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In this article, the topic of ape's and their ability to produce language. Whether it is with each other or with human's, it is shown that apes do have the ability to communicate. Many ape's have been taught American Sign Language or ASL for short. Not only did they prove to be able to mimic signs and understand their meanings but also are able to initiate and contribute to conversation. Physical items and plastic tokens that represent words are also used as a mode of communication between ape's and humans. The reason why vocal communication from ape's is not developed is because they do not have the physical capacity to do so like humans. How ever that does not mean that they can not understand language spoken to them and be able to reply in signs. "To date, Kanzi has learned approximately 256 lexigram words and can understand 500 spoken English words." The research makes me question if there are any other animals who have the ability to learn to communicate with humans such as ape's can.

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Language is a collection of symbols that represents objects, actions, and thoughts. It is representational, allowing for the transmission and relocation of information between minds. It can be written, spoken, gestured, and/or signed for purposes of communication.

It is often debated whether or not humans are the only animal possessing language capabilities. In particular, some studies have revealed that great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) exhibit some language like qualities. Apes have a larger brain size to body size ratio than all other nonhuman primates. In addition, one of the apes, the chimpanzee (Pan troglodytes), shares 98.4% of their deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA) with humans.

Apes typically use scent markings, pilo (hair) erection, facial expressions, and vocalizations, as well as other verbal and visual means of communication. Apes also can communicate with humans, and chimpanzees are capable of forming infrequent human vocalizations in response to human speech. In addition, some apes make the complex hand movements used in American Sign Language (ASL).

Nonetheless, ape language is qualitatively different than human language. Apes do not have a vocal tract that allows them to speak the same way people do. Also, apes do not have the same level of intelligence as humans, which some believe is necessary for understanding and producing speech. Furthermore, ape language is not as complex or expressive as human language.

There have been many studies on the language abilities of the great apes. Research has been conducted on the evolution of language, the acquisition and production of language, as well as strategies for teaching language to humans. The results of some ape language studies have been beneficial to those working on language acquisition in mentally challenged children.

Manual signing, plastic "words," computer lexigrams, and simultaneous communication have been used in ape language studies. In fact, human curiosity with the language abilities of apes dates back to the 1930s. In 1933, Winthrop and Luella Kellogg raised Gua, a female chimpanzee, along with their infant son, Donald. Over a period of 9 months, Gua was able to understand and respond to about 70 verbal commands. In 1966, another chimpanzee, Sarah, participated in language research designed by David Premack. Sarah learned to form sentences by placing plastic tokens that symbolized words in a vertical line. Sarah was able to read and write with over 130 words.

In 1967, two psychologists, Beatrice and Allen Gardner, taught Washoe, an infant female chimpanzee, how to use ASL in the same way that parents teach deaf children to sign. After a period of about 3 years, Washoe learned to sign approximately 130 words. Lana, another female chimpanzee, participated in a language study beginning in 1971 at the Regional Centre of Primate Studies at Yerkes. Duane Rumbaugh and colleagues placed Lana in an experimental chamber, where she used a computer lexigram language system to "talk."

Beginning in 1972, Koko, a female gorilla (Gorilla gorilla), learned ASL through simultaneous communication with Penny Patterson. Koko responded to verbal questions and signed novel combinations of words. Researchers noted that at times, Koko even talked (signed) to herself and her dolls.

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee, was raised and taught sign language as if he were human. In 1979, Herbert Terrace developed a language study at Columbia University in which Nim was a subject. In 44 months of training, Nim learned 125 words and was able to combine two- and three-word utterances. However, after reviewing years of data, Terrace concluded that most of the time Nim was not signing spontaneously. Rather, he appeared to be imitating his trainer's signs.

Chantek, an orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus), was taught ASL by Lyn Miles, who raised him as her child. As Chantek's vocabulary increased, the ideas that he expressed became more intricate. Chantek used signs in combinations and even invented his own signs (for example, "eye-drink" for contact lens solution). Chantek learned over 150 words from 1979 to 1986 and did not simply imitate his caregivers, but used signs to initiate communication. In addition, Chantek was able to comprehend spoken English.

Kanzi, a bonobo (Pan paniscus), learned to use language without specifically being trained or prompted to do so. Kanzi accompanied his mother, Matata, when she attended language-learning sessions in 1980 with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh. At the time, Matata was being taught a computer lexigram language. During Matata's language training, Kanzi often tried to interact with the researchers and sometimes touched the lexigrams on the keyboard. At first, Kanzi received little attention because his mother was the focus of the study. However, one day, Matata was absent and Kanzi used the lexigrams competently, to the amazement of the researchers. To date, Kanzi has learned approx-imately 256 lexigram words and can understand 500 spoken English words.

In 1985, Kanzi's sister, Panbanisha, joined the language studies at the Language Research Center in Georgia. Panbanisha, a bonobo or "pygmy" chimpanzee, was co-reared with Panzee, a "common" chimpanzee, to see if there were any differences in language acquisition and production between the two species of chimps. Like Kanzi, Panbanisha and Panzee became linguistically competent without specific training. However, it was found that there were differences in the learning abilities of the two apes. Panbanisha learned symbols sooner and combined words in more novel ways than Panzee. Currently, Panbanisha understands over 3,000 words and uses a vocabulary of 250 words.

Although much has been learned from ape language studies regarding the ontogeny of language, there still is a substantial amount of controversy regarding how much apes' language abilities resemble that of humans. Some research shows that apes do not use language spontaneously (for example, Nim), while other research demonstrates that they do (Chantek). Another point of contention is whether or not apes can form grammatically ordered sentences. Although apes do construct sentences using multiple signs, the sentences are often random and/or repetitious. Notwithstanding, Kanzi does not repeat himself often and appears to understand the grammatical rules about lexigram order.

After Terrace's conclusions that Nim Chimpsky seemed to be mimicking the signs of his trainers and could not grasp syntax, funding for ape language research dwindled. Terrace's findings were a major disappointment to talking-ape enthusiasts. However, the work of Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and colleagues brings an encouraging perspective to those who believe that great apes can acquire and produce language.

References:

1. Fouts, R., & Mills, S. T. (1998). Next of kin: My conversations with chimpanzees. New York: Perennial Currents.

2. Greenspan, S. I., & Shanker, S. G. (2004). The first idea: How symbols, language, and intelligence evolved from our primate ancestors to modern humans. New York: Da Capo Press.

3. King, B. (1999). The origins of language. Santa Fe, NM: School of American Research Press.

4. Patterson, F., & Cohn, R. H. (1988). Koko's story. New York: Scholastic.

5. Premack, D. (1976). Intelligence in ape and man. Hillsdale, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum.

6. Savage-Rumbaugh, S., Shanker, S. G., & Taylor, T. J. (2001). Apes, language, and the human mind. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

7. Terrace, H. S. (1987). Nim, a chimpanzee who learned sign language. New York: Columbia University Press

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Language is a collection of symbols that represents objects, actions, and thoughts. It is representational, allowing for the transmission and relocation of information between minds. It can be written, spoken, gestured, and/or signed for purposes of communication. It is often debated whether or not humans are the only animal possessing language capabilities.

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Music really is a universal language, study suggests

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Music really is a universal language, study suggests

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This article discusses music and how it is a language on it's own that anyone can understand. There was a study done at Harvard about the different emotions in songs and if people could pick up on them and categorize them correctly. "...researchers from Harvard University selected 86 songs from small-scale societies scattered throughout the globe. It asked 750 web users, in 60 countries to listen to 14-second excerpts from a random selection of these songs and the listeners had to evaluate whether they thought the songs were a lullaby; a love song; used for dancing; used to heal an illness; used for mourning; or used to tell a story.
After collectively listening to a total of 26,000 excerpts, the results – published in the journal Current Biology – showed accurate inferences about a given song’s function. Regardless of whether the music came from Highland Scots or Iroquois societies, the listeners were able to collectively decide what purpose a song has."
What amazes me about this experiment and also proves this article's point is that though all of these different people speak different languages they can still understand the meaning and value of the songs. Music is something that can blend different people and culture's because we can all understand it and this is really something to be amazed by.

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There is a communicative power in music that runs deeper than words. In fact, as the German poet Heinrich Heine once wrote, "where words leave off, music begins."

It has the power to stir up nostalgia; make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end; and even make you cry or laugh. But just how universal is the language of music globally, to convey emotions and stir up specific feelings as it crosses cultures?

To answer this, researchers from Harvard University selected 86 songs from small-scale societies scattered throughout the globe. It asked 750 web users, in 60 countries to listen to 14-second excerpts from a random selection of these songs and the listeners had to evaluate whether they thought the songs were a lullaby; a love song; used for dancing; used to heal an illness; used for mourning; or used to tell a story.

After collectively listening to a total of 26,000 excerpts, the results - published in the journal Current Biology - showed accurate inferences about a given song's function. Regardless of whether the music came from Highland Scots or Iroquois societies, the listeners were able to collectively decide what purpose a song has.

The clearest results came for lullabies and dance songs, which were the easiest for the majority of listeners to identify. Love songs and healing songs proved harder to categorise, but the collective conclusion still put these in their correct groupings.

There were actually no songs in the roster that were used for mourning or to tell a story, and these options were only added to stop listeners from assuming there were only four categories. Somewhat ironically, listeners tended to categorise healing songs as songs for mourning the dead.

Alphr asked the study's lead author, Samuel Mehr, what the findings suggest about the commonality of human experience of music:

"I think they show quite clearly that despite the fact that the songs of the world are dazzlingly variable, with each culture shaping a great deal of the way its music sounds, at the same time, our shared human psychology leads to some very clear regularities underlying all that variance," said Mehr.

"Nearly everybody seems to find dance songs 'dancey' and nearly everybody seems to find lullabies 'soothing' - but that doesn't mean that all dance songs sound alike and all lullabies sound alike."

Mehr continued that the song functions were chosen for two reasons. Firstly, work in anthropology and ethnomusicology shows these types of songs are found in many cultures. ("So they're good candidate genres for looking at possible form-function links.") Secondly, they are each related to theories of the biological and cultural evolution of music. Could there be underlying biological reasons for the common rhythms in music?

"Absolutely! We don't yet know what they are, but there's really cool work coming from evolutionary biology and psychology that develop testable theories of what those biological reasons could be," said Mehr.

"For instance, in some of my other work with [Harvard Evolutionary Psychology Laboratory associate professor] Max Krasnow, I've proposed a formal explanation for the origins of infant-directed singing. Studies like ours can be used to test the predictions of those theories and help to rule them in or out."

A follow-up experiment from the same researchers involved asking 1,000 people in the US and India to rate the excepts for contextual features such as the number of singers and instruments, and subjective features like melodic complexity, tempo and valence. While the results hinted at some relationship between those judgments and song function, they didn't go far enough to explain exactly why people were able to correctly detect a song's function.

To truly examine the universality of these responses, more work is need to test the reactions of listeners who haven't had any experience of music from other cultures. Mehr said that the paper's co-authors, Manvir Singh and Luke Glowacki, are "already leading field expeditions to isolated, small-scale societies, where they are running a new version of the same experiment to test the extent to which the current findings generalise to *all* humans, rather than just English-speaking internet users."

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Music really is a universal language, study suggests

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There is a communicative power in music that runs deeper than words. In fact, as the German poet Heinrich Heine once wrote, "where words leave off, music begins." It has the power to stir up nostalgia; make the hairs on the back of your neck stand on end; and even make you cry or laugh.

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For Bentley’s Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Debate Over How Language Began May be at an End

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For Bentley’s Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Debate Over How Language Began May be at an End

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Dan Everett discusses how instead of believing that grammar was created after a mutation in Homo Sapiens like Chompsky believes that grammar and language actually date back to Homo Erectus and grew alongside culture. Everett explains that in the signs of an early culture there must be signs of communication as well which leads to language. "Looking at the anthropological record, Everett sees that iconography and symbolism pre-date the Chomskyian contention about when human language began to appear among Homo sapiens. The ability to recognize symbols goes back 3 or 4 million years, Everett explains, citing the discovery of a naturally formed pebble shaped like a human face found preserved among a group of dissimilar pebbles in a cave in South Africa “by some ancient pre-human ancestors who agreed it ‘stood in for’ an actual face,” he says. “That’s the origin of language, language before grammar. So is drawing a circle with two horns and culturally agreeing it represents a bison,” says Everett." Logically all cognitive living things need a way to communicate and in communication grows connections and relationships which breeds culture so I wouldn't be surprised if culture and language date even farther back than Everett is suggesting.

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Dan Everett has spent a lot of time looking into the past. Now, with his latest book acting as a kind of closing argument for his side of anthropology's "language wars," he's looking toward the future, shifting his inquiries from the ancient origins of language to the philosophical implications of culture and cognition. And, with his time as Bentley's Dean of Arts and Sciences drawing to a close in June, he's setting his sights on new endeavors.

How Language Began: The Story of Humanity's Greatest Invention (Liveright, 2017) completes an analysis about the nature of human language that Everett's been staging across several books, one which famously positioned him against Noam Chomsky and his followers. Whereas the Chomskyians contend there is a purely evolutionary basis for human language, a mutation leading to a "universal grammar" in the brains of Homo sapiens somewhere between 50,000-100,000 years ago, Everett's work maintains that language is an evolutionary and a cultural acquisition, and that it can be traced back to Homo erectus, one of the ancestor species of modern humans. Language, Everett contends, may be more than a million years old, isn't unique to Homo sapiens, and has its origins in iconography and symbols.

In Language the Cultural Tool (Vintage, 2012), Everett looked at how language is affected by culture. Along with his earlier autobiographical book Don't Sleep, There are Snakes (Vintage, 2009)--which recounted his work among the Pirahã people of Brazil and his discovery that their language lacks a feature called "recursion" as required by Chomsky's theories of universal grammar- Language the Cultural Tool positioned language as deeply influenced by cultural structures and conditions.

In The Dark Matter of the Mind: The Culturally Articulated Unconscious (University of Chicago, 2017), Everett's argument focused on the bonds between language, knowledge, and culture, arguing that there can be no understanding of one without accounting for the others. In Dark Matter, Everett laid the groundwork for his increasing focus on cognition, on the nature of thinking itself, and also dealt with the evolutionary aspects of language. In How Language Began, he weaves together the threads from these earlier books into a tapestry that reaches back beyond human grammar and depicts the symbol as the root of language.

Looking at the anthropological record, Everett sees that iconography and symbolism pre-date the Chomskyian contention about when human language began to appear among Homo sapiens. The ability to recognize symbols goes back 3 or 4 million years, Everett explains, citing the discovery of a naturally formed pebble shaped like a human face found preserved among a group of dissimilar pebbles in a cave in South Africa "by some ancient pre-human ancestors who agreed it 'stood in for' an actual face," he says. "That's the origin of language, language before grammar. So is drawing a circle with two horns and culturally agreeing it represents a bison," says Everett.

All animals, explains Everett, can recognize and understand "indexes" or signs of change or condition in their environment. Our human ancestors, through culture and evolution, developed the ability to create symbolic languages, which they would have used in hunting and foraging and, eventually, in sophisticated endeavors like raft-building and seafaring. All of these activities show up in the anthropological record before spoken languages.

( View Dan Everett's TEDx San Francisco talk on How Language Began by clicking on the image above.)

Everett cites other examples in his book, including the existence of a Homo erectus city-like settlement in modern-day Israel dating back 750,000 years that would have required some means of collective action and communication to regulate what seems to have been the village-wide processing of fish and nearby grains, tool-making, and boat-building. "Collective efforts require a means of correction and instruction-'No, don't put that reed there, put it here.'-which requires language, even if 'only' a language of symbols," Everett says. There is even evidence that Homo erectus "colonized" the island of Socotra, off modern-day Yemen, among other islands. "They were seafarers and this, perhaps more than anything else they did, required language," Everett says.

"Grammar," says Everett, "is in fact of secondary or tertiary importance to the development of human language," and "grammar shows up when it needs to, culturally speaking."

Contrary to what some of Chomsky's defenders claim, Everett doesn't discount the role of biological evolution in laying the groundwork for the emergence of language in modern humans and their ancestors. "Evolution provides the brain with the cognitive firepower," he says, "and language then emerges out of specific cultures in combination with that cognitive ability."

For many outside the field of linguistics, Everett points out, the debate between him and Chomsky about the origins of language is already more or less a settled issue, with the anthropological record fueling more and more skepticism toward the idea that language emerges with a universal human grammar among Homo sapiens. "This isn't what bioanthropologists are studying and debating anymore, nor evolutionary biologists, nor cognitive scientists," says Everett. Cognitive scientists in particular, says Everett, are, like he is, "increasingly interested in the 'how' of the brain's functions-and what they mean for the individual and cultures-and less interested in the 'when' of some language structure within it."

With the publication and publicity around How Language Began, Everett is shifting his attention for future works to the intersections between the fields of anthropology, philosophy and cognitive science. His work's being talked about by cognitive science luminaries such as MIT's professor of cognitive science Ted Gibson, and he's been invited to cognitive science conferences around the world. "This will be the work I'll be doing on sabbatical, for my next book," says Everett, "which will lay out the philosophical grounding for my understanding of the interplay between cognition, the self, and culture; the book after that will deal with the self in society."

Everett may have closed one chapter in his war of words with those who believe in universal grammar and language's origins being found uniquely among Homo sapiens, but it's clear he's got no shortage of ideas for his next chapters.

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For Bentley's Dean of Arts and Sciences, the Debate Over How Language Began May be at an End

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Dan Everett has spent a lot of time looking into the past. Now, with his latest book acting as a kind of closing argument for his side of anthropology's "language wars," he's looking toward the future, shifting his inquiries from the ancient origins of language to the philosophical implications of culture and cognition.

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Special Collections Expands with New Anthropology and Linguistics Papers

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Special Collections Expands with New Anthropology and Linguistics Papers

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Special Collections Expands with New Anthropology and Linguistics Papers

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Special Collections Expands with New Anthropology and Linguistics Papers

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Special Collections Expands with New Anthropology and Linguistics Papers

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Special Collections Expands with New Anthropology and Linguistics Papers

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Norman McQuown is a linguist and an anthropologist who died in 2005. He taught about language and culture and was held in high esteem by others. So much so that the release of his course material is cause for celebration by many who wish to celebrate it. "The papers include McQuown’s course syllabi, lecture drafts, audiovisual recordings, and notes on work by his colleagues, among other material. The collection also incorporates the papers that McQuown inherited from anthropologist Manuel Andrade that McQuown helped make more accessible to researchers. Also included are previously unreleased records from the Chiapas Project, a set of research projects that “aimed to investigate the language, culture, environment, and history of local Maya communities,” as per the Library’s news release." People like this man are important because they are the ones who find artifacts and then go on to teach their importance as well as how they tie into the culture we know today. It takes a special person to understand then teach these important topics so it is a shame that he has passed but he will live through is books and course material that he has left behind, still teaching many even in death.

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Special Collections Expands with New Anthropology and Linguistics Papers

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The papers include McQuown's course syllabi, lecture drafts, audiovisual recordings, and notes on work by his colleagues, among other material.

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A student at Dartmouth University is concerned that there is not a class that teaches the third most spoken language in the world, Hindi-Urdu. The student believes that is important to make a class that will teach the language. The student claims that adding this class will only better others students chances at being connected to the outside world and the other larger powers that control it. ". This is especially relevant considering the relative size and impact of South Asia. Combined, the countries of South Asia, or what was formerly British India, are the most populous in the world and contain two nuclear-armed States. India itself will overtake China in population in the coming decade and currently has the second largest Muslim population worldwide..." The student brings up a good point that other less popular Asian languages are taught so why isn't Hindi-Urdu? The history, anthropology, and economics are being taught pertaining to South Asia and this student feels that the language should not be an exception. "We have multiple scholars whose work engages with South Asia in departments such as anthropology, government, and religion. Dartmouth’s history department also has a renowned historian of South Asia in Douglas Haynes. But without a Hindi-Urdu program, enrollment in South Asia-related courses and student engagement cannot reach its potential." I believe that representation in education is important especially when it comes to learning out the bigger nations that have a lot of power over how the earth works so I am on the side of the student that there should be a class that teaches Hindi-Urdu.

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Dartmouth needs to offer classes in the third most spoken language worldwide.

by Anmol Ghavri | 1/25/18 12:45am

According to language reference publication "Ethnologue," Hindi-Urdu (or Hindustani) is the third most spoken language worldwide. The Swedish-language encyclopedia "Nationalencyklopedin" places Hindi, not including the significant number of Urdu speakers, as the fourth most spoken language worldwide by native speakers. Beyond being a beautiful language with a unique history, hundreds of millions of speakers and two different scripts, Hindi-Urdu is a strategically important language for Americans for reasons including scholarship, trade and national security. Why, then, does Dartmouth not have a Hindi-Urdu Program?

Depending on who you ask, Hindi and Urdu can be classified either as a single language written in two different scripts or as two unique languages. For the most part, the two languages are mutually intelligible in spoken form. Indeed, half of my family is Indian and were taught Hindi in India, and the other half is Pakistani and was taught Urdu in Pakistan, but they can understand each other. Still, Urdu has a more significant amount of loan words from Persian, which creates a small rift between speakers of the two forms of Hindustani. In India, Hindi's public life has become a contentious issue as rising Hindu nationalists seek to minimize the role of the Perso-Arabic and Islamicate tradition in spoken Hindi in favor of its more "pure" Sanskrit and Vedic roots. But it is really in the written form where Hindi and Urdu are divided, as Hindi is written in Devanagari script and Urdu in Nastaʿlīq, the predominant style of Persian calligraphy. Under colonialism, this division was exacerbated by the British-Indian government through issues of patronage and what the "official" language of government business would be. This would be mapped onto and co-opted by various subsets of the nationalist movement. This history is too long and interesting to chart in a short opinion piece.

Because of this division in written form, it would be a challenge to teach a Hindi-Urdu program in the same type of course sequence used for languages like French or Spanish, as two distinct scripts would have to be taught in three terms. Still, Dartmouth's renowned language program could undoubtedly work through this problem. It already does something similar for Chinese and Arabic: Dartmouth's three-course introductory sequence for Chinese teaches traditional Chinese for the first two courses before shifting into simplified Chinese, which is written with different characters. Likewise, introductory Arabic at Dartmouth teaches Modern Standard Arabic; despite being akin to what Shakespearean English would be to a modern English speaker, this provides a baseline for students on the LSA+ in Morocco to learn regional Arabic dialects. For a Hindi-Urdu program, Hindi could be taught first - in my experience, its script is easier to learn, so students could learn the more complicated Nastaʿlīq script already knowing spoken Hindustani.

The fact that Hindustani is still not taught at Dartmouth is emblematic of the lack of serious consideration the academy and research of South Asia receives at American universities generally and Dartmouth in particular. This is especially relevant considering the relative size and impact of South Asia. Combined, the countries of South Asia, or what was formerly British India, are the most populous in the world and contain two nuclear armed States. India itself will overtake China in population in the coming decade and currently has the second largest Muslim population worldwide, with Pakistan as a close third. Indeed, South Asia already has the world's largest Muslim and Hindu populations and is home to several of the world's great faiths, from Sikhism to Christianity to Buddhism.

Rebuttals to my line of argument may call me myopic in my outrage. After all, there are many subjects and issues that do not get significant attention at Dartmouth and its peers. Yet South Asia is unique given its billions of souls and its significance for multiple religious and ethnic communities. Moreover, South Asia's nuclear arsenals and position in the so called "war on terror" make it a place of strategic interest for the United States. The subcontinent is also a key player in the global economy and has major technology and manufacturing hubs scattered throughout.

Dartmouth administrators must first gain awareness of the impact the College's lack of South Asian studies, resources and language training have on scholars of South Asia. Currently, individual departments support scholarship of South Asia. The Asian and Middle Eastern Studies Department runs an excellent foreign study program to Hyderabad. Visiting AMES professor Nikhil Rao is teaching multiple classes this year on relevant topics in South Asian studies ranging from ethnicity and development to cities and partition. We have multiple scholars whose work engages with South Asia in departments such as anthropology, government and religion. Dartmouth's history department also has a renowned historian of South Asia in Douglas Haynes. But without a Hindi-Urdu program, enrollment in South Asia-related courses and student engagement cannot reach its potential. Because area studies majors are generally linked to language study, without a Hindi-Urdu program, Dartmouth limits what its scholars and students of South Asia can study.

Dartmouth is alone among the Ivies without a Hindustani language program. With the proposed restructuring of the Asian and Middle Eastern Studies department, I hope that there exists the will to begin one. A Hindi-Urdu program has been considered for a while now, which is a step in the right direction. I urge Dartmouth administrators to turn that into a reality. If they really want Dartmouth to be a "global" institution with students engaged with the world, they need to understand and learn to communicate with the 1.8 billion people of South Asia. Dartmouth is renowned for its language and foreign study programs. It is time for us to begin a Hindi-Urdu program and give professors and students who study South Asia the resources and support they deserve. Only then can we help shape America's future engagements with a rising South Asia.

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Dartmouth needs to offer classes in the third most spoken language worldwide. by Anmol Ghavri | 1/25/18 12:45am According to language reference publication "Ethnologue," Hindi-Urdu (or Hindustani) is the third most spoken language worldwide. The Swedish-language encyclopedia "Nationalencyklopedin" places Hindi, not including the significant number of Urdu speakers, as the fourth most spoken language worldwide by native speakers.

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All of these articles have the common theme of communication. Whether it be who we communicate, when we communicate, with who do we communicate or who teaches communications. I feel that this is such a researched and sought out topic is because there are so many intricacies that go into our languages that also link to our culture that everyone just wants to be able to understand all of the facets of it. People want to know if they can talk to animals, people want to know who's been reaching language, people want to learn new languages, people want to communicate through music. There is just so much to know when it comes to linguistics and we as people don't even realize how much of our lives is compiled of it. Without communication and language there would be no connection and without connection, there is no culture. This is why language matters.