Monthly Archives: April 2009

The language that gave English the words dingo and boomerang has been extinct for more than a century. But that’s not stopping one Australian school from teaching it. A better known language that refuses to die, Latin, lives on in … Continue reading →

Add this to the CIA‘s troubles: the agency is nowhere near multilingual enough. Despite urging from Congress and the 9/11 Commission, the CIA remains overwhelmingly English-only. Also, what Hollywood might make of one linguist’s social experiment: Derek Bickerton proposed marooning … Continue reading →

In the political chaos that is Thailand today, there’s one thing that most Thais agree on: their king is untouchable.Now, the Thai government is using its lèse majesté law to prosecute anyone who criticizes the monarch. Also this week, recordings … Continue reading →

Live! From the hermit kingdom! Yes, it’s a North Korea special. The Korean language, like everything else on the peninsula has split into two. Our report from inside North Korea features a song whose lyrics fixate on one thing: food. … Continue reading →

To most people in the west, yoga means…yoga. No translation necessarily. It is a naturalized foreign word, and as with many foreign terms,  we appropriate it, and quickly forget – if we ever knew in the first place – what … Continue reading →