This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. My mother used to ...

I was proud of speaking three languages, especially the native language my tongue is familiar with. I am comfortable in the embrace of my own mother tongue, the language that helped me grow up and see ...

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of ...

Sanjana Bhambhani's ancestors fled their homeland during India's Partition – and her family gradually lost their mother tongue. Can she now reclaim it? When I was around eight years old, a teacher at ...

In a dream the other night, I was back in Beijing, at the entrance of my family’s apartment complex, where a public telephone, a black rotary, had once been guarded by the old women from the ...

I don’t remember my first language anymore, or at least not most of it. When I was 2, I immigrated with my family into the United States from South India, and we all spoke Tamil. I didn’t know any ...

Subscribe to Life Kit's weekly newsletter and get expert advice on lifestyle topics like money, relationships, health and more. Click here to subscribe now. For more ideas on how to improve your life, ...

My mother achieved real competence in Irish, and then gradually lost it. Her exertions were motivated by unrequited love, her ambitions, and even her politics. After she died, I found all these great ...

Explore the Smithsonian Folklife Festival's "One World, Many Voices" program. Nearly half of the 7,000 languages spoken in the world are expected to vanish in the next 100 years. One of them is ...

Do we need a national language to unify us? Of course not. The many wonderful languages we have worked just as well. Playing with language is akin to playing with fire. It pleases me that the Home ...