UNESCO stopped updating its atlas of endangered languages
UNESCO's atlas of endangered languages stopped updating in 2017, and the broader atlas meant to replace it is still not live.
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#linguistics.
Every story tagged #linguistics.
Newborns hear every speech sound, then tune to one language
Perceptual narrowing starts at about six months, vowels first. By a first birthday, a baby tells apart mainly the sounds of the language spoken at home.
Eliezer Ben Yehuda and the revival of spoken Hebrew
For nearly 2,000 years Hebrew had no native speakers. Eliezer Ben Yehuda, and children taught in Hebrew-only classes, made it a mother tongue again.
A UK network is testing the old recipe for saving a language
A UK network asks if a language still needs a settled community, home use, job value and state funding. A UNESCO seminar urged cooperation and steady funding.
Two spoken languages leave a mark on the brain's grey matter
A Georgetown study found more grey matter in executive-control regions of Spanish-English speakers. Bilinguals of sign and speech showed no such gain.
A decree on the Rosetta Stone let Champollion read hieroglyphs
A priests' decree of 196 BC, carved in three scripts, let Jean-François Champollion read hieroglyphs in 1822. Thomas Young had laid the groundwork.
Wittgenstein argued a truly private word can never be corrected
Wittgenstein argued a language only one person could understand fails, because nothing outside that person could catch a wrong use of a word.