To accompany the current Allusionist miniseries Survival, about minority languages facing suppression and extinction, we’re revisiting this double bill of The Key episodes about why languages die and how they can be resuscitated. The Rosetta Stone and its modern equivalent the Rosetta Disk preserve writing systems to be read by future generations. But how do those generations decipher text that wasn’t written with the expectation of requiring decipherment?

Features mild scenes of linguistic apocalypse.

Find out more about this episode at http://theallusionist.org/survival-key.

The Allusionist’s online home is http://theallusionist.org. Stay in touch at http://twitter.com/allusionistshow and http://facebook.com/allusionistshow.

The Allusionist is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX, a collective of the best podcasts on the interwaves. Hear all the shows at http://radiotopia.fm.

I have several events coming up – live Allusionists and Bugles and the Radiotopia tour. Check the listings at http://theallusionist.org/events

This episode is sponsored by Babbel and Bombas.
Babbel offers interactive fun courses to learn 14 different languages. To get 50% off your first 3 months of Babbel, use the code ALLUSION when you go to babbel.com/allusion.
You can get a 20% discount on Bombas’s expertly engineered socks by visiting http://bombas.com/allusionist and entering the offer ALLUSIONIST in the checkout code space.