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This National Science Foundation Special Report provides a handy overview of many topics covered in Words R Us, including the physiology of speech, neuroscience and language, dialects, Creoles, sign language, L1 vs. L2 learning, endangered languages, and language evolution.

This cool article talks about the endangered languages in the world today and how we are losing languages. This article makes the connection between languages and worlds because whenever a language is lost, there is no way to recover it and it is like losing a world of culture.

"Herrera also discovered teens in the Phillippines and Mexico who think it's "cool" to send text messages in regional endangered languages like Kapampangan and Huave."

Love this!~

Article shares 23 maps and charts that can hopefully illuminate small aspects of how we manage to communicate with one another. In the mix: linguistic diversity around the world, where the plurality of Wikipedia articles are authored, endangered languages, which countries boast the most languages...

Linguist are trying to document and record quickly dying languages. They try writing down and making dictionaries of these endangered languages. Documentation can be the key to revitalization. But if no one is interested in revitalization then there it is just like keeping museum artifacts.

Geoffrey Khan, a linguist, is bent on documenting Aramaic, the language of The Bible, and all of its dialects before the language-once the tongue of empires-follows its last speakers to the grave.

Sarah Thomason, linguistics professor, estimates that by 2100, only 700 of the world's 7,000 languages will remain. Although this isn't a full article and mainly an advertisement for her lecture on this same subject, it will most likely be possible to find a full recording online after the event!

This article by Maria Morava explains how language is more important to our daily lives than we may think; as languages can bring people together worldwide.

This article talks about a few different endangered languages (Ainu, Shinnecock, Mustang, Irish, Hawaiian, and Zaza.) and what they are doing to revitalize them. They all share the different strategies that are working for them.

This article explores the revival of Wampanoag (Wôpanâak)--an Algonquian language spoken by Native Americans living in Southeastern Massachusetts when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The story of the linguistic reclaimation's told in Anne Makepeace's documentary, _We Still Live Here_.

Wow!

Prior to the late 1880s, Chickasaw was the dominant language in Chickasaw Nation, in the southern part of central Oklahoma, yet today, only 65 fluent speakers, all bilingual in Chickasaw and English, remain. The death of Emily Johnson Dickerson, the last monolingual Chickasaw speaker, in December 2013 has spurred reflection on the erosion and future of this endangered language.

Although linguists have used for many years the process of deriving pronunciations of obscure words via comparing it to related descendant languages, this method has now been expedited by being scripted into computer code. Thus, scientists can now utilize computer technology to predict pronunciations of obscure words with up to 76% accuracy, which is greatly assisting the documentation of ancient, poorly recorded, or endangered languages in India.

This article talks about how an Objiwe women built robots in order for the Native American children in her community (and others) to learn their indigenous culture and languages. It is so interesting to program a robot to speak a language to prevent indigenous languages from going endangered/extinct.

The World in Words takes a trip to the Hawaiian Islands to meet some of Hawaii's native speakers on Ni`ihau. How have they managed to hold onto the language? What struggles do they face going forward? Is the variation of Hawaiian that Niihau speakers use different from the language spoken by the activists leading the Hawaiian revitalization movement, a.k.a. "university Hawaiian"?

Nineb Lamassu, a researcher at England's Cambridge University, travels among the Assyrian diaspora, recording the traditional epic poetry of the Assyrian ethnic minority and capturing at least the memory of an ancient people whose presence in their homeland is gradually fading.

Currently, one-quarter of American children don't learn to read. This not only endangers them socially and intellectually, but cognitively handicaps them for life. One 2009 study of 72 children ages eight to ten discovered that reading creates new white matter in the brain, which improves system-wide communication. White matter carries information between regions of grey matter, where any information is processed. Not only does reading increase white matter, it helps information be processed more efficiently. Reading in one language has enormous benefits. Add a foreign language and not only do communication skills improve-you can talk to more people in wider circles-but the regions of your brain involved in spatial navigation and learning new information increase in size. Finally, research shows that reading not only helps with fluid intelligence, but with reading comprehension and emotional intelligence as well.