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There are some cities you can identify with just an accent, including New York. But linguists say that those who speak in the classic New York tongue are part of a dying breed. To find them, filmmaker Heather Quinlan went accent hunting around the city, holding a sign that reads, "Do you have a New York accent?

New York is an incredibly diverse state. In one building, an extremely rare language is being kept alive. The language is called Seke and is spoken in 5 villages in Nepal. Around 100 of the 700 Seke speakers in the world are in New York. Half of the New York population stays in one building. In Nepal, many Nepalese are learning different languages such as Nepali or Hindi. In New York, the young Seke speakers are barely fluent. This shows how the language will likely be lost over time. However, a new dialect is arising called Ramaluk which is a combination of Nepali, English, Hindi, and Seke. This shows how the language might pass on to future generations.

On Thursday nights near the Brooklyn, N.Y., waterfront, an old firehouse turns into a schoolhouse, where the drills are in Chinese. About a dozen firefighters, EMTs and paramedics are taking the first Mandarin classes, funded by the New York City Fire Department Foundation. New York City boasts the largest Chinese population of any city outside of China, therefore "first responders" want to communicate with more of the New Yorkers they serve. The founder of the language program also states that "It's also to show the communities that we embrace them as citizens of this city, that we are in acceptance of their culture and the transition that they're going through," he says.

Skepticism of online "news" serves as a decent filter much of the time, but our innate biases allow it to be bypassed, researchers have found - especially when presented with the right kind of algorithmically selected "meme." At a time when political misinformation is in ready supply, and in demand, "Facebook, Google, and Twitter function as a distribution mechanism, a platform for circulating false information and helping find receptive audiences," said Brendan Nyhan, a professor of government at Dartmouth College (and occasional contributor to The Times's Upshot column). Why? Here are the key reasons: 1. Individual bias/first impressions: subtle individual biases are at least as important as rankings and choice when it comes to spreading bogus news or Russian hoaxes. Merely understanding what a news report or commentary is saying requires a temporary suspension of disbelief. Mentally, the reader must temporarily accept the stated "facts" as possibly true. A cognitive connection is made automatically: Clinton-sex offender, Trump-Nazi, Muslim men-welfare. And refuting those false claims requires a person to first mentally articulate them, reinforcing a subconscious connection that lingers far longer than people presume.Over time, for many people, it is that false initial connection that stays the strongest, not the retractions or corrections. 2. Repetition: Merely seeing a news headline multiple times in a news feed, even if the news is false, makes it seem more credible. 3. People tend to value the information and judgments offered by good friends over all other sources. It's a psychological tendency with significant consequences now that nearly two-thirds of Americans get at least some of their news from social media.

Quinn Norton is a technology writer whose job offer from The New York Times was rescinded after tweets from her past caused backlash on social media. In her essay, Norton describes how the controversy built and destroyed a falsely-constructed version of herself. The article talks about the potential perils of social media use, including context collapse, where online culture that was meant for a particular in-group becomes disseminated to other groups via social-media platforms. Consequently, it can be taken out of context and recontextualized easily and accidentally.

There are as many as 800 languages spoken in New York City, and nowhere in the world has more than Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA). You can see many of the languages in the article's map, which is featured in " Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas " by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. The five miles from Astoria to Forest Hills have a dense progression of languages: Greek, Filipino, Urdu, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and others, including more obscure ones like Chavacano, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau, and Bukharian.

For 30 years, Robert Siegel has pretty much been the voice of All Things Considered. He steps down from the host chair on Jan. 5, 2018. During his career, one of the recurrent themes of his reporting has been language - and how we speak. This article documents several of Robert Siegel's language-related stories, including a 1993 article on "uptalk," an interview with a voice coach who teaches rock stars to scream without shredding their vocal cords, an interview with sociolinguist William Labov on New York accents, and Donald Trump's vocabulary and language.

A CEO of a company that runs about 32 charter schools around New York is cutting foreign language from the curriculum because "Americans don't learn foreign languages well".

Eva Moskowitz is the CEO and founder of Success Academy Charter Schools, responsible for about 9,000 students in 32 charter schools around New York City. Moskowitz sat down for an interview with the American Enterprise Institute this week, and talked about how to fit everything she deems important for students-coding, recess, science five days a week-into...

Field trip to New York?

Courtesy the New York Times Magazine: thoughtful essays on what language reveals about our moment by rotating columnists Virginia Heffernan, Colson Whitehead, Amanda Hess, Michael Pollan, and others. Some sample titles: "The Underground Art of the Insult", "How `Flawless' Became a Feminist Declaration", "How Rock Star Became a Business Buzzword," "When You `Literally Can't Even' Understand Your Teenager."

Jack Hitt article on how languages die and efforts to keep them alive; notes estimate that half of more than 6,000 languages currently spoken in world will become extinct by end of century; says working to stem tide range are graduate students heading into the field to compile dictionaries, charitable foundations devoted to the cause, like Endangered Language Fund, and transnational agencies, like European Bureau for Lesser Used Languages; describes scene in Puerto Eden, tiny fishing village on Wellington Island in Patagonia region of southern Chile, home of last six speakers of Kawesqar, language native to area since last ice age; photos (L)

Dr. Joy Hirsch, head of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital's functional M.R.I. Laboratory, and her graduate student, Karl Kim, found that second languages are stored differently in the human brain, depending on when they are learned. Babies who learn two languages simultaneously, and apparently effortlessly, have a single brain region for generating complex speech, researchers say. But people who learn a second language in adolescence or adulthood possess two such brain regions, one for each language. To explore where languages lie in the brain, Dr. Hirsch recruited 12 healthy bilingual people from New York City. Ten different languages were represented in the group. Half had learned two languages in infancy. The other half began learning a second language around age 11 and had acquired fluency by 19 after living in the country where the language was spoken. With their heads inside the M.R.I. machine, subjects thought silently about what they had done the day before using complex sentences, first in one language, then in the other. The machine detected increases in blood flow, indicating where in the brain this thinking took place. Activity was noted in Wernicke's area, a region devoted to understanding the meaning of words and the subject matter of spoken language, or semantics, as well as Broca's area, a region dedicated to the execution of speech, as well as some deep grammatical aspects of language. None of the 12 bilinguals had two separate Wernicke's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. But there were dramatic differences in Broca's areas, Dr. Hirsch said. In people who had learned both languages in infancy, there was only one uniform Broca's region for both languages, a dot of tissue containing about 30,000 neurons. Among those who had learned a second language in adolescence, however, Broca's area seemed to be divided into two distinct areas. Only one area was activated for each language. These two areas lay close to each other but were always separate, Dr. Hirsch s

This New York Post article discusses strategies to tell when someone is lying. It provides tips on how to detect a liar, like what details they won't be able to provide. It also discusses a study conducted by the University of Amsterdam. This study describes nine experiments where 1,445 people needed to determine whether handwritten letters, videos, and interviews, both pre-recorded and live, were discussing true or false information. It also discusses the accuracy of polygraphs and how our intuition and attention to detail can help us determine if someone is being truthful or not.

This article discusses hundreds of the world's endangered & threatened languages in New York. Linguist Ross Perlin introduces the work he has done to document language extinction in NY for over 11 years. It introduces/provides an interview of the people who speak languages that are going extinct.

Can babies learn to read? While parents use DVDs and other media in an attempt to teach their infants to read, these tools don't instill reading skills in babies, a study by researchers at New York University's Steinhardt School of Culture, Education, and Human Development has found. In their study, which appears in the Journal of Educational Psychology, the researchers examined 117 infants, aged nine to 18 months, who were randomly assigned to treatment and control groups. Children in the treatment condition received a baby media product, which included DVDs, word and picture flashcards, and flip books to be used daily over a seven-month period; children in the control condition did not receive these materials from the researchers. Over the course of seven months, the researchers conducted a home visit, four laboratory visits, and monthly assessments of language development. To test children's emerging skills in the laboratory, the researchers examined the capacity to recognize letter names, letter sounds, vocabulary, words identified on sight, and comprehension. A combination of eye-tracking tasks and standardized measures were used to study outcomes at each stage of development. Using a state-of-the art eye-tracking technology, which follows even the slightest eye movements, the researchers were able to closely monitor how the infants distributed their attention and how they shifted their gaze from one location to another when shown specific words and phrases. No discernible differences were observed between the results of the experimental group vs. the control; yet parents of the infants in the experimental group perceived that their children were, in fact, acquiring words. :-)

Between 1950 and 2010, 230 languages went extinct, according to the UNESCO Atlas of the World's Languages in Danger. Today, a third of the world's languages have fewer than 1,000 speakers left. Every two weeks a language dies with its last speaker, 50 to 90 percent of them are predicted to disappear by the next century. Wikitongues wants to save these endangered languages from extinction. Bogre Udell, who speaks four languages, met Frederico Andrade, who speaks five, at the Parsons New School in New York City. In 2014, they launched Wikitongues, an ambitious project to make the first public archive of every language in the world. They've already documented more than 350 languages, which they are tracking online, and plan to hit 1,000 in the coming years. "When humanity loses a language, we also lose the potential for greater diversity in art, music, literature, and oral traditions," says Bogre Udell.

Natalie Brito, a New York University Professor of Applied Psychology, created an app to help the challenges of Hispanic parents when they want to teach their kids Spanish in an English speaking country like the US. She goes over "language racism" when Hispanic nannies/caregivers are told to speak English instead of their native Spanish language.

This article talks about Pelota mixteca, a sport, and how it has been keeping Oaxacan, a native mexican language, alive. The article talks about the stigma and resistance Mexicans and Mexican-Americans face when speaking non-English languages or their local languages.

Over the last 70 years, researchers have tried to gauge the effect on an individual of having an unusual name. It is thought that our identity is partly shaped by the way we are treated by other people - a concept psychologists call the "looking-glass self" - and our name has the potential to colour our interactions with society. Early studies found that men with uncommon first names were more likely to drop out of school and be lonely later in life. One study found that psychiatric patients with more unusual names tended to be more disturbed. But more recent work has presented a mixed picture. Richard Zweigenhaft, a psychologist at Guilford College in the US, pointed out that wealthy, oddly-named Americans are more likely to find themselves in Who's Who. He found no consistent bad effects of having a strange name, but noted that both common and unusual names are sometimes deemed desirable. Conley, who is a sociologist at New York University, says that children with unusual names may learn impulse control because they may be teased or get used to people asking about their names. "They actually benefit from that experience by learning to control their emotions or their impulses, which is of course a great skill for success."