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 ...

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 ...

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.

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, ...

PARIS — Only one native speaker of Livonian remains on Earth, in Latvia. The Alaskan language Eyak went extinct last year when its last surviving speaker passed away. Those are just two of the nearly ...

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, ...