Mother Tongues: Languages Around the World
This program travels the globe as it surveys a large portion of the world’s languages—25 percent of which are spoken by a mere 0.1 percent of the Earth’s population. Moving from Africa to Oceania and up to Asia and then west to Europe and acro...
Civilization to Colonization: Language Takes Written Form
Writing is a relative latecomer to the history of language. This program tracks its emergence in Mesopotamia, China, and Mesoamerica and its spread down through the millennia via conquest—usually violent, sometimes benign—and colonization. The c...
Let There Be Words: The Origin of Human Language
What precisely is language, and how did humans acquire it? In an effort to answer those essential questions, this program journeys back to prehistoric times in search of language’s origin. But this is not a passive discussion, as Noam Chomsky; Bro...
Constant change: the diversification and spread of language
In this program, John McWhorter, author of The Power of Babel: A Natural History of Language; Lyle Campbell, of the University of Utah; Brian Joseph, of The Ohio State University; and population geneticist Luigi Luca Cavalli-Sforza examine factors t...
Birth and death: the life cycle of language
It is predicted that within a century more than half of the world's languages will become extinct, but as languages are lost, new ones emerge naturally or are constructed. In this program, Noam Chomsky; Esperantist Thomas Eccard; endangered language...