Author: paige laevy

English carried the subdued assurance of an empire that no longer required soldiers for the majority of the previous century. Pop songs, airline announcements, textbooks, and the fine print on prescription bottles all carried it. In Asia and Africa, entire generations were raised with the belief that thinking in English was necessary to think seriously, make a good living, and be taken seriously at all. Now, that belief is starting to falter, and it’s doing so in unexpected places. Topic ProfileDetailsSubjectThe decline of English as the unchallenged global lingua francaRegion of focusSouth Asia, with global parallels in Africa, Latin America,…

When you listen in on a sourcing call between a factory manager in Dongguan and a buyer in Manchester, something strange happens. The small talk goes smoothly. The figures appear to come in. Everyone gives a nod. Three weeks later, a container containing the incorrect gauge of steel arrives, and someone in finance finds themselves staring at a $40,000 hole that no one can fully explain. It would be easy to label this as bad luck. Usually, it isn’t. If you speak with enough procurement officers, you’ll notice a subtle pattern in the way water damage appears on ceilings. Language…

American doctors often come to a quiet realization somewhere between the third coffee of a long shift and the fourth patient who speaks only Spanish. They did not agree to serve as translators. They also didn’t anticipate that a language they only vaguely remembered from high school would suddenly prevent them from receiving an accurate diagnosis. But increasingly, that’s precisely where they end up. When you enter any urgent care facility in Houston, Phoenix, or even rural Georgia, the waiting room’s rhythm conveys the story before the charts do. A mother is seen practicing an English sentence under her breath…

It’s not the bright walls or the sound of kids playing during recess that catch your attention when you first enter a hallway at Weaver Elementary in Garland, Texas. It’s Mandarin. Chinese was selected as the district leaders’ immersion bet in a school district where Hispanic students make up the majority and Spanish is used in nearly every parking lot conversation. Over the years, I’ve talked to some parents who find this intriguing. Some people don’t. They simply shrug and claim that their children will require it in the future. This instinct, which is half pragmatic and half optimistic, is…

Currently being tested at a speaker box in a strip-mall parking lot, somewhere off an exit ramp, between a gas station and a check-cashing location, is the most ambitious technology of our time, the one venture capitalists insist will revolutionize every industry on Earth. And things aren’t going very well. Taco Bell had to learn this lesson the hard way. The company has seen its experiment become one of the more dependable sources of humor on TikTok since implementing voice AI at over 500 drive-throughs. There is the now-famous client who was courteously served after placing an order for eighteen…

At the core of Meta’s most ambitious AI project is a tiny irony. The messy, unplanned expanse of YouTube served as part of the training for the system that can now translate between 200 languages, including ones that professional linguists have spent decades attempting to digitize. not scholarly databases. not official documents. Just people conversing in languages that the internet has largely forgotten. No Language Left Behind, or NLLB-200 as Meta refers to it, seems more alien the more you read about it. The model works with languages like Kamba, Lao, Lingala, and Fula, which even the best commercial translation…

When you enter a room full of teenagers using an AI tutor, you notice a certain kind of silence. Something looser rather than the stillness of concentration you’d expect in a library. A girl in the back laughs and tries again after mumbling a Spanish phrase to her phone. A boy by the window, half amused, half frustrated, argues with his screen in halting Mandarin. Sitting on a desk instead of behind it, the instructor isn’t actually instructing. She is observing. It’s also difficult to ignore how at ease everyone appears to be with that setup. The marketing slogan “bilingual…

You’ll see them if you stroll down Smith Street on a weekday morning: strollers arranged like a small fleet outside P.S. 58, parents holding iced coffees while wearing exercise gear, and the occasional father still on a Zoom call. Situated in Carroll Gardens, the school offers one of the most popular French dual-immersion courses in the city. Over the last ten years, homes in its zone have added an odd new line item to their listings. Everyone knows, even though realtors don’t always express it aloud. The cost includes the school. The emergence of bilingual schools may have quietly moved…

A baby in the womb begins to pay attention to her mother’s voice at some point during the third trimester. Not only does she hear the sound of a passing bus or the dull thud of a slammed door, but she also sorts the sound waves that pass through skin and amniotic fluid into something that starts to feel meaningful. We already knew this. Up until now, we had no idea what would happen if that voice continued to switch between two languages. This question has been the focus of a team of researchers in Barcelona, and their results, which…

When a professional sits across from a mother who has raised her child in two languages and tells her to stop singing lullabies in one language while gently reprimanding her in the other, a specific type of silent harm is done. At home, speak only English. He will benefit more from it. More times than anyone has bothered to count, that discussion has taken place in clinics and school offices across the United States. It was also regarded as sound clinical advice for a very long time. It wasn’t. It’s still not. And for years, scientists have been stating this…