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An International Year is an important cooperation mechanism dedicated to raising awareness of a particular topic or theme of global interest or concern, and mobilizing different players for coordinated action around the world. In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, based on a recommendation by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. At the time, the Forum said that 40 per cent of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken around the world were in danger of disappearing. The fact that most of these are indigenous languages puts the cultures and knowledge systems to which they belong at risk. In addition, indigenous peoples are often isolated both politically and socially in the countries they live in, by the geographical location of their communities, their separate histories, cultures, languages and traditions. And yet, they are not only leaders in protecting the environment, but their languages represent complex systems of knowledge and communication and should be recognized as a strategic national resource for development, peace building and reconciliation. They also foster and promote unique local cultures, customs and values which have endured for thousands of years. Indigenous languages add to the rich tapestry of global cultural diversity. Without them, the world would be a poorer place.

This is the official linguistic code for Hawaii Creole English, which is documented by an international linguistic mapping system as a "living" and "individual" language, separate from English but sharing a lot with English. Research shows that people who speak one but not the other can hardly understand one another. Hawaii Creole is not considered by linguists to be a subset or dialect of English.

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.

This article talks about how language is the most important part of culture. I thought this article was an interesting read because I believe it builds upon one of the small group discussions we've had in class earlier on in the semester. I am intrigued by the fact that many different countries have developed a language over time as a way to communicate, and has now become one of the things that define their culture.

Beyond the clear benefits on the brain, bilingualism also offers a host of cultural benefits.

Grateful shout-out to Thomas Morris '13 for this link, which aggregates language-related podcasts from Public Radio International. Listen on iTunes for free or stream the story links on the website. Some of the highlights: "Dim Sum Warriors" a Chinese/English bilingual comic book app, the homophonic reason why Chinese marriages spiked on 1/4/2013, a 13 year old language activist teaching Kurdish, a banned language, in Turkey...

A Swedish union has set up a hotline for workers to report instances of "mansplaining" as part of a weeklong effort to raise awareness of a certain kind of condescending elocution that men use to explain to women things they already understand.

Of all the terrible sounds in the world, few are worse than that of a screaming baby -- especially when it's sitting next to you on an international flight. Now, science has an explanation for why the sound of human screaming is so awful.

The king and queen of Spain flew to the former colony of Puerto Rico to help launch on Tuesday what is considered the world's most important event involving the Spanish language. The royal couple joined more than 200 writers, academics and experts who traveled to the U.S. territory to...

"...for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. ... Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country's National Encyclopedia. ... critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children ... toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do ... One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys 'gender-coded' them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys."

Seven years ago, President Ts. Elbegdorj shocked Mongolians by announcing that the nation would become bilingual, with English as the second language. Mongolian is a relatively small language, landlocked between two international giants, Russian and Chinese. As Elbegdorj pointed, English would be the definitive tool to open windows on the wider world.

The syllable "huh" is universally recognizable!

It appears the queen's English ain't wot it used to be. A scientific study of Queen Elizabeth II's accent has found her vowels moving steadily downmarket. The study published in Nature magazine found there was a drift in the queen's accent toward one "characteristic of speakers who are...

"Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. ... In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds. ... With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen. They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant. ... The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality." Full study: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001251

In the mid-1970s, sociolinguist John Gumperz was summoned to Heathrow International Airport to help make sense of an odd culture clash. The new hires in Heathrow's employee cafeteria (mostly women from India and Pakistan) and some of the baggage handlers at the airport - had grown to openly resent each other. Why? One word: gravy. British women cafeteria employees said the word with a rising intonation - gravy? - that was understood as "Would you like some gravy?" The Indian and Pakistani women, however, said it with falling intonation - gravy. That came across as, "This is gravy; take it or leave it." A mere surface intonational difference, yet the cause of major social misunderstanding.

Languages are now dying off faster than animal species, at a rate of losing a world language every two weeks. Researchers have discovered that the primary threat to endangered languages is economic development. It is now considered a global phenomenon.

New Jersey now requires it's students to learn a foreign language. They are starting instruction at a younger age, in the hopes of having it be more effective. The state is basing it's decision on studies that show acquiring more than one language boosts brain function in children, and leads to success in standardized tests. They are also hoping to end a shortage of bilinguals needed in the workforce.

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."

"All recordings are in English, are of native speakers, and include both English language dialects and English spoken in the accents of other languages."