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This ancient religious language is championed by India's Hindu nationalists. The new Hindu nationalist government is promoting Sanskrit over the objections those who favor a secular, pluralist India. All of which may put off some people from learning Sanskrit-- but not everyone.

In the early 1800s, native English speakers like Scotsman Hugo Reid and New Englander Abel Stearns settled in Mexican California, married Spanish speakers and took Spanish names. In letters to other local Anglophones, they peppered their English with Spanish expressions and idioms. Comedian George Lopez might have been thinking of them when he said, "We've always spoken Spanglish."

Pop Up Archive is making spoken word audio searchable. It joins a similar effort by the BBC to tag and transcribe words spoken into microphones but until now not written down. Plus, Argentina’s President posts a dumb tweet about the Chinese pronouncing rice, ‘lice.’

We humans have been dropping 'um,' 'uh' and other expressions of hesitation into our speech for a long time— maybe for as long as we've had language. More recently, linguists are noting a shift in usage across a number of Germanic languages from 'um' to 'uh.'

An online photo album is casting new light on a forgotten episode in Hawaii's history, when U.S. authorities imported 1,500 Russian Siberians to work on sugar plantations. Most of the migrants never made it past the language and cultural barrier, but the story of how they came to Hawaii says plenty about American attitudes to race and language.

"Africans are incredible linguists," says Lori Thicke, founder of Translators Without Borders, which enlists Africans to translate everything from medication instructions to election materials into some of Africa's 1,000+ languages.

People on the fringes of society—criminals, discriminated-against minorities, rebellious teenagers—often need to speak in code. So they create argots, or secret languages. In Turkey, the LGBT community keep their words to themselves with the help of an argot called Lubunca.

Most Haitian kids do not speak fluent French, but that is the language of instruction in the vast majority of Haiti's schools. Recently, some schools have dropped French in favor of Creole, which is universally spoken but often disparaged.

Turkey's president is demanding that students study the Ottoman language in schools. Is this a genuine effort to get Turks to better understand their history? Or a veiled attempt to undermine secularism and democracy?

Students learn in English, Spanish and Nahuatl. But this charter school has had to fight off an effort by officials to close it down.