This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday. Sign up for it here. My mother used to ...

I knew Armenian, my first language, before I knew anything else. I knew the language before I discovered my hobbies and passions. I knew the language before I knew how to do simple addition and ...

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of ...

Although I now speak and think in English, my first words were not in this language. I was raised by a village of relatives; as a result, I grew up speaking in a patchwork of Cantonese, Mandarin and ...

Decades of government policies aimed at forcibly assimilating Native Americans, guided by the notion of “kill the Indian and save the man,” included generations of Indigenous children ripped away from ...

How can I improve my English? This was a question frequently posed by my students in South Korea. My initial advice was straightforward – dedicate time and effort. However, both my students and I ...

After moving abroad, I found my English slowly eroding. It turns out our first languages aren’t as embedded as we think. Credit...Artwork by PABLO DELCÁN Supported by By Madeleine Schwartz Madeleine ...