"Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as "the land of sushi." Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian): "homemade language. no country to stay in. three countries I experienced. insufficient space in brain. so made new language. homemade language." As she searches...

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?

When Dat starts school in a country where he does not speak the language, everything around him sounds like gibberish until a new friend helps him make sense of his new world.

"In her witty account of the origins of many English words and expressions, Deborah Warren educates as she entertains-and entertain she does, leading her readers through the amazing labyrinthian history of related words. "Language," she writes, "is all about mutation.""--

"English is the world language, except that most of the world doesn't speak it--only one in five people does. Gaston Dorren calculates that to speak fluently with half of the world's 7.4 or so billion people in their mother tongues, you would need to know no fewer than twenty languages. He sets out to explore these top twenty world languages, which range from the familiar (French, Spanish) to the surprising (Malay, Javanese, Punjabi). [This book]...

"Anisa Ellahi dreams of being a translator of "great works of literature," but mostly spends her days subtitling Bollywood movies and living off her parents' generous allowance. Adding to her growing sense of inadequacy, her mediocre white boyfriend, Adam, has successfully leveraged his savant-level aptitude for languages into an enviable career. But when Adam learns to speak Urdu practically overnight, Anisa forces him to reveal his secret. Adam...

"Everyone likes to think they know a bit about language: There are some words that you simply can't translate into English. The origin of a word tells you how it should be used. A dialect is inferior to a language. The problem is, none of these statements are true. In Don't Believe a Word, linguist David Shariatmadari explodes nine common myths about language and introduces us to some of the fundamental insights of modern linguistics. By the end of...

Gale Presents: Udemy is an online learning platform that provides instruction for adults who want to upskill for a new job, advance in their current profession, or deepen a personal interest. This top collection, curated from courses from Udemy.com and powered by Udemy for Business, gives users access to relevant skills training, helping them achieve success at work and in life. Before enrolling, users can review key information about a course, its...

A little girl greets people in her neighborhood in many different languages.

How did language come to be? Why can we speak, while cats and dogs can't? When, how, and where did our 7,000 world languages come from? Isabella looks at languages-- spoken, written and signed-- to find out where they came from and how they're changing.