Linguistic Typology

North of My Foot: Languages Without ‘Left’ and ‘Right’

Imagine a world without 'left' or 'right,' where you'd say "there's a bug on your south leg." This post explores…

3 weeks ago

Counting in Base-20: A World Beyond Ten

Why do we count in tens? While it seems natural, many cultures from the Mayans to the Basques developed sophisticated…

3 weeks ago

The Balkan Sprachbund: A Linguistic Melting Pot

What happens when unrelated languages live side-by-side for centuries? In the Balkans, languages as different as Albanian, Greek, and Romanian…

3 weeks ago

Why You Can’t Just “Count” in Thai

Ever tried to say "two dogs" in Thai and been corrected? That's because you can't just count nouns; you need…

3 weeks ago

The One-Word Sentence: A Deep Dive into Polysynthetic Languages

In languages like Inuktitut or Mohawk, a single, complex word can convey a thought that requires a full sentence in…

3 weeks ago

Classifying Reality: The Social Impact of Noun Classes and Grammatical Gender

Beyond the simple "he/she/it" of English, many languages categorize the world in ways that are deeply tied to culture and…

3 weeks ago

The Future Tense That Never Was: How Languages Without a Future Tense Shape Planning and Perception

Did you know that many languages, like Mandarin Chinese and Finnish, get by perfectly well without a grammatical future tense?…

3 weeks ago

I Heard, I Saw, I Inferred: The Linguistic World of Evidentials

In English, we use optional phrases like "I heard" or "I saw" to show how we know something. But in…

3 weeks ago

The Pressure-Cooker Consonants: An Introduction to Ejectives

Ejectives are a fascinating category of consonants found in languages from the Caucasus to the Americas. Made by building up…

3 weeks ago

The World’s Lego Languages: How Agglutination Builds Meaning Brick by Brick

This article explores the world of agglutinative languages like Turkish, Finnish, and Swahili, where long, complex words are built by…

3 weeks ago

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