Dear children, let us not love with words or tongue but with actions and in truth.

WHITEHOUSE: Remarks by the President at the National Prayer Breakfast

Even though he had a distant memory of speaking and hearing, he had never learned the facility of reading words upon the tongue.

NEWYORKER: The Limner

"Those phrases that we're probably told to hold back on like inspirational, all those words just drip off your tongue during a paralympic Games because of the human achievement mixed in with the athletic achievement, " he says.

BBC: Paralympics 2012: Is it OK to call the athletes brave?

The gut-gnarling stress of attempting to piece together words plucked from a seemingly alien tongue (spellers faced "leucoryx" "barukhzy" and "hoomalimali" just Wednesday) is more than most reasonable adults could bear.

CNN: The agony and ecstasy of the National Spelling Bee

The thing that struck me first was her warm and sparkling grin of greeting, and words of Malayalam, her only language, the tongue of her native Kerala.

BBC: NEWS | South Asia | Embraced by India's hugging saint

But in the 18th century, after political union with England, the Scots did their best to stamp out their own tongue believing that it was coarse low-class stuff in comparison with the finer words being spoken by London's elite.

ECONOMIST: Scots English

Mr Riordan has the opposite of the Irish gift of the gab: he is frequently too tongue-tied to say anything, and when he does manage to speak he often uses the wrong words.

ECONOMIST: Los Angeles

Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students.

BBC: Digital tools 'to save languages'