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This article is pretty self-explanatory based on the article - it talks about how monkeys' vocal cords and bodies are physiologically able to talk and make distinct sounds. However, monkeys lack the brain circuits used by humans to learn sounds, and the special nerve sets humans use to control the shape of our vocal tracts.

University of Washington students have created gloves called SignAloud. These gloves sense hand motions and translate the meanings, allowing more people to understand sign language.

Changes by the French language council, Académie Française, will simplify the spelling of about 2,400 words, coinciding with the start of the new school year in September. The hat-shaped circumflex accent will disappear above the "i" and "u" in many words. You'll also see fewer hyphens and some vanishing vowels.

UH-Manoa's Institute for Hawaiian Language Research and Translation provides access and research capacity into the extensive archive of Hawaiian language materials, making more than a century of historical documentation about Hawaiian knowledge and experience available for study. Browse through the Hawaiian Language Newspaper database to view side-by-side scans of original Hawaiian language articles, along with their English translation!

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

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.

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!

New research suggests that 3-month-old human babies can use lemur calls as teaching aids. The findings hint at a deep biological connection between language and learning. But not everyone agrees that the new work shows that primate sounds can stimulate a child's linguistic instinct. "This work tells us that sounds that are more like human language are more effective," says , a psychologist at the University of California, Davis. "What is more controversial is why they are effective." She says it's still unclear whether the primate sounds are stimulating some deep linguistic circuit in the brain or just getting the babies to look.

University of Michigan professor Carmel O'Shannessy has discovered a language born just a few decades ago. "Light Warlpiri" is spoken in the aboriginal community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Video featuring British historical linguist and Early Modern English scholar, David Crystal, and his son, Ben Crystal, speaking about their work in re: speaking Shakespeare's words as they originally sounded.

Linguist Danny Erker studies how Spanish is spoken, and changing, in the United States.

Interesting NPR story on the use of "ax"--apparently not simply the oft-maligned African-American Vernacular English version of "ask". That particular pronunciation of the word has a more distinguished pedigree, dating back to Chaucer.

A recent study of the speech information rate of seven languages concludes that there is considerable variation in the speed at which languages are spoken, but much less variation in how efficiently languages communicate the same information.

Body language affects how others see us, but it may also change how we see ourselves. Social psychologist Amy Cuddy shows how "power posing" - standing in a posture of confidence, even when we don't feel confident - can affect testosterone and cortisol levels in the brain, and might even have an impact on our chances for success.

Without understanding the 'referential function' of language (words as 'verbal labels', symbolizing other things) it is impossible to learn a language. Is this implicit knowledge already present early in infants? Marno, Nespor, and Mehler of the International School of Advanced Studies conducted experiments with infants (4 months old). Babies watched a series of videos where a person might (or might not) utter an (invented) name of an object, while directing (or not directing) their gaze towards the position on the screen where a picture of the object would appear. By monitoring the infants' gaze, Marno and colleagues observed that, in response to speech cues, the infant's gaze would look faster for the visual object, indicating that she is ready to find a potential referent of the speech. However, this effect did not occur if the person in the video remained silent or if the sound was a non-speech sound. "The mere fact of hearing verbal stimuli placed the infants in a condition to expect the appearance, somewhere, of an object to be associated with the word, whereas this didn't happen when there was no speech, even when the person in the video directed the infant's gaze to where the object would appear, concludes Marno. "This suggests that infants at this early age already have some knowledge that language implies a relation between words and the surrounding physical world. Moreover, they are also ready to find out these relations, even if they don't know anything about the meanings of the words yet. Thus, a good advice to mothers is to speak to their infants, because infants might understand much more than they would show, and in this way their attention can be efficiently guided by their caregivers."

Google is working on a font, Noto, that aims to include "all the world's languages" - every written language on Earth. Right now, Noto includes a wide breadth of language scripts from all around the world - specifically, 100 scripts with 100,000 characters. That includes over 600 written languages, says Jungshik Shin, an engineer on Google's text and font team. The first fonts were released in 2012. But this month, Google (in partnership with Adobe) has released a new set of Chinese-Japanese-Korean fonts - the latest in their effort to make the Internet more inclusive. But as with any product intended to be universal, the implementation gets complicated - and not everyone for whom the product is intended is happy.

This article and video explains how recent research on bird brains could give us clues as to how human language evolved.

Condemned as a dead language, Manx - the native language of the Isle of Man - is staging an extraordinary renaissance. By the early 1960s there were perhaps as few as 200 who were conversant in the tongue. The last native speaker, Ned Maddrell, died in 1974. The decline was so dramatic that Unesco pronounced the language extinct in the 1990s. But the grim prognosis coincided with a massive effort at revival. Spearheaded by activists and driven by lottery funding and a sizeable contribution (currently £100,000 a year) from the Manx government, the last 20 years have had a huge impact. Now there is even a Manx language primary school in which all subjects are taught in the language, with more than 60 bilingual pupils attending. Manx is taught in a less comprehensive way in other schools across the island.

Spontaneous gesture can help children learn, whether they use a spoken language or sign language, according to a new report by Susan Goldin-Meadow, psychology professor at the University of Chicago. "Children who can hear use gesture along with speech to communicate as they acquire spoken language," a researcher said. "Those gesture-plus-word combinations precede and predict the acquisition of word combinations that convey the same notions. Gesture plays a role in learning for signers even though it is in the same modality as sign. As a result, gesture cannot aid learners simply by providing a second modality. Rather, gesture adds imagery to the categorical distinctions that form the core of both spoken and sign languages. Goldin-Meadow concludes that gesture can be the basis for a self-made language, assuming linguistic forms and functions when other vehicles are not available. But when a conventional spoken or sign language is present, gesture works along with language, helping to promote learning.

It is an honor to be here at the University of Maryland which has worked closely with the Department of Education for more than 20 years to advance the teaching of languages such as Hebrew, Farsi, Chinese, and Russian. As President Obama said on Monday: "Our generation's Sputnik moment is now."