The Khipu's Deepest Secret Wasn't the Numbers — It Was Who Got to Make Them

A language dies. Centuries pass. Then, at the turn of the twentieth century, expedition teams digging through the sands of the Tarim Basin in what is now western China pull out man…

In Hokkaido, roughly 80% of river names still carry Ainu words, according to UNESCO's documentation of the Toya-Usu Geopark region. The mountains speak Ainu. The water speaks Ainu.…

I already wrote about Silbo Gomero back in May — specifically about the neuroimaging evidence that fluent whistlers process it in the left hemisphere, the same region as spoken spe…

A cord of human hair, radiocarbon-dated to around 1498, has quietly upended one of the most persistent assumptions about Inca record-keeping. Researchers had long believed that khi…

Maxine Wildcat Barnett learned Yuchi before she learned English. It was the only language her parents spoke, and it carried her through childhood in rural Creek County, Oklahoma —…

There is a word in Ainu — kamuy — that doesn't translate cleanly into Japanese or English. It refers not to gods in any distant, theological sense, but to the spiritual force prese…

Somewhere in the Tarim Basin — the vast desert depression in what is now western China — scribes were copying Buddhist texts in a language that had no business being there. The scr…

In 1980, a new school for deaf children opened in Managua. The students who arrived had grown up largely isolated from one another, each relying on homemade gesture systems develop…

There is a moment, documented in a 2005 neuroimaging study published in Nature, that stops you cold if you think about what it means. Researchers placed five fluent silbadors — spe…

There is a cassette player somewhere in Nibutani, Hokkaido, and through it, a child named Maya Sekine heard her ancestors speak. Her bedtime stories came on magnetic tape — folk ta…

In 2008, a team of linguists climbed steep hillsides in Arunachal Pradesh, India's remote northeastern state, going door-to-door among bamboo houses on stilts. They were looking fo…

There is a word in Ongota for a specific kind of pain treated with a specific plant harvested from a specific forest in the South Omo Zone of Ethiopia. When the last six speakers o…

There are no words for "yes" or "no" in Kusunda. No words for direction — no "left," no "right," no "north." For a language that has survived two near-extinctions in the hills of N…

There is a village in the Daghestanian highlands where roughly 1,200 people speak a language whose verbs alone could fill a dictionary the size of a city phone book. The village is…

There is a village in southern Dagestan, perched at roughly 2,000 meters in the Caucasus mountains, where approximately 1,000 people speak a language that contains more verbal comp…

The most contested language in linguistics isn't just about numbers. It's about whether grammar can wall off entire categories of thought. --- There is a moment in fieldwork that e…

There is a moment, documented in the fieldwork of linguist Daniel Everett, when the Pirahã people of the Brazilian Amazon are asked about the origin of the world. The answer, rende…