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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Joseph Warren (C), an Anishinaabe tribal community member, wears a traditional headdress during a Totem Pole consecration ceremony ...

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 ...

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 ...

Taiwanese linguist Sung Li-may, right, speaks with villagers, 80-year-old Mu’u Ka’angena (center), 78-year-old Angai Kamunuana (2nd right), and a woman with a girl, in their aboriginal Kanakanvu ...

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, ...

DAKANUA, Taiwan (AP) — Her eyes lit bright with concentration, Taiwanese linguist Sung Li-may leans in expectantly as one of the planet's last 10 speakers of the Kanakanavu language shares his hopes ...

Like many of the young people in her Indigenous Anishinaabe community in the upper peninsula of Michigan, Danielle Boyer grew up speaking only a little of her people’s native language, ...