Language Policy

Ithaca & Ulysses: The Greek Diglossia Struggle

For over a century, Greece was locked in a fierce linguistic civil war between Katharevousa, an artificial "high" language of…

5 months ago

The Town That Fought Over Its Apostrophe

What happens when a local council tries to erase a single punctuation mark from a place name? In the English…

6 months ago

The Campaign to ‘Speak Good English’

Explore the sociopolitical story of Singlish, Singapore's vibrant creole, and its decades-long clash with the government's official "Speak Good English…

6 months ago

Language, Purity, and Power

This post explores the often-overlooked link between linguistic purism and exclusionary politics. We move beyond simple vocabulary debates to investigate…

7 months ago

The Kazakh Alphabet Switch: A Nation’s Identity

Kazakhstan is undertaking a monumental linguistic and cultural shift, transitioning its national script from Cyrillic to Latin. This deep dive…

7 months ago

Japan’s ‘Hentaigana’: The Lost Characters

Before Japanese script was standardized in 1900, writers used a vast and beautiful array of variant cursive characters known as…

10 months ago

The First Language Ban: The Story of the Acadian Expulsion

The Acadian Expulsion of 1755 was far more than a military maneuver; it was one of North America's first major…

10 months ago

The Data Drought: Why Some Languages Are Invisible to AI

Why can AI translate French perfectly but struggles with Navajo or Swahili? The answer lies in the "data drought", a…

10 months ago

The Brazil-Portugal Spelling War

Imagine a civil war fought not with weapons, but with dictionaries. For decades, Brazil and Portugal have been locked in…

10 months ago

What is a Language Worth? The Economics of Extinction

Can you put a price tag on a language? This article explores the emerging field of linguistic valuation, where economists…

10 months ago

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