If you’ve played WORDLE, you know how quickly this online game becomes addictive. Although only one puzzle is released each day (for now), if you haven’t yet been sucked into this new online obsession, you might not want to start…
Read MorePerhaps you’re excited for Sunday, February 21 this year because you’ve heard that it’s National Sticky Bun Day in the United States, and hey—we don’t blame you! Sticky buns are great! But there is another, much more significant day happening as well. A day on which we celebrate something so important that without it, sticky buns probably wouldn’t even exist…
Read MoreThere’s a scene in the movie The 5th Element where the villain, played by Gary Oldman, bloviates about how all the evil, destructive things he does are actually good, because they prompt the creation of industry and provide work for countless people. While we disagree strongly with the idea that the good that can come after evil things have happened somehow transmogrifies that evil into good, the fact remains that truly awful things—like a global pandemic, for example—can bring about some positive change…
Read MoreLanguage is not math, science, grammar, or even dancing… although it would be difficult to develop and grow in any of those fields without it, because language encompasses them all. It converses with them, with art—with every aspect of human experience—and this conversation affects what language becomes and (if it’s alive and in use) is perpetually becoming.
This means that when you translate a text from one language to another, you’re not just translating a static form of notation into another static form of notation… you’re translating a culture…
Read MoreDo you hate going to the doctor?
Imagine you went to the doctor’s office and she held up a strange-looking medical instrument and said, “Hello friends. I want to give this opportunity now. It can die like a mosquito, but it can also save your life.”* You would probably be more than just confused—you’d be scared. And the next time you felt sick, you might avoid the doctor altogether (and tell others in your community to do the same).
This is a problem that millions of people all over the world experience every time they go to the doctor, or some well-meaning healthcare provider attempts to give them vital, life-giving information…
Read MoreWhen Dr. Susan Nyaga started school in rural Tharaka, Kenya, instruction was not offered in her mother tongue of Kitharaka, but in Kimenti, a neighboring language. Not only that, but the school added two more languages to the curriculum—English and Swahili—bringing the total number of languages she had to deal with to four. That’s a lot for any six-year-old to handle, and there was no structure in place to help her make that transition. Susan likens her experience to having a very narrow, weak bridge that she and her classmates had to use across a swelling river…
Read MoreThe first language we learn to speak gives us roots. It anchors us to a place and provides us with a sense of belonging—a community. It colors how we understand the world, and in many ways defines who we are for the rest of our lives.
What if your language was disappearing—if its very existence was threatened? What if your children were not being taught to read and write in your language, and there was very little written in it for you to try and teach them yourself? Or worse, what if others thought their language was superior and were trying to replace your language with their own?
Wouldn’t you want to do something about it?
SIL LEAD is doing something about it!
And you can help…
It is almost certain that your life and the life of SIL LEAD staff member Kuchhat Narayan Chaudhary have been very, very different.
You likely did not grow up in a small farming family in Gobardiha village in the Dang district of Nepal, and you probably never had to help with plowing and grass cutting after school, or with taking the family’s sheep and buffalo out to graze…
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