Linguistics is an often overlooked part of American society, a bit of a “lost art,” so to speak. Part of the reason that the American education system typically does not put much emphasis on linguistics is because only 20% of the US population can speak more than one language, while over 60% percent of the world population is multilingual, according to ilanguages.org. The problem comes right back to the school system, which usually disregards language learning as “extracurricular,” or worse, “unnecessary.” Even the schools that do put emphasis on language only teach reading, writing, speech, and comprehension skills. Quite frankly, this is extremely tedious. Who wants to sit down and memorize hundreds of vocabulary terms and verb conjugations? But perhaps if the pupils knew what they were really studying, (the insight of millions before them), and how the words themselves came to be, they would be more interested in the subject. For example, most people in any English-speaking nation know who William Shakespeare was, but very few know that in his original work, the very letters that make up the English language were very much unlike what it is today. The history of languages is just as important, if not more, than the history of the rest of the world. The printing press could not have existed without ink, nor could the car have existed without the wheel, just like English could not have existed without the lingos of the past. The very fundamentals of our society, our ability to communicate, are made possible by this wonder designed by humankind. So far, I have come up with ten major language families that will be covered, and every two weeks, this segment will feature a different one, some of which have died out over the years. English’s closest relative, West Frisian, only has about 400,000 speakers, and that number is decreasing day by day. Every language is like a species that evolves over time. Some go extinct, while others thrive and become lingua franca for millions of people. We should learn about each and every dialect so that they are not forgotten when they fall out of use. Linguistics is an incredibly important and intriguing subject, and more people should know about it.