“Eskimos have many words for snow.” “A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.” “Aborigines speak primitive languages.” “English has the world’s richest vocabulary.” “Children learn languages more easily than adults.” “Languages die because they are not fit enough for the modern world.” “Animals speak their own language.” You may hear many of these statements, but are they actually true? In this course, we will examine these and related beliefs about language. We will investigate what aspects of these statements are true and what aspects are false or even nonsensical. In doing so, we will explore topics including language diversity, language history, children’s language acquisition, adult language learning, animal and human communication, and much more. We will also consider where language myths come from and why they persist despite all the scientific evidence to the contrary.

Asya Pereltsvaig, PhD?received a degree in English and History from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and a PhD in Linguistics from McGill University. She taught at Yale and Stanford, and has been teaching in lifelong education programs since 2010. Her expertise is in language and history, and the relationship between them. Her most recent book is?Languages of the World: An Introduction, 4th edition. Pereltsvaig is a popular instructor for several OLLI programs around the country.