Meet the award-winning narrator of the America’s Bilingual Century audiobook, who does more than just deliver the spoken text. Sean Pratt has narrated more than a thousand audiobooks, including Steve’s America’s Bilingual Century. You would think that a professional audiobook narrator sees words on the page that they’re reading from. Sean Pratt, who’s won six awards from AudioFile magazine and snagged two Audi Awards nominations, does see them, of course. But there amidst the black type, he spies something else that the rest of us don’t. “I look for the [...]

She’s a singer, songwriter, TED Talker, Twitch Partner. She’s performed at Carnegie Hall, been featured in an Ariana Grande music video, and acted in several films. She studied violin and piano before she was 5 and learned Flamenco dancing—in Spain—when she was 5. Oh, and she started her YouTube channel then, too. But for the editorial team of Steve’s book, America’s Bilingual Century, the most knock-it-out-of-the-park achievement of this 20-year-old California-born phenom is that’s she’s fluent in both Mandarin Chinese and Spanish. For the final chapter of the audiobook version of Steve’s book, hers is the [...]

Editor’s note: Be sure to listen to our podcast on saving the Cherokee language—Episode 30 of America the Bilingual, “A New Generation of Cherokee Speakers Rises.” When is an alphabet not an alphabet? When it is the syllabary of the Cherokee language. A Cherokee named Sequoyah invented it in 1821. He had seen non-Native soldiers reading from what he called “talking leaves”—words on paper—and was determined to find a way for the Cherokee to do the same. Sequoyah (ca. 1776 – ca. 1843) was used to making tools for his work as both a blacksmith and [...]

To talk of bilingualism in America is to speak about more than just language. Our not-so-secret wish at America the Bilingual is that aspiring to be bilingual will inspire an appreciation for those who have come to this country from elsewhere, and with other languages. They are following the lodestar that has long shaped America’s history. They’ve come to make their lives here, raise their families, help build—literally and otherwise—their communities. Yet if you rely on just national news to know how we’re all getting along with one another in our communities, you might conclude [...]

Most writers will tell you that it's challenging enough to write well in their native language, let alone attempting it in another. Yet a number of well-known authors have done just that, in many cases writing not only well but brilliantly, in a language that was not their first. There's a name for these writers: exophonic. The word derives from Greek–exo in Greek means "outside"; phonic means "voice." The University of Warwick in the United Kingdom even offers a course on it, called "Exophony, or Writing Beyond the Mother Tongue." One for the Russian road Vladimir Nabokov [...]