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You travel to Spain for a vacation, but you need to finish an assignment and don’t have a computer. You are staying at a hotel, and you have three hours before the assignment’s due. The problem? You barely know Spanish, and definitely don’t know how to ask for a “computer”. So, you ask the receptionist: “Donde ‘computero’?” Thankfully, even though the receptionist doesn’t know a lick of English, she understands you and points you to a room in the corner where you finish you

Introduction In an increasingly cross-cultural society, effective communication across languages and cultural contexts is crucial for breaking down social barriers and tackling issues such as climate change, public health and world peace, which have unprecedented global interdependence. It is also important to acknowledge that language is not mere machine translation word-for-word; rather, it is a complex interplay of sounds, intonation, expressions and gestures that can conv

I am delighted to feature Sarah Payne, a 3rd year Ph.D student in Linguistics at Stony Brook University and an NSF graduate research fellow. Under the guidance of Dr. Jordan Kodner and Dr. Jeff Heinz, Sarah is researching how children learn their native language, drawing both from experimental findings and from computational theory. Sarah’s love for writing and math sparked the beginning of their fascinating journey into linguistics. They studied Latin in school, but it was

Picture stepping through farms of amaranth, roselle greens, sunchokes and molokhia with friends from Sierra Leone and Congo, reminiscing world history with high schoolers or sowing seeds for the next generation of technologists. Why? All for the love of building strong communities. I am so fortunate to be chatting with Mr. Jacob Moore , an educator and anthropologist, who is flipping the dynamics from “ teaching ” to “ co-learning”. It's about intellectual humility, he says.

Without its aromatic spices, the Indian cuisine isn’t the same, and without the serenade of the mariachi, the streets of Oaxaca are amiss! Similarly, language without its cultural context is like music without its melody. “ Ghar ki Murgi Daal Barabar ” in Hindi literally translates to “ The chicken at home is equal to lentils .” This idiom means that we take for granted, or value less what is available easily to us. Mrs. Mangal, who lives in Delhi, India, explained to me that

What is love? A loss of words is not uncommon, especially when expressing emotions as deep and complex as love. Shakespeare’s use of metaphors and similes to describe what Romeo and Juliet feel for each other exemplifies a sea of emotions that are hard to just express with the word “love”. According to Dr. Steven Pinker, the Johnstone Family Professor of Psychology at Harvard University, and author of The Language Instinct, language thankfully does not hinder what we feel. I