The tiny island of New Guinea is a hotbed of linguistic diversity. Though the island is only 462,840 square kilometres in size, approximately one sixth of the world’s languages are spoken here. More than 1,000 languages have been counted on: around 800 in Papua New Guinea and 200 on the side o...

Maori is the original language of New Zealand, and one of the country’s three official languages. However, despite its official status and efforts at reviving it that date back to the 1980’s, the number of fluent speakers is estimated to be between 10,000 (Maori Language Commission, cite...

Language is more than just a set of vocabulary words. For example, think of how two different people can say the same thing two different ways. This complexity is what makes it so hard to create adequate machine translation programs, or even to teach machines to recognize spoken commands. In an atte...