Many indigenous languages alive in Mexico today don't have formal written systems, but a growing number of computer-savvy young people want to Facebook and tweet in their native tongue.
While education research has long suggested that studying second languages in K12 schools boosts student achievement in other content areas, the current testing emphases on mathematics and reading has placed foreign language instruction relatively low on district priority lists.
As a young adult preparing to enter the professional world upon graduation, the ability to speak a second language is a great skill. From social media to participating in a globalized economy, interconnectedness is rapidly becoming one of the defining characteristics of the 21st century.
Researchers studied the evolution of words across 103 modern and extinct languages from the Indo-European language family, and created a tree showing the relationships among the different languages, at right.
