Languages of the World

The One-Word Language Myth: Yaghan

The viral myth claims *mamihlapinatapai* is an untranslatable Yaghan word for a romantic, unspoken look. The truth, however, is far…

1 week ago

The Birth of Grammatical Gender in PIE

Why is a table feminine in French? The answer is thousands of years old and has little to do with…

1 week ago

The Library’s DNA: Dewey Decimal Syntax

We often see the Dewey Decimal System as a simple filing method, but it's actually a complex and elegant language…

1 week ago

The Fourth Person: Obviation Explained

Ever get confused when a sentence has too many "he"s or "they"s? Some languages have a brilliant built-in solution for…

1 week ago

The Wolof Pronoun System

In many languages, pronouns are simple stand-ins like 'I' or 'they'. But in Wolof, a major language of West Africa,…

1 week ago

Finland’s “Possessive Suffixes”

In English, we say 'my house', but Finnish takes a more intimate approach. Instead of a separate word for 'my',…

1 week ago

Why Tocharian Was an Anomaly

Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors,…

1 week ago

Hmong’s Tonal Writing System

Discover the Romanized Popular Alphabet (RPA), the ingenious writing system for the Hmong language. In this linguistic deep-dive, you'll learn…

1 week ago

OCS: The First Slavic Literary Language

Before there was Russian, Polish, or Bulgarian, there was their common literary ancestor: Old Church Slavonic. Discover the story of…

1 week ago

Hawaiian and the Phonemic Principle

With only eight consonants and five vowels, the Hawaiian alphabet is a perfect example of the phonemic principle, where each…

1 week ago

This website uses cookies.