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linguistics

Language 'time machine' a Rosetta stone for lost tongues

One of my favorite things about watching old movies is hearing how people might have spoken in eras past -- the expressions they used, their old-school smack talk. But what did the languages from thousands of years back sound like? Hollywood, as far as I know, has yet to make a movie in which characters talk in authentic proto-Austronesian.

The language nerd in me, was, therefore, excited to discover that scientists from UC Berkeley and the University of British Columbia have created a computer program to rapidly reconstruct vocabularies of ancient languages using only their modern language descendants. … Read more

Google confronts extinction of more than 3,000 languages

More than 3,000 languages are on the verge of extinction and Google is trying to do something about it.

Collaborating with scholars, researchers, and language communities, the Web giant launched the Endangered Languages Project today, backed by a coalition called the Alliance for Linguistic Diversity. Through the project Web site, people can learn about the Earth's endangered languages and see what kind of documentation is being created to preserve them.

The diverse languages range from Navajo, which is spoken by only 120,000 people in the Southwest U.S., to Koro, a previously unknown language that was documented … Read more