In this episode, a conversation with language writer Julie Sedivy. Her memoir, Linguaphile: A Life of Language Love is a kind of natural history of language, told through some of Julie’s most meaningful linguistic encounters: at home, in school, in love and in death.

Check out Julie's website for more of her writing. And listen to this Subtitle episode about her efforts to reclaim her native Czech, most of which she forgot after moving to Canada as a child.

Music in this episode by Par, Medité, Brightarm Orchestra, Laura Platt, Ookean, and Trabant 33. The photo shows Julie Sedivy and her daughter in the Czech Republic.

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As 20-year-old Olga Janáčková lay dying from typhoid fever, her father wrote down everything she said. Later, he transformed those words—and gasps—into music. The grieving father, Czech composer Leoš Janáček, called the ultra-short musical pieces "speech melodies." In this episode, language writer Michael Erard invites cellist Petronella Torin to play Olga's speech melodies. NYU's Michael Beckerman describes the controversy surrounding them.

This is among countless ways that loved ones have memorialized the final words of the dying. Michael Erard tells the stories of many of them in his new book, Bye Bye I Love You.

Music in this episode by Magnus Ludvigsson, Medité, Dream Cave, Nylonia, Alexandra Woodward, Cobby Costa, August Wilhelmsson, David Celeste, Martin Landstrom, Gavin Luke, Rand Also, Airae, Alan Ellis, Jules Gaia, Trabant 33, and Leoš Janáček. More about cellist Petronella Torin here.

The photo (via Wikimedia Commons) shows Olga Janáčková, daughter of the Czech composer Leoš Janáček, not long before her death from typhoid fever.

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Some Icelanders are becoming unsettled by this existential question: Will their language still be spoken in the future? Comedian and former Reykjavik mayor Jón Gnarr is convinced that this uniquely archaic-yet-modern language will one day die out. He says his children express themselves beautifully in English but speak limited Icelandic. Give it a couple more generations, and who knows? For Gnarr and many others, speaking Icelandic is an essential part of being Icelandic. Without the language, Iceland's patriotic anthem "Land, Nation and Tongue" would lose its meaning. Among Iceland's multitude of avid book-readers though, the language is showing few signs of disappearing. For now at least, Icelandic authors are committed to writing in their mother tongue.

This is part two of our reporting on Icelandic. Listen to the first part, Icelandic, the language that recycles everything.

In addition to Jón Gnarr, we hear from novelists Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir and Sverrir Norland, as well as literary translator Larissa Kyzer, linguist Ari Páll Kristinsson, and Ethiopian-born restaurant owner Azeb Kahssay.

Music in this episode by Luella Gren, Hysics, Medité, Farrell Wooten, J.S. Bach/Eric Jacobsen, Jon Björk, and Trabant 33. The photo is of a poster in Reykjavik celebrating the Icelandic language.

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