Did you know that there are nearly 7,000 languages spoken around the world? This book introduces you to a wide variety of different languages to start you off on your language-learning journey. Find out where languages come from and where they are spoken. From Arabic to Zulu, Morse code to whale song, this book is packed with language facts and phrases to help you communicate all around the world. It includes: basic vocabulary and short dialogues...

Fine artist Sam Winston, cocreator of the New York Times best-selling A Child of Books, celebrates the power of stories and written languages--and the imperative to preserve them. Once there were many stories in the world. There were stories with sunsets and wonderful tales filled with fairies and dinosaurs. But one day, a story decided that it was the best, the most important story ever. It called itself the One and started to consume every other...

Selig, who loves words and copies them on pieces of paper that he carries with him, goes on a trip to discover his purpose. Words. Selig collects them, ones that stir his heart (Mama!) and ones that make him laugh (giggle). But what to do with so many luscious words? After helping a poet find the perfect words for his poem (lozenge, lemon, and licorice), he figures it out: His purpose is to spread the word to others. And so he begins to sprinkle,...

Language is always changing-- but we tend not to like it. We understand that new words must be created for new things, but the way English is spoken today rubs many of us the wrong way, and it often seems as if the language is deteriorating before our eyes. McWhorter shows how English has always been in motion and continues to evolve today. These shifts are a natural process common to all languages, and McWhorter shows that our lives are all the richer...

"As immigrants and others are engulfed by dominant societies, the connection to their ancestral tongues is routinely severed. Julie Sedivy takes on the science and politics of language loss, offering lessons for the renewal and preservation of heritage languages, alongside her own moving story of language loss and accompanying personal crisis"--

"Words to change our minds-and our hearts New discoveries in biology and the neurosciences are revealing how the structure of language-the words we think and speak-can actually change the way the neurons in our brains and hearts connect. But our ancestors understood this connection intuitively, thousands of years ago. They created specific word-patterns to provide comfort, healing, strength, and inner power in difficult times, and they encoded these...

On his first day of first grade in a new country, Santiago has a dinosaur-sized problem: how will he make new amigos when he does not speak English?