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"The human knowledge base is eroding as we lose languages, exacerbated by the fact that most of them have never been written down or recorded... Each language is a unique expression of human creativity... it seems premature to begin constructing grand theories of universal grammar...If we can learn to value the intellectual diversity that is fostered by linguistic variety, we can all help to ensure its survival."

Lera Boroditsky, cognitive science professor at UC San Diego notes, "...a growing body of research is documenting how experience with language radically restructures the brain. People who were deprived of access to language as children (e.g., deaf individuals without access to speakers of sign languages) show patterns of neural connectivity that are radically different from those with early language exposure and are cognitively different from peers who had early language access. The later in life that first exposure to language occurs, the more pronounced and cemented the consequences. Further, speakers of different languages develop different cognitive skills and predispositions, as shaped by the structures and patterns of their languages. Experience with languages in different modalities (e.g., spoken versus signed) also develops predictable differences in cognitive abilities outside the boundaries of language. For example, speakers of sign languages develop different visuospatial attention skills than those who only use spoken language. Exposure to written language also restructures the brain, even when acquired late in life. Even seemingly surface properties, such as writing direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), have profound consequences for how people attend to, imagine, and organize information. The normal human brain that is the subject of study in neuroscience is a "languaged" brain. It has come to be the way it is through a personal history of language use within an individual's lifetime. It also actively and dynamically uses linguistic resources (the categories, constructions, and distinctions available in language) as it processes incoming information from across the senses.

"...a desire in Hollywood to infuse fantasy and science-fiction movies, television series and video games with a sense of believability is driving demand for constructed languages, complete with grammatical rules, a written alphabet (hieroglyphics are acceptable) and enough vocabulary for basic conversations. ... "The days of aliens spouting gibberish with no grammatical structure are over," said Paul R. Frommer ... who created Na'vi, the language spoken by the giant blue inhabitants of Pandora in "Avatar." ... fans rewatched Dothraki scenes to study the language in a workshop-like setting. ... There have been many attempts to create languages, often for specific political effect. In the 1870s, a Polish doctor invented Esperanto ... The motivation to learn an auxiliary language is not so different from why people pick up French or Italian, she said. "Learning a language, even a natural language, is more of an emotional decision than a practical one. It's about belonging to a group," she said. ... The watershed moment for invented languages was the creation of a Klingon language ... But as with any language, there is a certain snob appeal built in. Among Dothraki, Na'vi and Klingon speakers, a divide has grown between fans who master the language as a linguistic challenge, and those who pick up a few phrases because they love the mythology." Reaction on Language Log: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3628 - "there's an attitude among some linguists - and also plenty of non-linguists, as is evident from many of the comments on the NYT piece - that engaging in conlang activity is a waste of time, perhaps even detrimental to the real subject matter of linguistics."

Ben Blatt, _Slate_ journalist, shares and reports on some maps of the United States that incorporate data from the Census Bureau's American Community Survey regarding the languages spoken in American homes. One map shows what language, after English, is most commonly spoken in each of the 50 states (Spanish, for the most part), and another, the second most-spoken language. I personally question the veracity of the data for Hawai'i, which lists Tagalog as the second-most spoken language behind English. Surely it's Hawai'i Creole English (HCE), but perhaps it's because survey respondents don't know HCE= its own language. Also, Ilocano seems to be more commonly spoken than Tagalog in the 808, but maybe because Tagalog= the language of school instruction in the Philippines, it's universally spoken by everyone who speaks some Filipino variant. Some caveats on the construction of these maps. A language like Chinese is not counted as a single language, but is split into different dialects: Cantonese, Mandarin, Shanghaiese and treated as different languages. If those languages had been grouped together, the marking of many states would change. In addition, Hawaiian is listed as a Pacific Island language, so following ACS classifications, it was not included in the Native American languages map.

Lera Boroditsky, then an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University at the time of this article, looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think. Boroditsky's research data, collected from around the world, suggeststhat people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. Boroditsky argues that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think - that learning a new language isn't simply learning a new way of talking, but a new way of thinking. Languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

This article documents the subculture of conlangers. Conlang", short for "constructed language," is a language that has been constructed. There are a lot of them, of various sorts. International auxiliary languages like Volapük, Esperanto, or Interlingua are one specific type of conlang. Invented to facilitate international communication during the great techno-utopian-modernist thought-boom of the last two centuries, they never got terribly popular. Conlangs do not necessarily have to be useful. As David Peterson explains in his new book _The Art of Language Invention_, conlanging is an art as well as a science, something you might do for your own pleasure, as well as for the entertainment of others.

Excellent study. "While it has long been recognized that certain areas in the brain's left hemisphere enable us to understand and produce language, scientists are still figuring out exactly how those areas divvy up the highly complex processes necessary to comprehend and produce language. ... Two brain areas called Broca's region and Wernicke's region serve as the main computing hubs underlying language processing, with dense bundles of nerve fibers linking the two ... Working with patients suffering from language impairments because of a variety of neurodegenerative diseases, Wilsons' team used brain imaging and language tests to disentangle the roles played by the two pathways. ... The study marks the first time it has been shown that upper and lower tracts play distinct functional roles in language processing."

While the left hemisphere of the brain is where the processing and understanding of language is, different sections of the brain control different parts of language. Two separate areas of the brain control the ability to remember and understand specific words, and the other controls how we construct sentences and make sense of them. If one of these sections is damaged, the other can still work properly, so it is possible to be able to remember words and what they mean but not know how to create sentences.

How do humans construct their mental representations of the passage of time? The universalist account claims that abstract concepts like time are universal across humans. In contrast, the linguistic relativity hypothesis holds that speakers of different languages represent duration differently. A 2017 study conducted by Panos Athanasopoulos, Professor of Linguistics and English Language at Lancaster University, and felllow linguist Emanuel Bylund, shows that bilinguals do indeed think about time differently, depending on the language context in which they are estimating the duration of events. Learning a new way to talk about time really does rewire the brain. Our findings are the first psycho-physical evidence of cognitive flexibility in bilinguals. It seems that by learning a new language, you suddenly become attuned to perceptual dimensions that you weren't aware of before. The fact that bilinguals go between these different ways of estimating time effortlessly and unconsciously fits in with a growing body of evidence demonstrating the ease with which language can creep into our most basic senses, including our emotions, our visual perception and now it turns out, our sense of time. But it also shows that bilinguals are more flexible thinkers and there is evidence to suggest that mentally going back and forth between different languages on a daily basis confers advantages on the ability to learn and multi-task, and even long term benefits for mental well-being.

Previously, genetic analysis had indicated that the ancestors of Native Americans left Siberia to migrate across ancient Beringia (the strip of land that once connected Asia and what's now Alaska) about 25,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence of human habitation on North America dates to 15,000 years ago. With ice covering much of Alaska, the ancestors of Native Americans might've lived in Beringia for about 10,000 years before moving on. Now linguistic evidence may help support that theory. A pair of linguistics researchers, Mark Sicoli and Gary Holton, recently analyzed languages from North American Na-Dene family (traditionally spoken in Alaska, Canada and parts of the present-day U.S.) and the Asian Yeneseian family (spoken thousands of miles away, in central Siberia), using similarities and differences between the languages to construct a language family tree. As they note in an article published today in PLOS ONE, they found that the two language families are indeed related-and both appear to descend from an ancestral language that can be traced to the Beringia region. Both Siberia and North America, it seems, were settled by the descendants of a community that lived in Beringia for some time. In other words, Sicoli says, "this makes it look like Beringia wasn't simply a bridge, but actually a homeland-a refuge, where people could build a life."

Stephen Wilson, an associate professor in the University of Arizona's Department of Speech, Language, and Hearing Sciences, studied the upper and lower white-matter connecting pathways between Broca's region and Wernicke's region: the two areas of the brain that are hubs for language processing. Brain imaging and language tests were used to examine patients suffering from language impairments caused by neurodegeneration. Wilson discovered the pathways have distinct functions. Damage to the lower pathway affects lexicon and semantics: "You forget the name of things, you forget the meaning of words. But surprisingly, you're extremely good at constructing sentences." Conversely, damage to the upper pathway creates problems in syntactic processing and figuring out the relationship between words in a sentence.

Language isn't found in just one part of the brain but rather in separate individual parts that are responsible for different aspects of language. Neurodegentive diseases that target specific areas of the brain affecting language, only have a partial effect on the patients ability to understand and communicate.

Chisato Danjo, Lecturer in Japanese and Linguistics at York St John University, reports on her ethnographic case study examining a mother and her two bilingual Japanese-English children. Danjo argues that instead of seeing bilingualism as "dual monolingualism," as reflected in the practice of "One Parent, One Language" (OPOL), we adopt a broader view of language learning: translanguaging, which conceptualises language as a bundle of socially constructed linguistic resources that individuals can deploy to make sense of their multilingual world. When we see a child actively using, adapting and negotiating their repertoire, it casts doubt on the belief that it's bad for children to mix languages. What it could actually be doing is demonstrating high-level flexibility and interpersonal skills.

Doesn't use the term "niche construction," but certainly makes a case for language constructing a niche.

In 2010, two articulate powerhouse linguists, Lena Boroditsky, of Stanford, and Mark Liberman, of U. Penn., squared off on the above topic. Boroditsky advanced the Neo-Whorfian position that language does indeed shape thought. Liberman countered, noting that thought also shapes our language we speak, and the way we live shapes both language and thought. When we encounter or create new ideas, we can usually describe them with new combinations of old words. And if not, we easily adapt or borrow or create the new words or phrases we need. As Edward Sapir once put it, "We may say that a language is so constructed that no matter what any speaker of it may desire to communicate … the language is prepared to do his work."

Has a list of entries on the word "like"

Linguist John McWhorter examines 3 fictional constructed languages, also known as conlangs, and explains the features that make them bona fide languages, including the presence of grammar/syntax and the fact that they evolve and change over time.

We use both sides of our brain for speech, New York University researchers have discovered: a finding that alters previous conceptions about neurological activity. Many in the scientific community have posited that both speech and language are lateralized -- that is, we use only one side of our brains for speech, which involves listening and speaking, and language, which involves constructing and understanding sentences. However, the conclusions pertaining to speech generally stem from studies that rely on indirect measurements of brain activity, raising questions about characterizing speech as lateralized. In their examination, the researchers tested the parts of the brain that were used during speech. Here, the study's subjects were asked to repeat two "non-words" -- "kig" and "pob." Using non-words as a prompt to gauge neurological activity, the researchers were able to isolate speech from language. An analysis of brain activity as patients engaged in speech tasks showed that both sides of the brain were used -- that is, speech is, in fact, bi-lateral. The results also offer insights into addressing speech-related inhibitions caused by stroke or injury and lay the groundwork for better rehabilitation methods.

Some game modes: Try to created the longest sentence. The longer the sentence, the higher the score. Timed feature to test ability to construct nonsensical phrases under pressure. App called Sleep Furiously. Available from Apple, Google and Amazon

how to make up a language