A recent article in the New York Times describes the endangered language research of Tucker Childs, a linguist at Portland State University, who is in Sierra Leone studying the nearly extinct Kim language.  The death of the Kim language is attributed to the decision of younger speakers to learn the Mende language, spoken by 1. . .   Read More

Estimates of the number of the world’s languages are hard to nail down precisely.  Our best estimate comes from the current edition of the Ethnologue, which puts the number at 6,909…  6,909 languages. For a challenge, try naming a hundred.  Fifty.  Ten?  The notion of living in a world with almost 7. . .   Read More

Over at The Rosetta Project, we have been busy uploading new materials to our collection at the Internet Archive (which you can also follow by RSS feed). This week, we uploaded this grammar of Esperanto — a language invented by a single man, now used as a means of regular communication by thousands, if not millions. . .   Read More

With the passing of Cahuilla elder Alvino Siva on June 26, the language of the Cahuilla of Southern California moved one step closer to being lost forever.   Silva was one of just a handful of fluent Cahuilla speakers left.  A 1994 estimate placed the total number of speakers between 7 and 20, all elderly.  Cahuilla. . .   Read More

This recent study has found that monkeys are able to discern the prefixes and suffixes of human language.  These word parts are essential to the grammars of many languages — including English, where verbs are changed by the addition of suffixes to mark things like tense, aspect, person and number (hear-d, hear-s, hear-ing. . .   Read More

The Codex Sinaiticus, the oldest extant copy of the Bible, has been digitized by the Codex Sinaiticus Project, and can now be viewed online here. The manuscript contains the entire New Testament, and most of the Old Testament, all in Greek (the original language of the New Testament). The physical manuscript is divided unequally among. . .   Read More