News snippets

Children’s tongue

Language>> Children • Australia

Website on Caribbean Indigenous and endanged languages launched

Why we say 'huh' once every 84 seconds

N J Enfield’s book inverts traditional concerns about language and and seeks to understand it as we experience it—via the messy …

Tales for posterity: The songs and stories of the Great Andamanese

'Voices from the Lost Horizon' encapsulates the worldview of the Great Andamanese tribe through its stories and songs, capturing a culture that …

How will we know if AIs gain consciousness? A new checklist might help us assess

No current AI systems appears to be a strong candidate for consciousness, but developments likely in near future, says report

Softer, processed foods changed the way ancient humans spoke

The range of available speech sounds used in human language has not remained stable since its origin

News Snippets

The divide will always remain

‘Language is the only tool for expressing identity and culture’

Aparna Pallavi talks to Shubhranshu Choudhari and Motiravan Kangali on the significance of standardisation of Gondi language. Excerpts:

A language that only Great Andamanese speak

Artificial intelligence GPT-4 shows ‘sparks’ of common sense, human-like reasoning, finds Microsoft

Latest version of ChatGPT shows signs of artificial general intelligence; can solve novel and difficult tasks in various fields in a way …

Tagore’s ideals couldn’t have inspired Modi’s National Education Policy 2020: Veteran educationist Pabitra Sarkar

The PM, also Visva Bharati chancellor, spoke at the inauguration of the university’s centenary celebration and tried hard to associate his …

Origins of Indo-European languages

Now evolutionary biologists have jumped in where linguists fear to tread, namely the stormy question of when and where Indo-European languages …

International Mother Language Day 2023: How an education module in tribal dialects became a game changer in Odisha

An experiment in mother language based education for children from the Kolha tribe showed how developing text books and primers in tribal …

Mind your language Intellectual property police could be lurking with intent

UNPFII calls for inclusion of indigenous people in socio-economic development, conservation of environment

UN Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues also demanded inclusion in preserving culture & languages

‘English wiped out local languages elsewhere, not in India’

Eighty-Five years after George A Grierson, a British administrator, conducted the first survey of languages in India, another such exercise has …

Survey tracks down only speaker of Majhi in India

Peoples Linguistic Survey of India, released on Thursday, has traced near extinct languages like Majhi, a language spoken by boatmen in Sikkim …

We have produced a new guide to decolonise language in conservation

We at Survival want to make people stop and think about why we use the words we do when writing or talking about environmental issues

Amul loses its sugar-free market

A language spoken by only 273

Pramod Kumar researches a language spoken by only 273 people in the Andaman islands. A PhD candidate at Jawaharlal Nehru University in Delhi, he …

Gondi language: victim of government neglect

Without active government support, a unique language, connected with the aspirations of the largest forest-dwelling tribal group in India, is …

The loss of wisdom

A survey says India has lost a fifth of its languages in the past five decades. With the death of these languages we have also lost the keys to …

AI isn’t close to becoming sentient — the real danger lies in how easily we’re prone to anthropomorphise it

Chatbots like ChatGPT raise important new questions about how artificial intelligence will shape our lives, and about how our psychological …