How climate change is killing languages

Forced migration is a major cause of language extinction. Environmental disasters are driving these displacements in the very regions richest in …

Is it realistic to teach science in vernacular languages?

Can an alien worldview like western science be taught in the vernacular or is it best conveyed in the languages of the culture that created it?

Assam’s lost and found languages

Linguistic survey helps some tribes rediscover their language; 55 languages spoken in the state

‘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 …

Zulu vs Xhosa: how colonialism used language to divide South Africa’s two biggest ethnic groups

The decision to think of isiZulu and isiXhosa as two separate languages can to some extent be traced back to African interpreters on whom …

"Dialects are the avant-garde teams exploring new semantic possibilities"

Linguist GANESH DEVY has just published a new volume of a unique language survey that is based on geography and people's vernacular claims. He …

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 …

World Biodiversity Day: Why language should not be forgotten

Languages are a treasure trove of knowledge about a region’s flora, fauna and medicinal plants, say experts

Book Excerpt: An Austro-Asiatic language that has struggled to find its place in modern India

Santali is the most widely spoken Adivasi language in India; But it was included in the Eighth Schedule only in 2003, a reminder of the country&…

BBC will speak only English

BBC>> Languages • The UK

World Kiswahili Language Day: How a standard version of the east African language formed and spread across the world

Kiswahili has been adopted as a working language at the African Union

When did humans first start to speak? How language evolved in Africa

Ability to produce speech sounds catapulted Homo sapiens into a world in which they would dominate all other species

EIA notification 2020 delayed till September 7

A petition had been filed in court, asking the notification be translated in all 22 regional languages of the Eighth Schedule of the Constitution

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 …

Words are biotic

Is it a coincidence that areas of linguistic plurality are also areas of biodiversity?

Green lore

Environment has been intrinsic to our oral traditions much before we developed writing. But it is only in the past decade or two that …