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This article talks about how some World Cup games will be broadcast in pidgin for Nigerian and Ghana audiences. I find it fascinating that the world has become more friendly to pidgin and other "informal" languages. I wonder if Hawaii broadcasts and television shows will start to utilize more pidgin and Hawaii Creole English.

An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.

An estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by the year 2100, 90% of the world's languages would have ceased to exist.

This study shows that language doesn't only consist of words, but can also consist of sounds. People have different styles of language and understand people in different ways from different countries around the world.

With five distinct kinds of clicks, multiple tones and strident vowels - vocalized with a quick choking sound - the Taa language, spoken by a few thousand people in Botswana and Namibia, is believed by most linguists to have the largest sound inventory of any tongue in the world.

We may sometimes think of body language as universal but in some cases, that is not true. This list shows some of the interesting cultural differences between body language throughout the world.

New research shows that bilingualists can view the world in different ways depending on the language they are operating in.

Modern German language sounds very disparate in comparison to modern English. New research finds that your language determines your literal perspective of the world due to its grammar.

Food for thought: " A few weeks ago, the world on my phone seemed more compelling than the offline world - more colorful, faster-moving and with a bigger scope of rewards. I still love that world, and probably always will. But now, the physical world excites me, too - the one that has room for boredom, idle hands and space for thinking. I no longer feel phantom buzzes in my pocket or have dreams about checking my Twitter replies. I look people in the eye and listen when they talk. I ride the elevator empty-handed. And when I get sucked into my phone, I notice and self-correct. It's not a full recovery, and I'll have to stay vigilant. But for the first time in a long time, I'm starting to feel like a human again."

English will still dominate a century from now, but it will no longer share the planet with thousands of other languages. Instead, expect fewer but simpler modes of oral communication on every continent.

In 1880 a Bavarian priest created a language that he hoped the whole world could use. That language failed because English was already on the rise. Why is English growing more popular when Chinese is the largest language in the world? It is possible by 2115 that there will only be 600 languages from the 6,000 there are today.

Words formed from a sound and intended to imitate that sound-what linguists refer to as onomatopoeia-fluctuate around the world even when the underlying sound is roughly the same in each place. And the thing about it is, we don't really understand why this fluctuation occurs. It has something to do with the alchemy of humans in different times and places striving to mimic noises in the world around them, and to incorporate this mimicry into distinct linguistic systems and cultural contexts. Some have hypothesized over the years that language originated with the imitation of natural sounds-a notion sometimes referred to as the "bow-wow theory." But whatever the answer to this question, onomatopoeia explains only a sliver of the words we use. The article goes on to share some fun collections of onomatopoeia.

This post (a 2021 update of a 2018 post) contains several useful infographics and charts, including a visualization of the top 23 most-spoken languages in the world, distribution of those languages by country, a family tree of Indo-European languages.

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.

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

Just seeing a list of negative words for a few seconds will make a highly anxious or depressed person feel worse, and the more you ruminate on them, the more you can actually damage key structures that regulate your memory, feelings, and emotions.But negative words, spoken with anger, do even more damage. They send alarm messages through the brain, interfering with the decision making centers in the frontal lobe, and this increases a person's propensity to act irrationally. Fear-provoking words-like poverty, illness, and death-also stimulate the brain in negative ways. And even if these fearful thoughts are not real, other parts of your brain (like the thalamus and amygdala) react to negative fantasies as though they were actual threats occurring in the outside world. Curiously, we seem to be hardwired to worry-perhaps an artifact of old memories carried over from ancestral times when there were countless threats to our survival.

Read this full article: "seems" is the operative word, as linguists are NOT in agreement that language definitively shapes how we see the world. If you want to learn another language and become fluent, you may have to change the way you behave in small but sometimes significant ways, specifically how you sort things into categories and what you notice. Researchers are starting to study how those changes happen, says Aneta Pavlenko, a professor of linguistics at Temple University. If people speaking different languages need to group or observe things differently, then bilinguals ought to switch focus depending on the language they use. That's exactly the case, according to Pavlenko. For example, she says English distinguishes between cups and glasses, but in Russian, the difference between chashka (cup) and stakan (glass) is based on shape, not material. One's native language could also affect memory, says Pavlenko. She points to novelist Vladimir Nabokov, who was fully trilingual in English, French and Russian. When Nabokov started translating his first memoir, written in English, into Russian, he recalled a lot of things that he did not remember when writing it in English. Pavlenko states that "the version of Nabokov's autobiography we know now is actually a third attempt, where he had to recall more things in Russian and then re-translate them from Russian back into English." Lena Boroditsky, an associate professor of cognitive science at the University of California, San Diego, has studied the differences in what research subjects remember when using English, which doesn't always note the intent of an action, and Spanish, which does. This can lead to differences in what people remember seeing, which is potentially important in eyewitness testimony, she says. However, not all linguists agree that language affects what we notice. John McWhorter,, a linguist at Columbia University, acknowledges such differences but says they don't really matter. The experim

There are two versions of the writer Lauren Collins. There is the English-speaking Lauren, who, presumably, is the Lauren primarily responsible for writing her (wonderful) new memoir, When in French. And then there is the French-speaking Lauren, the one tasked with navigating a marriage and a life in a second language.

It's cool to think that speaking a language can change your perception of the world. I never thought about it before, but from studying Chinese, I feel like I have two sides to myself: an american point of view and an asian point of view. Language shapes who you are.

There are so many different languages in the world, that it's impossible for us to be able to communicate with everyone in the world...right? Well, in this article, it discusses the possibility of everyone in the world being able to communicate with each other because of computer translations. These computer translations are now exponentially growing in data, and with more data, the easier it will be for people to translate words, phrases, and text more accurately.

English is a very widespread language and is spoken in various places around the world. Spanish and Chinese are also both very popular languages. But why can't they be as dominant as english? In English a necessity for places around the world?

These seven maps and charts, visualized by The Washington Post, will help you understand how diverse other parts of the world are in terms of languages. 1. Some continents have more languages than others Not all continents are equally diverse in the number of spoken languages.

"I am collecting number systems of world languages. The languages shown below are listed according to the complexity of the way of counting numbers..."

"From Nazi to Chocolate, words play a vital role in our lives. And each word has its own story. But where do they come from? What do they mean? How do they change? Some of these questions will be answered by "Words of the World" - a series of short videos presented by experts from the University of Nottingham's School of Modern Languages and Cultures."