Languages | featured news

... But these are no Silicon Valley techies in town for one of the city's massive electronics shows. Many are from far-flung American Indian reservations, and their high-tech devices are serving a decidedly old-school purpose: trying to save their languages from the brink of extinction.

Imagine two dolphins swimming in the Gulf of Mexico. You hear a series of clicks, whistles and whines coming from each, much like a conversation in dolphin language... "These whistles actually turned out to be names. They're abstract names, which is unheard of in the animal kingdom beyond people," said Randall Wells, one of the authors of a new study on dolphin behavior, told CNN affiliate WFLA-TV in Tampa, Florida.

A friend recently asked me whether black bears in Appalachia have Southern accents and whether they have trouble understanding black bears raised in Canada or Alaska. Taken literally, those are notions more fit for a Disney movie than a scientist. In a more abstract sense, however, it’s a profound inquiry that fascinates zoologists and psychologists alike.

Little did I know that studying how my son learned to speak would come to this: a TED Talk gone viral, partially thanks to Ashton Kutcher and his 6 million Twitter followers -- and a technology platform that may change the way we understand social, political and commercial communications.

Mastering a second language can pump up your brain in ways that seem to delay getting Alzheimer's disease later on, scientists said Friday....

Part of the mystery behind an 'alien' book no one can read has at last been unraveled. Found in a chest of books outside Rome by a dealer in antique books, the Voynich manuscript is among literature's great mysteries. The book of aging parchment is written in alien characters, some resembling Latin letters, others unlike anything used in any known language, and arranged into what appear to be words and sentences -- except they don't resemble anything written or read by human beings.

When it came to translations, you used to either need an interpreter or a book to navigate another language. That was either costly or cumbersome, respectively. Then the Internet came along and made things significantly easier. Except you had to be chained to your computer to translate something. A year ago, Google made things easier again by launching their Translate app for Android.

A "hidden" language spoken by only about 1,000 people has been discovered in the remote northeast corner of India by researchers who at first thought they were documenting a dialect of the Aka culture, a tribal community that subsists on farming and hunting.

After 24 hours in a coma, a Croatian girl woke up speaking only German, according to reports. Doctors say it may be due to different parts of her brain being affected.

The last speaker of an ancient tribal language has died in the Andaman Islands, breaking a 65,000-year link to one of the world's oldest cultures.