Does it matter when languages die? This is a question bothering a number of people, from professional linguists to amateur language-lovers and minority activists. As globalization accelerates, so does ...

HOLYHEAD, Wales (Reuters) - Endangered languages like Welsh, Navajo and Breton have regained speakers and popularity in their communities and are now even "cool" for kids -- thanks to the Internet.

LANGUAGE AND SILENCE by George Steiner. 426 pages. Afheneum. $8. “A man can learn half a dozen professions by reading Zola,” says George Steiner. And a man can learn the ground rules to half a dozen ...

Like many of the young people in her Indigenous Anishinaabe community in the upper peninsula of Michigan, Danielle Boyer grew up speaking only a little of her people’s native language, ...

WASHINGTON -- Every two weeks or so the last elderly man or woman with full command of a particular language dies. At that rate, as many as 2,500 native tongues will disappear forever by 2100. David W ...

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. The linguist, ...

Every dying language had an adventurous youth. Eyak can be traced to an ancient mother tongue that was centered near the Yukon and Tanana rivers in North America. Three millennia ago, a small band ...

I forget that I know three languages. Partly because who’s to say what constitutes “knowing,” given the way that language skills degrade without practice? Another reason I forget is because the ...

JERUSALEM - An ancient, dying language gets a new life on American movie screens this week. Some linguists, who fear the language spoken by Jesus could vanish within a few decades, hope for a boost ...