For thousands of years the K’iche’ people, Mayan speakers, have revered the golden kernels belonging to a plant known as maize. Their sacred stories tell of the first humans who were fashioned from the bread made from these kernels and who were given the gift of language. More recently a new and very different kind […]
In 2012 I spent six months in Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon), Vietnam. My goal, as a linguist, was to overcome my fear of a tone language. Vietnamese is a language with six tones. Yikes! I took private lessons at a Vietnamese language school four hours a day, five days a week, for six months. […]
In the Indian Ocean off the south coast of India is the island nation of Sri Lanka. The majority population is the Sinhalese, an ethnogroup who tend to be Buddhists and who speak Sinhala, an Indo-European language. They share the island with the minority Tamils, who tend to be Hindu. Their language, Tamil, is Dravidian. […]