Ned Maddrell. Yet, this…
Could a nearly extinct language from Siberia be related to Navajo and other Native American languages? The fascinating Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis…
Imagine trying to learn a language with no textbook, no translator, and no shared vocabulary. The monolingual fieldwork method is…
What happens when a language's entire world can fit into a single room? We explore the most extreme cases of…
What are the ethical responsibilities of a linguist who is the first outsider to document a language from a previously…
Deep in the Amazon, linguist Daniel Everett encountered a language that seemed to break all the rules. His claim that…
Every two weeks, a language dies, taking with it a unique way of seeing the world. Meet the "Language Catchers,"…
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