Linguistic Typology

Are There Any Absolute Language Universals?

For decades, linguists have searched for features shared by all 7,000+ human languages, a quest for a "Universal Grammar." But…

2 weeks ago

What’s the Hardest Romance Language to Learn?

While most language learners ask about the easiest Romance language, we're flipping the script to find the toughest. From the…

2 weeks ago

The Two Pasts of Bulgarian: Witnessed vs. Unwitnessed

In most languages, the past is simply the past. But in Bulgarian, your grammar forces you to specify your source:…

2 weeks ago

How Hungarian Builds Words: The Agglutinative Engine

Explore the beauty of Hungarian, a language that builds incredibly long words by 'gluing' suffixes together in a process called…

2 weeks ago

The Georgian Verb: A Sentence in One Word

Ever wondered if you could fit an entire sentence into a single word? In the ancient and beautiful Georgian language,…

2 weeks ago

The Sound of ‘Th’: A Rare Phoneme

The "th" sounds in "think" and "that" feel utterly ordinary to English speakers, but they are linguistic superstars on the…

2 weeks ago

Why Do Some Languages Use Postpositions?

Ever wondered why Japanese speakers say "box in" instead of "in the box"? This seemingly small difference is no accident;…

2 weeks ago

Who Did What? Case vs. Word Order

Ever wonder why you can't scramble an English sentence, but you can in languages like Latin or Russian? This analysis…

2 weeks ago

5 Languages You’ve Never Heard Of

Journey beyond the familiar and discover languages that defy expectations, from a whistled language that echoes through Canary Island valleys…

2 weeks ago

The QWERTY Problem: Typing in a Non-Latin World

How do you type a language with thousands of characters on a keyboard with only a few dozen keys? The…

3 weeks ago

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