Language families, human families

Razib Khan over at ScienceBlogs has an excellent post today on the relationship between population genetics and the spread of languages around the globe. He gives a wide background of the anthropological, linguistic and biological research behind what we know about the evolution of the world’s languages. Razib quotes a 1997 paper by L. L. [...]

The death of language?

BBC News reports on the state of endangered languages around the world: an estimated 7,000 languages are being spoken around the world. But that number is expected to shrink rapidly in the coming decades. What is lost when a language dies? In 1992 a prominent US linguist stunned the academic world by predicting that by [...]

Indus Valley Script

From the most recent New Scientist: Scholars at odds over mysterious Indus script 19:00 23 April 2009 by Ewen Callaway An as yet undeciphered script found on relics from the Indus valley constitutes a genuine written language, a new mathematical analysis suggests. The finding is the latest chapter in a bitter dispute over the interpretation [...]