Vanishing Voices
Used in WWII to create an uncrackable secret military code.
What is Navajo?
The UN uses this category name for a language that children speak at home, but few speak outside of it, such as New Mexico's Zuni.
What is vulnerable?
In Welsh, instead of raining "cats and dogs," it rains these two things.
What are old wives and walking sticks?
Apache storytellers reflect their culture's deep sense of place by using descriptive names for these natural features.
What are land features (or landscapes)?
Starting in Hawaii in the 1980s, these preschools immersion programs—where children speak only the native language—helped revive Hawaiian.
What are "language nests"
This southern African language is one of the most complex in the world, featuring 5 distinct click sounds and up to 120 consonants.
What is Taa?
A language falls into this category when parents may understand it but don't speak it much, leaving grandparents as the primary speakers.
What is severely endangered?
In Yiddish, a schlemiel is a fool who spills soup on others, while this is the word for the unlucky fool on whom the soup gets spilled.
What is a schlimazel?
The Seri term moosni hant cooit revealed to scientists that green sea turtles do this unusual activity on the ocean floor.
What is hibernate (or overwinter)?
Young people in Chile are keeping the Huilliche language alive by performing this modern style of music.
What is hip-hop?
By the year 2100, linguists estimate that approximately this fraction of the world’s 7,000 languages will disappear.
What is one-half (50%)?
Dakota, a Great Plains language with 675 remaining speakers, falls into this category where children no longer learn it in the home.
What is definitely endangered?
The Gta’ language of India includes the word nosor, which specifically means to free someone from this dangerous animal.
What is a tiger?
Seri speakers gave scientists a clue that this marine plant, unlike most sea grasses, is actually a nutritious food.
What is eelgrass?
Cherokee speakers can download an app that allows them to perform this modern daily activity in their native alphabet.
What is texting?
In 2008, the last native speaker of this Alaskan language died, making the language officially extinct.
What is Eyak?
This term describes a language like New York and Canada's Onondaga, where very few people younger than grandparents speak it at all.
What is critically endangered?
If a Basque speaker tells you, "Don't take the beans out of your lap," they are telling you not to do this.
What is get on your high horse (or lecture)?
The Ojibway word mawadishiweshkiwin describes the annoying habit of doing this too often.
What is making visits (or visiting neighbors)?
He immigrated to Jerusalem in 1881 and led the effort to revive Hebrew as a spoken, living language.
Who is Eliezer Ben-Yehuda?
Native American children in the late 19th and early 20th centuries were forbidden from speaking their native languages while attending these institutions.
What are boarding schools?
The UN assigns this term to a language that no longer has any living native speakers.
What is extinct?
This Cheyenne word captures the hilariously embarrassing moment of laughing so hard that you fart.
What is mémestátamao’ó?
The elegant Seri translation for this modern car component literally means "into which the breathing descends."
What is a muffler?
To modernize Hebrew, Ben-Yehuda authored a dictionary that expanded the vocabulary from 8,000 words to this many.
What is 50,000?