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UNESCO's Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger is intended to raise awareness about language endangerment and the need to safeguard the world's linguistic diversity among policy-makers, speaker communities and the general public, and to be a tool to monitor the status of endangered languages and the trends in linguistic diversity at the global level. The latest edition of the Atlas (2009) lists about 2,500 languages (among which 230 languages extinct since 1950), approaching the generally-accepted estimate of some 3,000 endangered languages worldwide. For each language, the Atlas provides its name, degree of endangerment (see below) and the country or countries where it is spoken. The online edition provides additional information on numbers of speakers, relevant policies and projects, sources, ISO codes and geographic coordinates. This free Internet-based version of the Atlas for the first time permits wide accessibility and allows for interactivity and timely updating of information, based on feedback provided by users.

The Modern Language Association supports a broad, intellectually driven approach to teaching language and culture in higher education. To study the best ways of implementing this approach in today's world, the MLA Executive Council established an Ad Hoc Committee on Foreign Languages. The committee was charged with examining the current language crisis that has occurred as a result of 9/11 and with considering the effects of this crisis on the teaching of foreign languages in colleges and universities. This summary of the committee's and the Executive Council's deliberations offers background and context for the association's recommendations regarding the challenges and opportunities facing language study in higher education. While the recommendations address issues specific to the United States, they may be applicable to other contexts and countries.

Welcome to the Culturally Authentic Pictorial Lexicon, CAPL, the source for authentic images for language learning. As a language teacher and learner, I always seek to connect language, culture, and meaning. This site represents my interest to not only write about language learning, but provide concrete examples. Our world rich in diversity, both linguistic and visual, and often the connection between word and image can be lost. As commercial globalization brings the world together through 'common products', we sometimes forget how our visual perception of the world affects our use of words and the meanings they convey. Is a house really a Haus, is pain really хлеб, and when we see red cabbage, is it really red? These are simple and mundane questions that underscore the fact that visual perception is culturally determined and visual cognition varies from culture to culture. The CAPL project seeks to explore this idea through a collection of authentic photographs arranged by language and context. In the coming year, we will add more photos, more databases, and more textual descriptions. Check back often as we expand our collection. It is our hope that the collection itself can spur research in a variety of areas and that the collection can be used by language teachers and learners throughout the world with its generous Creative Commons license.

italki.com is where you can find everything you need to learn a language. italki is a social network and an online resource for learning foreign languages. Find a Language Partner: Get a language partner, find a tutor, or just make friends around the world! Answers: Ask your questions here and get answers from the italki community. Shared Files: Download files like free textbooks, handouts, and learning guides. Language Resources Check this directory for other online and offline language learning resources. Knowledge: Free community-created wiki. Contribute your knowledge and create a wiki page. Groups: Join and create groups to discuss and learn from each other.

May 28 - 30, 2009 at The George Washington University, Washington, DC Designed for practitioners and researchers involved in the preparation and ongoing professional development of language teachers, LTE 2009 will address the education of teachers of all languages, at all instructional and institutional levels, and in many national and international contexts in which this takes place including: English as a Second or Foreign Language (ESL/EFL) instruction; foreign/modern/world language teaching; bilingual education; immersion education; indigenous and minority language education; and the teaching of less commonly taught languages.

"In the increasingly interconnected world of the 21st century, Americans must be able to communicate effectively in English and other world languages. Yet while countries around the world are implementing language programs that position their students to become multilingual world citizens, results of a recent national report by the Center for Applied Linguistics (Rhodes & Pufahl, 2010) reveal that opportunities for U.S. students to learn a foreign language have declined.

WALS is a large database of structural (phonological, grammatical, lexical) properties of languages gathered from descriptive materials (such as reference grammars) by a team of more than 40 authors (many of them the leading authorities on the subject). WALS consists of 141 maps with accompanying texts on diverse features (such as vowel inventory size, noun-genitive order, passive constructions, and "hand"/"arm" polysemy), each of which is the responsibility of a single author (or team of authors). Each map shows between 120 and 1370 languages, each language being represented by a symbol, and different symbols showing different values of the feature. Altogether 2,650 languages are shown on the maps, and more than 58,000 datapoints give information on features in particular languages.

Diane J. Tedick, Editor (The Minnesota Articulation Project). This handbook for teachers was designed to provide world language teachers with the background knowledge, ideas, and resources for implementing proficiency-oriented language instruction and classroom-based performance measures into their curriculum. Tied to the national Standards for Foreign Language Education, the Handbook gives teachers a solid foundation of the principles and practices that are central to standards-based and proficiency-oriented language instruction and assessment. The Handbook gives teachers a wide variety of tasks and activities to use in the classroom along with ideas for adapting these activities for different levels and languages and longer curricular packages.The Handbook was originally created by members of the Minnesota Articulation Project. While the handbook is still available in print through the CARLAmworking paper series most of the handbook is now available online.

Connecting you with the world's diverse cultures is this KML layer produced by The Rosetta Project / The Long Now Foundation. Around the world, a significant part of cultural diversity is experienced through language. It is feared that many of the languages, and therefore the cultures they belong to are being lost at such a rapid rate that "linguists predict that we may lose as much as 90% of the world's linguistic diversity within the next century." This KML provides an opportunity to explore the areas where these endangered languages are spoken throughout Africa and the Americas.

Welcome to the UCLA Phonetics Lab Archive. For over half a century, the UCLA Phonetics Laboratory has collected recordings of hundreds of languages from around the world, providing source materials for phonetic and phonological research, of value to scholars, speakers of the languages, and language learners alike. The materials on this site comprise audio recordings illustrating phonetic structures from over 200 languages with phonetic transcriptions, plus scans of original field notes where relevant. The archive in its current form is a self-standing website. Eventually all the data here will be incorporated into the comprehensive UCLA Digital Library where it will be maintained as a permanent resource for future generations.

TANDEM meansfor people who want to study languages in a different way: the opportunity to meet another person for conversation exchange, either while as taking a language course or independent of one. All of this in a network of language schools practically world-wide which open new paths towards languages, cultures and exchanges.

Language study materials for French, German, Spanish, and Italian, plus some limited materials in other languages such as Japanese, Chinese, Portuguese, Greek, Polish, Russian, Gaelic, Welsh, Irish, and Urdu.

Interesting data visualization showing the number of speakers for wide range of world languages

An online blind-refereed journal dedicated to the issues underlying the teaching and learning of heritage languages. Hosted by the UCLA Center for World Languages.

WORLD CALL LANGUAGE LINKS LIBRARY - Free/Open Source Language Education Resource Repository

International Mother Language Day was proclaimed by UNESCO's General Conference in November 1999. The International Day has been observed every year since February 2000 to promote linguistic and cultural diversity and multilingualism.

Since 1946 the Middle East Institute has been an important conduit of information between Middle Eastern nations and American policymakers, organizations and the public. We strive to increase knowledge of the Middle East among our own citizens and to promote understanding between the peoples of the Middle East and America. Today we play a vital and unique role in expanding the dialogue beyond Washington, DC, and actively with organizations in the Middle East. Our Department of Programs present programs with top regional experts and officials from the US and foreign governments. The George Camp Keiser Library has the largest English-language collection on the Middle East outside of the Library of Congress. We publish quarterly one of the most prestigious journals on the Middle East, The Middle East Journal. MEI's Department of Languages and Regional Studies offers courses in Arabic, Hebrew, Persian and Turkish and seminars highlighting the history, literature and culture of the Middle East.

Can access through index of languages, index of sounds or map index. Includes sounds to accompany Ladefoged's textbooks, A Course in Phonetics 5th Ed, Vowels and Consonants, 2nd. Ed. This page (Phonetics Lab Data) is the phonetics teaching materials compiled by Peter and Jenny Ladefoged (originally Sounds of the World's Languages).

Building an archive of all documented human languages.

Outreach World, a comprehensive one-stop resource for teaching international and area studies and foreign languages in the precollegiate classroom.