Census finds fewer than a half-million Native American language speakers; majority Navajo

More people speak Navajo at home than any other Native American language, a seemingly promising 169,000 people at a time when some tribes have lost their native tongue or are struggling to retain the words of their ancestors. Evangeline Parsons Yazzie, a Navajo professor at Northern Arizona University, said the figure recently released by the U.S. Census Bureau is no surprise, but can be misleading. The country’s population of Navajos is well over 300,000. For every one who speaks the language, one doesn’t — and those are likely younger Navajos, Yazzie said.The loss of Native languages is rooted in a history that includes the federal government’s attempt to eradicate Native American culture by sending children to boarding schools and punishing them for speaking their language. “That’s one thing all Indian nations suffer from,” Yazzie said. “Youth are ashamed of that because it caused a lot of harm. They internalized it. ... Now we’re trying to turn that around and say, ‘The languages are beautiful.’”

Click here to read the full article

Indigenous dictionary released on Straddie

A short article detailing the release of an Indigenous dictionary:

"North Stradbroke Island has its own indigenous dictionary, called the Minjerribah Moorgumpin Elders-in-Council Jandai Language Dictionary. The 126-page hard cover book, compiled by The Minjerribah Moorgumpin Elders-in-Council and the Straddie Sand Mining Community Fund, was launched in Dunwich last month. It is published by GEON Group and costs $50 which includes an interactive CD, giving the correct pronunciation to words. Island elder Aunty Margaret Iselin and members of the Minjerribah Moorgumpin Elders-in-Council spent five years on the important task of saving Jandai, the language of the local Quandamooka people. "It might have taken five years to complete, but we now have a timeless record for future generations of our native Jandai language here on Stradbroke Island," she said.

"I was five years old when the two grannies at the Myora Mission decided to teach us the language. The first word they taught was 'myora' which means mission. But after we started learning the language, the authorities came and told us that we weren't allowed to speak it anymore. Now we have the dictionary, the local schools can teach Jandai."

Aunty Margaret worked with family and friends and indigenous residents to write down as many words they could remember in the language. Entries are in alphabetical order and give an English translated meaning. Aunty Margaret said the dictionary came after she found local schools were teaching indigenous languages from other parts of Australia. Mining giant Sibelco developed the Straddie Sand Mining Community Fund to provide financial support for community initiatives on the island.

Order a dictionary on 3409 9723."

Aboriginal elders reject ‘another decade of discrimination’

The Ramingining elders have called for an end to the intervention, the reinstatement of bilingual education, the involvement of elders in curriculum development, and Yolngu teachers. Elders from the remote Northern Territory Aboriginal community of Ramingining, East Arnhem, released, on November 28, a statement, saying that they “...don’t want another decade of discrimination here in Ramingining,” said Mathew Dhulumburrk, a 67-year-old Gupapuyngu man. “The government is extending and strengthening laws designed to assimilate Aboriginal people. We will not sit back and watch these attacks on our lives, our future, our culture, and our law.

Click here to read the full article

New home movies resurrect endangered Native American language

University of Minnesota Duluth education professor Mary Hermes says saving an endangered language goes beyond just enriching the people who speak it. "I think people have got to get beyond thinking it's just for the Ojibwe people, that we want to save their Ojibwe language. There's 10,000 years of human evolution and knowledge in that language," she says. With support from the National Science Foundation (NSF), Hermes is combining the skills of native speakers with video technology to help others, young and old, learn the language in the most natural way. She's doing it by videotaping short movies of everyday situations, from going to a rummage sale to planting a garden to helping out a sick relative. "Because Ojibwe isn't spoken on a regular basis, there's not a store or a rummage sale or a resort, but part of what we're doing is trying to re-envision what that would be like," explains Hermes.

Thanks to Living Languages where I first read this :)

The rest of this article + (very interesting) video can be accessed here

Fight for Nyoongar language

A QUEENS Park-based Aboriginal group is fighting to preserve the Nyoongar language. The language appears in Western Australian culture, and is featured on street signs, place names and during Welcome to Country ceremonies. However, Nyoongar Language Program interim chairman Joe Collard said such references were not understood and the language was slowly dying out.“Names like Joondalup and Dwellingup – these are our place names that have wonderful histories,” he said. “So many place names across the South-West derive from Nyoongar words, which have associated stories. We could offer these stories to people.” Mr Collard said he was concerned with the low number of fluent Nyoongar language speakers.

To continue reading this article, click here

Apple co-founder Steve Jobs leaves legacy in Cherokee language

The Cherokee Nation lowered its flags to half mast Oct. 6 in honor of Apple Inc. co-founder Steve Jobs, 56, who died Oct. 5 in California after a long battle with cancer. For the Cherokee Nation, its work with Apple has resulted in the adaptation of the Cherokee language to modern technology and renewed hope that the language will not only survive, but thrive. In 2003, Apple began supporting the Cherokee language by including a font and keyboard in the company’s computer operating system. 'Anything a person can do in English can be done in Cherokee in part because of [Steve Jobs'] innovations and his support of [the] language', CN Language Technologist Joseph Erb said.

To read the full article, click here

In the World: Murmurs of Mayan

Along with its stunningly accurate calendar and majestic pyramidal architecture, the Mayan civilization deserves recognition for another unique feature: its language. Mayan languages are a rich source of data for linguists aiming to develop a universal theory of language, but like many of the world’s tongues, their speakers are steadily dwindling in number. MIT undergraduate John Berman spent the past summer in a remote village in Mexico studying Chol — a Mayan language spoken in the southern state of Chiapas — in the hopes of capturing some important features of its grammar and vocabulary. Chol has several elements that differentiate it from English and other well-documented languages, including its manner of expressing possession and the structure of its nouns and verbs.

To read the full article, click here

Africa pushes for indigenous language in continet's development

Emphasising the need to take knowledge back to people, the Conference on African Renaissance, Integration, Unity and Development ended in Pretoria last Friday with a call to empower the people and promote an increased use of African languages in all spheres of national, regional and continental development. The two-day conference discussed at length how to use African languages and the meaning of language as an identity of the people's repository of knowledge.

Click here to read the rest of the article

Push to boost number of Aboriginal academic staff

Increasing the number of Aboriginal academic staff is a "pragmatic" way to boost knowledge of indigenous culture and knowledge in the sector, says Larissa Behrendt, the chairwoman of the federal government's review of indigenous access and participation in higher education. Professor Behrendt said the review would not get distracted by academic debates on the content and methodologies of indigenous knowledge. "The terms of reference for this review has a clear focus on closing the gap, while the [one] that focuses on indigenous knowledge allows for an approach which is comprehensive," Professor Behrendt said.

Click here to read the rest of the report

Japanese linguist helps revive an Aboriginal language

In north Queensland the Worrongo language is coming back to life. It's taken 40 years but from almost the ashes of extinction, an Aboriginal language has been saved and is again being spoken on Palm Island in North Queensland. The last living speaker of the Worrongo language is a Japanese professor who created a dictionary after learning it from one of the last native speakers in the early 1970s.

Read the full story here

Workshop works to revitalize Native American - Tlingit - language

Elders, fluent Tlingit speakers, language teachers and learners gathered in Juneau recently to work towards Tlingit language revitalization. The “Honoring Our Ancestors, Teaching Our Language” workshop was sponsored by Goldbelt Heritage Foundation through an Administration for Native Americans language grant; the grant was titled “Tlingit Language Flowing Through Generations: A Region wide Approach to Language Revitalization'.

Teachers work with elders throughout the year enhancing their understanding of the verb forms and then take that new knowledge and translate it into language lessons for youth. Every member of this team is committed to language revitalization and the benefits inherent herein to heal past historical trauma many of our elders experienced from being punished for speaking their first language within schools. Holding on to the language is a crucial endeavor as teachers strive to learn from our fluent speakers.

Read the article in full here

Australian languages

Noel Pearson once said, 'If you don't know an Indigenous Australian language, learn one. If you know an Indigenous Australian language, improve your grasp of it; literacy in Australian languages is still rare. Then speak it to the children. This is the noblest and worthiest cause for an Australian patriot'.

Cape Cod's first language is spoken again

Imagine helping to recreate the language your ancestors spoke. You have to start thinking like them, even if you don’t have all their words, and even if they did not have to name all the things that you work with today. “There must have been a word, for example, for watermelon,” Nitana Hicks of Mashpee told an audience at Tales of Cape Cod in Barnstable Village this week, but that word had been lost as use of the language died out because of the dominance of white settlers. So, said Hicks, who was talking about her part in a reclamation project for the language of the Wampanoag, she thought that “wet-squash” suited the summer fruit. By agreement of others, then, in modern Wampanoag, “wet-squash” it is. Right now, there is a 7-year-old child on Cape Cod who is being raised with the native tongue as her first language. Hicks said 250 families are enrolled in classes that allow everyone of native descent “to get to the level they want.”

As preliminary work, the language project has created a dictionary, some Wampanoag-based word games, coloring and storybooks, and even a three-day “immersion camp” where only the native language is spoken. A major characteristic of the language that Hicks called “complicated” is that it does not distinguish between genders but does separate “animate” and “inanimate.”

Click here to read the full article

Insults to Confuse Enemies - Wordnik List

You're a sycophant!" "AM NOT! Wait, what?" More Insults to Confuse Your Enemies:

Insults to Confuse Enemies - Wordnik List

Australian project hunts lost indigenous languages

Librarians in Australia have launched a three-year project to rediscover lost indigenous languages. The New South Wales State Library says fragments of many lost languages exist in papers left by early settlers. Before British colonialisation began there in 1788, around 250 aboriginal languages were spoken in Australia by an estimated one million people. Only a few dozen languages remain and the communities number around 470,000 people in a nation of 22 million.

The rest of this article can be read here

Federal Agencies Take Action to Digitally Document Nearly 50 Endangered Languages

The National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH) and the National Science Foundation (NSF) today announced the award of 10 fellowships and 24 institutional grants totaling $3.9 million in the agencies' ongoing Documenting Endangered Languages (DEL) program.

This is the seventh round of their campaign to preserve records of languages threatened with extinction. Experts estimate that more than half of the approximately 7,000 currently used human languages are bound for oblivion in this century, and the window of opportunity for high-quality language field documentation, they say, narrows with each passing year.

These new DEL awards will support digital documentation work on almost 50 endangered languages, enhance the computational infrastructure of the field and provide training for the next generation of researchers.

To continue reading this article, click here

Top 10 Weirdest Writing Systems

As writing goes, English is pretty straightforward. Sure, it has its weird parts: some of our letters combine to make new sounds, we have extra letters we don’t really need and there are spelling rules that only apply half the time. But on the whole, we have it easy.
It’s not always like this. The Latin alphabet that English uses is alphabetic – in general, there’s one letter for every sound. In other writing systems, one character can signal a whole syllable. Or it might be like the Chinese system, in which characters signify whole objects or concepts.

And sometimes, things can get even weirder. Click here to read about the top 10 strangest writing systems of the world...

Endangered Alphabets

In doing some linguistic research, I came across a fascinating project, called the Endangered Alphabets Project. Fundraising is needed for this project - below is an introduction to it & the full website can be accessed here, at The Endangered Alphabets Project.

The world has between 6,000 and 7,000 languages, but as many as half of them will be extinct by the end of this century. Another and even more dramatic way in which this cultural diversity is shrinking concerns the alphabets in which those languages are written.

Writing has become so dominated by a small number of global cultures that those 6,000-7,000 languages are written in fewer than 100 alphabets. Moreover, at least a third of the world’s remaining alphabets are endangered–-no longer taught in schools, no longer used for commerce or government, understood only by a few elders, restricted to a few monasteries or used only in ceremonial documents, magic spells, or secret love letters.

The Endangered Alphabets Project, which consists of an exhibition of fourteen carvings and a book, is the first-ever attempt to bring attention to this issue.

Languages on Papua vanish without a whisper

Who will speak Iniai in 2050? Or Faiwol? Moskona? Wahgi? Probably no-one, as the languages of New Guinea — the world’s greatest linguistic reservoir — are disappearing in a tide of indifference. New Guinea is home to more than 1,000 languages — around 800 in Papua New Guinea and 200 in Indonesian Papua — but most have fewer than 1,000 speakers, often centred around a village or cluster of hamlets. The most widely-spoken language is Enga, with around 200,000 speakers in the highlands of central PNG, followed by Melpa and Huli.
More than 200 languages have become extinct around the world over the last three generations and 2,500 others are under threat, according to a UNESCO list of endangered languages, out of a total of 6,000.

The rest of this article/report can be viewed here

Yiddish, a fusion of languages

Yiddish is a Germanic language, and its main speakers are Ashkenazi Jews in the United States, Israel and in many countries in Eastern Europe, with a smaller number of speakers scattered throughout the rest of the world. Over time, Yiddish evolved and became two different dialects: Western Yiddish, which was spoken in Central Europe in the 18th century, and Eastern Yiddish spoken in Eastern Europe, in what used to be the USSR. Yiddish is the fusion of three linguistic components: the Germanic, Slavic and Semitic. In addition to the vocabulary, these three elements have contributed to the phonology, morphology, syntax and semantics of this language.

The rest of this article on Yiddish can be read here

NSW Government announces funding for Aboriginal Language Centre

Minister for Aboriginal Affairs Victor Dominello MP has announced funding for the creation of the Centre for Aboriginal Languages Coordination and Development (CALCD). "I share the view of Aboriginal communities that reclaiming and maintaining Aboriginal language and culture is imperative, as it instills a greater sense of identity, pride and confidence in people and leads to increased school attendance and participation....We have listened to members of numerous Aboriginal communities and we are pleased to redirect funds from the bureaucracy to this community-based Aboriginal organisation to focus on language revitalisation," Minister Dominello said.

To read the rest of the announcement, click here

Saving Language - ABC New England North West NSW - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

LOUISA REBGETZ, PRESENTER: A new push is underway to save the Northern Territory's Indigenous languages. The Northern Territory Library is launching a range of children's books that capture Indigenous stories in Indigenous languages. And in the community of Elliott about half way between Alice Springs and Darwin the new books are having a big impact. Laetitia Lemke reports.

Saving Language - ABC New England North West NSW - Australian Broadcasting Corporation

Reviving a dead Alaska Native language

There was big news last year for the Eyak language, the arrival of 22-year-old Guillaume Leduey, a French student who had stumbled upon Eyak while randomly surfing the Internet at age 15. Leduey had taught himself to speak Eyak using materials he ordered from Alaska. His 2010 trip to the United States came at the invitation of Michael Krauss, University of Alaska linguistics professor, and the only living speaker of Eyak on the planet since the death of Marie Smith-Jones, honorary Eyak chief and the last fluent Eyak speaker of the language; and, Laura Bliss-Spaan, a former television reporter who has taken up preservation of the language as a personal mission since discovering Eyak while covering the Cordova Iceworm Festival years ago.

To continue reading about the Eyak language revitalization, click here

Dictionary Of Ancient Akkadian Provides Glimpse Into Civilization’s Cradle

Linguists and researchers of ancient Mesopotamia began compiling the dictionary in 1921. The dictionary, which spans some 10,000 pages in 21 volumes, took no less than nine decades to complete. In the process, it outlived some of the nearly 100 scholars who devoted their careers to it. The final volume, published just weeks ago, caps what editor-in-charge Martha Roth describes as far beyond a mere lexicon. "There are about 28,000 entries in this -- 28,000 words -- that provide a window into the history, culture, and society of the ancient Near East. This was not designed to be a glossary. The entire project sought to explicate the world of ancient Mesopotamia through the words we have preserved," Roth says. Like each reference for each of the dictionary's words, it was discovered on one of the millions of tablets that have survived the centuries. And each line of wedge-shaped cuneiform writing, carved into the clay, has a story to tell.

To read the article in full, click here

Is the Southern accent dying?

The distinct drawls and twangs that dominate America's Southeast as we know it may be dying off, new research suggests.
A North Carolina State University study has noted a gradual shift away from the drawn-out vowel pronunciations widely associated with Southern speech, which experts say is 'disappearing'.
Linguists say upper and middle classes in the state capital of Raleigh have adopted a distinctly 'less Southern' drawl in recent years, and it's a trend that will continue.
Robin Dodsworth, an associate linguistics professor at North Carolina State University, who collected hours of recordings of people native to the capital of Raleigh, states that 'the Southern accent the way we think of it now is different than the way people in the South talked 50 years ago, 100 years ago, and so forth.'

To read the rest of the article, click here

New kiwi dialect devised for film

School of Linguistics and International Languages staff have devised an other-worldly sounding dialect for a film that explores an imaginary time in New Zealand’s future. Actors Matthew Sunderland and Aaron Jackson will speak the dialect after receiving coaching by New Zealand-born Dr Paviour-Smith, with advice from Dr Petrucci. “Not being a natural-born New Zealander myself, we decided that Martin be the one to manipulate the dialect to what a New Zealander might sound like in the future,” Dr Petrucci says. "When we devised the dialect we envisaged certain changes in the consonants and vowels along with some interesting new words. Matthew and Aaron will be speaking in English but in variety distinct from what we are used to.”

Click here to read the rest of the article, and you can also listen to some phrases in the new Kiwi language as well.

Ayapaneco language at risk of dying

Anthropologists are racing to compile a dictionary of the centuries-old Ayapaneco tongue, spoken in Mexico. There are just two people left who can speak it fluently – but they refuse to talk to each other. Manuel Segovia, 75, and Isidro Velazquez, 69, live 500 metres apart in the village of Ayapa in the tropical lowlands of the southern state of Tabasco. It is not clear whether there is a long-buried argument behind their mutual avoidance, but people who know them say they have never really enjoyed each other's company.

The dictionary is part of a race against time to revitalise the language before it is definitively too late. "When I was a boy everybody spoke it," Segovia told the Guardian by phone. "It's disappeared little by little, and now I suppose it might die with me." This compiled dictionary is due out later this year.

The rest of the report can be read here, and a full list of the endangered languages of the world can be viewed here; this long list includes languages that are vulnerable, those that are definitely endangered, those critically endangered, & those which are extinct.

Report: Swedish language under threat in Finland

The Council of Europe thinks Swedish as an official language in Finland is under threat, according to Finnish broadcasting association YLE. In an upcoming report on minority languages the Council of Europe states that Swedish as an official language in Finland is under threat due to officials’ poor Swedish skills and deficiencies in the mandatory Swedish tuition in schools.

Kimmo Sasi of the Finnish Constitutional Law Committee is not surprised by the Council’s findings. He thinks that the matter must be taken seriously. “We will look into it and try to come up with solutions for the ministry of education on how to deal with these issues,” Sasi told Yle.

The Finnish language laws from 2003 specify that the official languages of Finland are Finnish and Swedish. Both languages have the same legal status and authorities in bilingual municipalities must offer their services in either language. The Council has on many occasions pointed to the difficulty in using the Swedish language in Finland, despite the right to be served in Swedish is stipulated in the Finnish constitution. Recently the Finnish parliamentary ombudsman ruled that there should be clearer guidelines at health centres as to what information and medical records should be made available in the patient’s mother tongue. Although the medical records will be allowed to remain kept in Finnish, it must be possible for a Swedish-speaking patient to get access to a Swedish translation. This followed a demand from the Swedish Assembly in Finland (Folktinget) in 2009 that all medical records of Swedish speakers should be kept in Swedish.

Swedish is a compulsory subject in Finnish schools today, a fact that has been criticised from many sides over the years.
More recently the right wing party True Finns (Sannfinländarna) have been demanding the abolishment of obligatory Swedish in Finnish schools. The Council of Europe is now recommending that Finland improves the level of Swedish classes in school and ensures services in Swedish for Swedish-speakers. According to Sasi, the Constitutional Committee will do what they can to give the matter the deserved attention. “It might not lead to any definite measures but at least it will increase the pressure to do something about it,” Sasi told YLE.

Finland was a part of Sweden until 1809 when the area was lost to Russia. The country has been an independent nation since 1917.

The report can be viewed online here

Translating the Bible into exotic & rare languages

Fritz Goerling sits at his desk in a neighbourhood of Munich, Germany, making clicking and smacking sounds with his mouth.
'We have hardly any letters in our alphabet for such sounds,' said Goerling, a specialist in translating the Bible into exotic languages.

The sounds he makes are common in the language of the Jula, a small African ethnic group, but they didn't exist in written form until Goerling developed them. The project took 25 years starting when Goerling, with the help of a few Jula from Ivory Coast, learned the language. Matching symbols were borrowed from the international phonetic alphabet and taught to local people in the ethnic group. The reason for all the effort is to ensure that the Jula have a written copy of the Bible.

Demand for versions of Christianity's essential book in native languages spoken in all parts of the world is increasing, particularly in Africa. We want to reach people in their native tongue because it is the language of their heart,' said Goerling, 67. Many Jula know the Arabian script, but it lacks vowels for many spoken words. Thus, there was no word for an integral word like temple, for example.

However, translating something from one language into any other language is not a simple task - nuances from both the word-meaning level & the syntactic level need to be dealt with, and this can be more challenging in some languages than others, depending on the language you are translating from, into the language you are translating into.

Translation can easily be turned into nonsense - what makes sense in one language, syntactically, may make absolutely no sense in another language. This is also true phonologically - in the spoken language of the Jula there is the word 'ba,' which has three different meanings depending on the emphasis used to express it. In a low voice (or low tone), the word means mother. When the word is spoken in a middle-range (mid-tone) it means river, and when it is spoken in a a higher voice (high tone) it means goat. A mixup (however unintentional) can be quite insulting.

Click here to read in full the article.

The Hebrew hotline: Keeping an ancient language modern

Modern Hebrew, which can now be heard everywhere on the streets of Israel, has continued to evolve since it was reintroduced as a living language. Eliezer Ben Yehuda is the man many credit with reviving the Hebrew language more than 100 years ago. Ben Yehuda's son, Itamar Ben Avi, was the first native Hebrew speaker. He had a thoroughly miserable childhood - home-schooled, locked up by his parents, and not allowed to play outside with other children so that he would not be exposed to any other languages. Itamar was three-and-a-half when he spoke his first Hebrew word.

Part of the difficulty in bringing an old language back to life was that, well, life had changed. The words that existed in the Bible often described rather grand ideas like love, war, and peace. But that was no help when trying to get shopping done - there were no words back then for ice cream or jelly, or underwear. So Ben Yehuda and his friends simply made them up, using old Hebrew roots to hint at the new words' meaning. And that process is still happening today.

The modern Hebrew language is growing all the time with around 20 new words being officially added each year. Approving these new words can be a lengthy process. A committee has to consider them, and it can take several years to reach a decision. And even after all that - there is no guarantee that the public will accept the words. Language is a sensitive issue in Israel. It is even discussed in the Knesset.

In 2005, Israel's then prime minister Ariel Sharon chastised Israelis for using the Arab-English hybrid expression "yala bay" to say farewell to each other (you hear it everywhere in Israel). Instead, Sharon argued, they should be using what he referred to as "the most beautiful word", shalom.

You can read the whole article here

Language Diversity Index tracks global loss of mother tongues

For the past several years, we have been hearing anecdotal reports about endangered languages – how we’re losing languages by the day, how we may lose 50-90 percent of languages before the end of the century. But nobody had any reliable quantitative data to corroborate these claims,” says Luisa Maffi, co-founder and director of Terralingua, an international NGO devoted to sustaining the biocultural diversity of life through research, education, policy, and on-the-ground work.

”But now a new Index of Linguistic Diversity (ILD), the first of its kind, shows quantitatively, for the first time, what’s really happening with the world’s languages,” Maffi adds. “The ILD shows in quantitatively rigorous ways what the trends have been over the past 30 years in the numbers of mother-tongue speakers of the world’s languages–and the news is not good: an overall decline of more than 20 percent in that period alone.”

Click here to continue reading the rest of the report & interview on the LDI.

Languages Of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples - A Uniquely Australian Heritage

This article by Kazuko Obata and Jason Lee, from the Australian Institue of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies (AIATSIS), details and describes Australian Aboriginal languages and their features, such as the origin of and relationships between Australian Indigenous languages; creoles; early & recent work in Indigenous language study; the current state of Aboriginal languages & endangerment; and language documentation and preservation.

You can find this informative report here

It's all Greek to me

“When an English speaker doesn’t understand a word of what someone says, he or she states that it’s ‘Greek to me’. When a Hebrew speaker encounters this difficulty, it ‘sounds like Chinese’. Which begs the question: “Has there been a study of this phrase phenomenon, relating different languages on some kind of Directed Graph?” Well apparently there has, even if only perfunctorily, and the result is this cartogram - and this report (of kinds).

Bilinguals Find It Easier to Learn a Third Language

A new study from the University of Haifa reveals that students who know two languages have an easier time gaining command of a third language than students who are fluent in only one language. The researchers concluded that fluency and skills in one language assist in the language acquisition of a second language, and possessing skills in two languages can boost the learning process of a third language.

To read the full study at Science Daily, click here

Border Collie Comprehends Over 1,000 Object Names as Verbal Referents

Researchers at Wofford College discovered that a border collie comprehends the names of over 1,000 objects, differentiating between names of objects and orders to fetch them. This research deepens the findings of researchers in Germany, who had discovered a dog that knew the names of a couple of hundred objects. Important questions were left open as to how far a dog could go, and whether the dog really understood that the object names were nouns and not commands to retrieve the object.

To read the full article at Science Daily, click here