Languages of the World

Inside Kannywood: The Engine of a West African Lingua Franca

Explore how the vibrant film industry of Kano, known as Kannywood, serves as the primary engine for standardizing and spreading…

1 week ago

The Knight in the Panther’s Skin: A 12th-Century Time Capsule

While English speakers struggle to decipher texts from just 500 years ago, modern Georgians can read their 12th-century national epic…

1 week ago

The ‘Ə’ Factor: How Azerbaijani Differs from Turkish

While Turkish and Azerbaijani are mutually intelligible linguistic cousins, they are far from identical. This deep dive explores the defining…

1 week ago

The Aras River Divide: One Language, Two Writing Systems

Separated by the Aras River and two centuries of divergent history, the Azerbaijani language exists in a unique sociolinguistic split:…

1 week ago

A Century of Change: Azerbaijani’s 4 Script Swaps

In the 20th century, Azerbaijani speakers were forced to change their official alphabet three times—from Perso-Arabic to Latin, to Cyrillic,…

1 week ago

Cyrillic Persian: Why Tajik Scripts Changed 3 Times

Tajik is the only variety of the Persian language officially written in Cyrillic, a result of turbulent 20th-century Soviet policies…

1 week ago

Retro-Engineering: How Sanskrit Shaped Modern Hindi

Unlike languages that evolve naturally, Modern Standard Hindi was deliberately "retro-engineered" in the 19th century to establish a distinct identity…

1 week ago

Germanic Sound, Semitic Look: The Unique Yiddish Writing System

Yiddish presents a rare linguistic paradox: a Germanic language, close kin to English and German, written entirely in the ancient…

1 week ago

The Appendix Probi: When ‘Bad’ Latin Won

Discover the *Appendix Probi*, a 3rd-century list of "mistakes" that unintendedly documented the birth of the Romance languages. This article…

1 week ago

The Lemnos Connection: Etruscan’s Long-Lost Cousin

While Etruscan has long been considered a mysterious "language isolate", the discovery of the Lemnos Stele in the Aegean Sea…

1 week ago

This website uses cookies.