I forget that I know three languages. Partly because who’s to say what constitutes “knowing,” given the way that language skills degrade without practice? Another reason I forget is because the ...

LANGUAGE AND SILENCE by George Steiner. 426 pages. Afheneum. $8. “A man can learn half a dozen professions by reading Zola,” says George Steiner. And a man can learn the ground rules to half a dozen ...

WASHINGTON -- Every two weeks or so the last elderly man or woman with full command of a particular language dies. At that rate, as many as 2,500 native tongues will disappear forever by 2100. David W ...

Every dying language had an adventurous youth. Eyak can be traced to an ancient mother tongue that was centered near the Yukon and Tanana rivers in North America. Three millennia ago, a small band ...

It was a sunny morning in May, and I was in a car with a linguist and a tax preparer trolling the suburbs of Chicago for native speakers of Aramaic, the 3,000-year-old language of Jesus. The linguist, ...

Hollywood star Charlize Theron has faced a mountain of criticism for calling her mother tongue Afrikaans "a dying language". Theron joked it was spoken by "about 44 people" and was "not very helpful".

Wow! Your child understands and speaks Taiwanese? That’s amazing! Whenever I am in a taxi in Taiwan and speak to my parents in broken Taiwanese, the taxi drivers always react to my little ...