PPA is a rare but profound disorder in which language deteriorates progressively due to the death of brain cells in regions responsible for speech and comprehension, typically without the memory collapse seen early in classic Alzheimer’s disease. Since the landmark consensus criteria published by Gorno-Tempini and colleagues in 2011, clinicians worldwide have recognized three canonical variants: the non-fluent or agrammatic form (nfvPPA), marked by halting, effortful speech and broken grammar; the semantic variant (svPPA), in which word meaning itself dissolves; and the logopenic variant (lvPPA), characterized by impaired word retrieval and repetition. But a provocative new perspective article, published in Frontiers in Language Sciences by Mohamed Taiebine of the Euro-Mediterranean University of Fez in Morocco, argues that this entire diagnostic edifice rests on a hidden assumption—one that quietly fails the vast majority of humanity.

The problem, Taiebine contends, is that the world hosts approximately 7,168 living languages, yet English has become the absolute lingua franca of scientific research. Diagnostic tools, brain-imaging norms, and linguistic benchmarks have been built almost exclusively around English speakers—often from Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, and Democratic (WEIRD) populations. When these instruments are merely translated into other languages, they frequently lose their validity, because translation cannot capture the unique psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and cultural properties of the target language. A test designed to probe English syntax may be meaningless for a speaker of Arabic, Turkish, or an agglutinative language where meaning is packed into morphological suffixes rather than word order.

The consequences are not abstract. Screening tools rarely account for the nuances of non-dominant languages in bilingual and multilingual populations, which means early signs of decline can be missed entirely. The first symptoms of PPA often surface in the most deeply embedded, natural registers of a patient’s speech—the home dialect, the mother tongue—precisely the structures that standardized tests are least equipped to examine. In diglossic societies, where people use one variety of a language at home and another in formal settings, the disease may strike these registers disproportionately, eroding one while sparing the other. A patient might retain their first language while losing a second, or vice versa, complicating any assessment that assumes a monolingual baseline.

To address this, Taiebine proposes a radically multidimensional framework that maps PPA across six interconnected pillars: typological (the structural diversity of the patient’s language), topological (the specific brain regions undergoing atrophy), hodotopic (the location of language functions within brain networks), hodological (the integrity of white-matter tracts connecting those regions), biological (the underlying proteinopathies such as tau or TDP-43), and psychosocial (the environmental and cultural context). The idea borrows from the Research Domain Criteria (RDoC) model originally developed for psychiatry, which abandons rigid diagnostic categories in favor of dimensions that span molecules, circuits, and behavior. Applied to PPA, this means a diagnosis would integrate not just which brain areas are shrinking, but how the patient’s particular linguistic system is wired into those areas.

This matters because the brain’s language architecture is not language-neutral. The hodological level—the wiring—illustrates the point vividly. In classic conduction aphasia and in the logopenic variant of PPA, damage often involves the dorsal pathway, including the superior longitudinal fasciculus and the arcuate fasciculus, the fiber bundles connecting speech production and comprehension regions. But for a bilingual speaker of an understudied language, Taiebine hypothesizes, a repetition deficit might reflect network interference between languages rather than the classic arcuate fasciculus breakdown seen in monolinguals. He is careful to flag that such neuroanatomical correlations remain speculative and require far more investigation in speakers of understudied languages—yet the very possibility exposes how Anglo-centric assumptions could lead clinicians astray, misattributing dialect-specific vocabulary loss to general memory decline rather than focal language breakdown.

The framework also intersects with a broader scientific revolution already underway. Artificial intelligence and machine learning are transforming PPA diagnosis by analyzing connected speech—the natural, flowing language patients produce—rather than relying solely on structured tests. Large language models can identify natural clusters within patient speech that align with independent clinical diagnoses, and a machine-learning system called NeuroScreen has achieved up to 91 percent accuracy in classifying PPA and its variants by differentiating neurological conditions through language analysis. AI is even being applied to neural assessment through EEG and cortical speech envelope tracking, offering objective measures of language network plasticity. Crucially, Taiebine argues that this same technology could become the great equalizer: rather than translating thousands of tests into thousands of languages, AI and large language models could offer a scalable, low-cost pathway to map dialectal nuances directly, detecting subtle acoustic markers of motor-speech disorders across multilingual clinical settings.

Existing tools point the way forward, even as they reveal the scale of the gap. The Mini Linguistic State Examination (MLSE) has emerged as a pivotal brief screening instrument, evaluating five core domains—motor speech, phonology, semantics, syntax, and verbal working memory—through eleven subtests in roughly fifteen to twenty minutes, with cross-linguistic validity demonstrated in more than twenty languages. A newly developed web-based version promises automated scoring, potentially reducing clinician burden and standardizing diagnostic profiling across international trials. Yet its automated scoring currently remains restricted to English. In parallel, the Dépistage Cognitif de Québec (DCQ), validated in French, English, and Spanish, screens for atypical dementias including PPA and covers social cognition alongside language—a notable exception that still reaches only a fraction of global language families. As an interim measure, Taiebine suggests pairing these tools with the Bilingual Aphasia Test (BAT), which can document a patient’s sociolinguistic history, age of language acquisition, and dialect usage patterns before any standardized assessment is administered, thereby attenuating bias at the intake stage.

The article is equally candid about the limits of its own proposal. The interaction between specific linguistic structures and PPA pathology is strongly motivated by theoretical linguistics, but empirical evidence across all minority language populations is still emerging. Establishing typologically informed frameworks—prioritizing, for example, tonal variance in tonal languages or agglutinative morphology in Arabic rather than literal translations of English syntactic structures—will require rigorous, ongoing cross-linguistic normative research. The author calls for shared, open-access repositories of diverse speech samples and normative cross-linguistic data, so that clinicians and researchers worldwide can build assessments grounded in the actual linguistic reality of their patients rather than in borrowed norms.

What elevates this argument beyond technical reform is its framing as a matter of cognitive rights. Linguistically fair screening, Taiebine writes, is not merely a clinical improvement but a profound commitment to the dignity of diverse populations—a blueprint for an aphasiology in which the depth of a patient’s linguistic identity enhances, rather than hinders, the accuracy of their diagnosis and their quality of life. As dementia rates rise globally and populations age across every continent, the question is no longer whether the world’s languages deserve a place in the neurology clinic, but whether the science of the brain can finally catch up to the dazzling diversity of the minds it seeks to heal.

Subject of Research: Linguistically fair screening and transdiagnostic assessment of primary progressive aphasia in understudied and minority languages

Article Title: Toward linguistically-fair screening and assessment of primary progressive aphasia: a transdiagnostic approach for understudied and minority languages

Article References: Taiebine, M. (2026). Toward linguistically-fair screening and assessment of primary progressive aphasia: a transdiagnostic approach for understudied and minority languages. Frontiers in Language Sciences, 5, Article 1782730. https://doi.org/10.3389/flang.2026.1782730

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/flang.2026.1782730

Keywords: primary progressive aphasia, aphasia screening, minority languages, transdiagnostic framework, Research Domain Criteria, bilingualism, diglossia, artificial intelligence, machine learning, neurodegeneration, cross-linguistic assessment, health equity

The study, conducted by Barbara Riman and Mojca Medvešek of the Institute for Ethnic Studies in Ljubljana, draws on an online survey of eighteen teachers of Slovene in Croatia carried out in April 2021, at the height of pandemic restrictions, together with a retrospective follow-up questionnaire completed by eight of those teachers in 2026. Because only around twenty teachers of Slovene were active in Croatia during the 2020/21 school year, the 2021 sample captured a large proportion of the entire professional population, although most respondents taught supplementary, extracurricular classes rather than lessons embedded in the regular school system. The authors deliberately treat the 2026 responses not as a second measurement point but as a qualitative lens through which the immediate pandemic-era findings can be reinterpreted with hindsight.

The sociolinguistic context explains why the stakes were so high. The number of Croatian residents reporting Slovene as their mother tongue fell from 19,341 in 1991 to 7,620 in 2021, a decline that points to a narrowing base of potential speakers and to weakened intergenerational transmission. Previous studies have documented that Croatian predominates in family communication among many children and young people learning Slovene, and that opportunities to use Slovene in public life in Croatia are limited. In the theoretical framework of the study, drawing on Joshua Fishman’s work on reversing language shift, institutional support alone cannot sustain a language once it has receded from everyday family and community use—but where such use is fragile, organised instruction may become one of the few structured settings in which learners regularly hear and speak the language.

Slovene instruction in Croatia takes several institutionally distinct forms, and the pandemic treated them unevenly. Slovene Language and Culture is taught under the so-called Model C within Croatian primary and secondary schools, and university-level Slovene programmes operate in Zagreb, Zadar and Rijeka; both could plug into existing school and university digital platforms when teaching moved online. By contrast, supplementary Slovene language and culture classes, funded by the Republic of Slovenia and usually hosted on the premises of Slovene cultural associations, depended on physical access to those premises, on local organisational capacity, and on sustained family engagement. A further extracurricular programme in Varaždin County relies on teachers commuting from Slovenian schools across the border, making it acutely sensitive to border restrictions and the closure of school buildings. Indicative figures for the 2020/21 school year suggest that supplementary classes involved 287 learners, Model C instruction 221, and the Varaždin programme 217—substantial numbers for a small minority community.

The survey data reveal a striking paradox. Twelve of sixteen teachers reported that their Slovene instruction was included in official pandemic education measures, and most judged those measures favourably or neutrally. Yet in 2020 not a single respondent taught fully in person: ten taught partly in person and partly remotely, and five taught entirely remotely, with exclusive remote delivery lasting up to twelve weeks for four teachers, between twelve and eighteen weeks for four more, and more than twenty-four weeks for three. At the time of the survey in April 2021, eight teachers were still teaching in hybrid mode and seven entirely online. Instruction had formally survived—but, as the authors put it, formal continuation did not amount to stable, interaction-rich contact with the language.

The pedagogical consequences were most visible in spoken interaction. Nine of sixteen teachers said they could not achieve their set teaching objectives under the adapted modes, and of the fifteen who assessed learning outcomes during remote instruction, only two judged that the majority of their students had achieved the expected learning standards; nine said students reached only the minimum standards, and three could not assess them at all. In the 2026 follow-up, teachers explained why. One noted that in-person classes offered more room for playful activities—joking, laughing, singing and dancing—making lessons more dynamic, while another observed that motivational games over Zoom simply did not have the same effect as classroom activities. A third teacher summarised the underlying principle: language learning is most successful through contact between speakers. For younger learners in particular, remote formats reduced immediate teacher support, spontaneous interaction and real-time feedback—the very mechanisms through which a minority language becomes audible and usable.

Participation itself proved fragile, and the reasons were social rather than technological. Seven of fifteen teachers estimated that roughly three quarters of their learners participated regularly in remote lessons, four estimated about half, and four estimated fewer than half; not one teacher said all learners participated. The most widely endorsed explanation for non-participation was a lack of a supportive environment at home, cited by nine of fifteen teachers, while lack of interest was not seen as the dominant factor. Parental help, teachers reported, depended on parents’ own knowledge of Slovene, their time and their energy—and was unevenly distributed across families. One teacher was unequivocal in the follow-up: during the pandemic, organised lessons were her learners’ only contact with Slovene, because very few of them spoke the language at home. Another reported that for almost all of her secondary-school students, the class was their sole regular exposure to the language.

The pandemic also severed the informal channels that normally reinforce classroom learning. Teachers described how restrictions on movement cut learners off from Slovene-speaking relatives, from peers, and from leisure activities in Slovenia, slowing progress even among children who had previously used the language with grandparents or family across the border. Teachers themselves compensated with considerable additional labour: twelve of fifteen prepared their own teaching materials, eleven adapted materials from other sources to their learners’ proficiency levels, and most maintained contact through messages and individual instructions. In the retrospective accounts, remote teaching depended not on any single platform but on a broader infrastructure—equipment, internet connectivity, institutional approval, collegial networks and, in some cases, teachers personally covering the cost of internet access. Ten of the eighteen surveyed teachers worked on contractual arrangements rather than permanent employment, underscoring how precarious the professional base of this instruction already was.

Perhaps surprisingly, the 2026 follow-up found no uniform, lasting collapse in interest. Several teachers reported no long-term changes in enrolment or motivation, attributing fluctuations to the changing interests of successive student cohorts rather than to the pandemic, and some pandemic-era adaptations persisted productively: closer collaboration and material exchange among teachers, new digital resources, online consultations that suit adult learners by removing travel barriers, and published teaching materials originally developed for remote instruction. Yet the authors caution against reading this as resilience. They conceptualise the pattern as structural fragility: organised instruction can continue on paper even as the institutional, organisational, pedagogical, social and communicative conditions that make it a genuine space of language contact are disrupted. The finding is not that learners’ competence declined—the study measured no proficiency tests—but that the infrastructure of exposure proved vulnerable precisely where it mattered most.

The implications reach well beyond the Slovene community in Croatia. Wherever a minority language has weakened intergenerational transmission, the classroom may be the last regular venue in which children encounter it, and crisis planning for minority-language education must therefore address the practical conditions of continuity: access to teaching spaces or digital channels, stable teacher employment, coordination across borders, quality materials, and support for families. Legal recognition, the authors note, is a necessary but insufficient guarantee—Croatia’s minority-language legislation and the European Charter for Regional or Minority Languages provide a framework, but the pandemic showed that effectiveness depends on implementation. The resilience of minority-language schooling in a crisis, the study concludes, rests not on the mere possibility of remote delivery but on the wider institutional, community and communicative scaffolding that keeps a language present in learners’ lives—even, and especially, when the classroom door closes.

Subject of Research: The continuity and fragility of organised Slovene minority-language instruction in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article Title: Organised instruction as a fragile space of minority-language contact: Slovene in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic

Article References: Organised instruction as a fragile space of minority-language contact: Slovene in Croatia during the COVID-19 pandemic. (n.d.). https://doi.org/10.3389/feduc.2026.1950848

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: 10.3389/feduc.2026.1950848

Keywords: minority languages, Slovene in Croatia, COVID-19 pandemic, language maintenance, heritage-language education, intergenerational transmission, remote instruction, language policy, supplementary classes, sociolinguistics, teacher survey, structural fragility