linguistics

"The linguist Kenneth Hale from MIT said that losing a language is like dropping a bomb on a museum."

As languages are passed on from generation to generation, the differences between them accumulate, making the languages and the worldviews they contain more and more distinct.

Language fluency is activism. This is not about reclaiming purity, but embracing pluralism and contradiction. We reject colonial amnesia through language learning, even informally.

The pace at which we’re creating new words, then recontextualizing their meanings in hyperbolic, meme, and joke formats, is moving faster than ever before, in our age of relentless online discourse.

Gordon surmised that the Pirahã provided support for a controversial hypothesis advanced early in the last century by Benjamin Lee Whorf, a student of Sapir’s. Whorf argued that the words in our vocabulary determine how we think. Since the Pirahã do not have words for numbers above two, Gordon wrote, they have a limited ability to work with... See more