Live AI translation tools are making it easier to converse across languages without a human translator, a phrasebook, or years of study. So will we all just stop taking Spanish or Mandarin classes? Sociolinguist Abby Walker doesn’t think so. She shares the many reasons we learn new languages, some of which have little to do with functional communication at all. We also hear how one AI-assisted conversation brought two future in-laws together, why machine translation is still so darn buggy, and w

Wikimedia Bandung Community, Hayati Mayang Arum, CC-BY-SA 4.0 via Wikimedia Commons In our daily life, there are things we do not notice while they are still around us. A mother tongue can be one o…