Oleksandr Zahalskyy spent most of his life speaking only Russian. Born in 1960 in what was then the Soviet Union, Zahalskyy hails from the largely Russian-speaking Ukrainian city of Kherson. Now, at 63 and living in the capital, Kyiv, Zahalskyy and his wife Natasha are in the midst of the difficult but voluntary transition – making the Ukrainian language their own. "At first, we thought we needed to know our national language, but with the start of this full-scale war, the feeling changed from'I have to' to'I want to'," Zahalskyy told Al Jazeera by phone. The invasion Russia launched on February 24 last year, which started the biggest war in Europe since 1945, is seen by many Ukrainians as an attempt to wipe them out – and their culture, language and way of life.

Computer scientists at MIT and Israel's Technion have discovered an unexpected source of information about the world's languages: the habits of native speakers of those languages when writing in English. The work could enable computers chewing through relatively accessible documents to approximate data that might take trained linguists months in the field to collect. But that data could in turn lead to better computational tools. "These [linguistic] features that our system is learning are of course, on one hand, of nice theoretical interest for linguists," says Boris Katz, a principal research scientist at MIT's Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and one of the leaders of the new work. "But on the other, they're beginning to be used more and more often in applications. Everybody's very interested in building computational tools for world languages, but in order to build them, you need these features. So we may be able to do much more than just learn linguistic ...