A student from northern India musters the courage to learn her native Bhoti language from a college friend. Sonam Chhomo . “Does polyandry also exist in Ladakh?” I asked my friend Rewa* as we strolled around the college campus after dinner. We were both students at St. Stephen’s College in Delhi, both of us hailing

Miguel Pinheiro In the heart of the Amazon Rainforest, along the Xingu River and one of its tributaries, the Iriri, traces of an ancient, vanished population are found. The petroglyphs carved in the rocks tell a ghost story—faint echoes of faded voices that today we struggle to imagine alive. A language can be a map

Last month, there were just four people left on earth who could speak a language from the Great Andamanic family, which hails from the Andaman Islands in the Bay of Bengal. On April 4, one of those speakers—a woman named Licho—passed away from tuberculosis and heart disease. She was the last woman alive to speak

Story by Hellen Losapicho, age 34, El Molo (Kenya), and Magella Hassan Lenatiyama, age 35, El Molo (Kenya) The last fluent speaker of our language, El Molo, died in 1999, and it is now one of the most endangered languages in the world. When the Samburu people moved into our territories after an outbreak of

by Ajuawak Kapashesit Language endangerment is a growing issue around the globe. Of the less than 7,000 languages spoken today, many are not expected to survive into the next century. Because of this growing threat to our planet’s linguistic diversity  —  something that should be cherished as much as our biological diversity  —  many language

by Javier Domingo in conversation with Dora Manchado Getting to Doña Dora’s home on foot is no picnic. It’s a long way, and stray dogs can be a serious threat. But it’s all part of my job with the Intercultural Bilingual Education System of Santa Cruz, coordinated by anthropologist Marcela Alaniz. It’s what I call

by David Stringer . . Endangered Languages and Biocultural Diversity Conservation Just over twenty years ago, many linguists were shocked into a new sense of urgency when Michael Krauss wrote his classic short article on the status of the world’s languages, in which he lamented that linguistics was about to “go down in history as the