While language isolates like Basque stand as mysterious linguistic islands with no living relatives, dialect continuums show us how languages…
How different are two dialects, really? Linguists can now answer that question with surprising precision. Discover the methods used to…
How do you reconstruct the vowels of an ancient language when its descendants, like Hebrew and Arabic, were written without…
Why is a table feminine in French? The answer is thousands of years old and has little to do with…
Explore Sumerian, the world's first written language and a fascinating linguistic isolate. Discovered on cuneiform tablets, this ancient tongue challenges…
Imagine discovering a lost language in Western China that looks far more like Latin or Irish than its immediate neighbors,…
Before there was Russian, Polish, or Bulgarian, there was their common literary ancestor: Old Church Slavonic. Discover the story of…
With only eight consonants and five vowels, the Hawaiian alphabet is a perfect example of the phonemic principle, where each…
Are Turkish, Mongolian, Korean, and Japanese distant cousins? The Altaic hypothesis proposes they descend from a single ancient tongue, but…
Are Korean and Japanese related languages? While they feel incredibly similar to learners, the answer from linguists is "no." This…
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