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Tracey Tokuhama-Espinosa is a neuroscientist and Professor of Education and Neuropsychology at the Universidad San Francisco de Quito. She's also been a consultant to Punahou for Mind-Brain Education. In this interview, she discusses the benefits of knowing multiple languages and states 10 key factors leading to successful second and multiple language acquisition: 1. Timing and The Windows of Opportunity 2. Aptitude for Foreign Languages 3. Motivation 4. Strategy 5. Consistency 6. Opportunity and Support (Home, School and Community) 7. Language Typology and Similarities 8. Siblings 9. Gender 10. Hand Use as a reflection of cerebral dominance for languages.

This article explains an experiment that was conducted, with the aim to find if people change the pitch of their voice when talking to different people. The experiment had participants to undergo a simulated job interview. The experiment found that people speak in a higher pitched voice when speaking to someone whom they believe is more dominant.

Straddling the imaginary border between the Balkans and Central Europe, Slovenia is home to two million citizens united by a common language. But this wasn't always the case. For about six hundred years, the Slovene lands were the domain of the Habsburgs, with the occasional appearance by the French, Italians, Hungarians, and Serbs. The Slovene language-and with it the core of Slovene identity-should by all rights have disappeared long ago, subsumed by the much stronger languages and political powers surrounding it. The language survived thanks to the efforts of many people, from the 16th-century protestants who first wrote it down to the 18th- and 19th-century intellectuals who coaxed it out of the church and spread it among the people. Among their arsenal of weapons: a cookbook, wielded by one relentlessly determined priest, Valentin Vodnik. Vodnik was a man of boundless energy, curiosity, and drive: Besides his work as a priest and later a high-school teacher and headmaster, he was fluent in half a dozen languages, wrote some of the first Slovene poetry, published the first Slovene newspaper, and began corresponding with intellectuals in Slovene. Vodnik's mission was popularizing and elevating the reputation of the language at a time when educated Slovenes mostly spoke German, considering their native tongue to be the vernacular of poor illiterate farmers, unfit for polite society and incapable of expressing complex ideas.

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

The article talks about the history drag and LGBTQ+ slang and the double-edged sword of the language becoming mainstream. It's interesting how many subcultures such as African American and Latinx cultures contributed to what drag is today.

For centuries, Central America's Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people have kept the culture's oral history alive through their ancestors' native language. But decades of modernization, haphazard native-language training in Garifuna schools, intermarriage between cultures, and the ridicule of young people who speak the language, collectively led to Garifuna being listed on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages in 2001. Today, linguists estimate that about 100,000 speakers remain. The threat of language extinction isn't new. Some linguists estimate a language dies every two weeks, as some languages become dominant tools for social and economic exchange, while others are pushed to the margins. But there are ways to save at-risk languages, as well. The key is that the language needs to be thought of less as preserved, "but indeed part of their present and their future," says Liliana Sánchez, a linguist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That's exactly what the Garinagu (Garifuna people) are doing. For the past two decades, Garifuna artists have used a cultural cornerstone-spirited dance music-to inspire young Garinagu to learn and share their native language. Now, with a new Garifuna Tourism Trail project in Belize, travelers can experience and support the cultural renaissance, too. Elements of the Garifuna culture-including music, dance, and language-were listed as a UNESCO Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Around that same time, Garifuna musicians and cultural activists hatched a plan: Create irresistible melodies, sung entirely in Garifuna, to rally young Garinagu to embrace the culture and learn the language. Will music save the Garifuna language? Time will tell. Garifuna remains on UNESCO's endangered-language list, last updated in 2010. And, as the Hawaiians learned from revitalizing their own language post colonization, this kind of revival is a long, multi-generational road.