language death

The Rebirth of Cornish

Once officially declared extinct after the death of its last native speaker in the 18th century, the Cornish language (Kernewek)…

3 weeks ago

The World’s Most Isolated Languages: A Journey into Linguistic Isolates

While most languages belong to vast family trees, some stand utterly alone. These linguistic isolates, like the mysterious Basque of…

3 weeks ago

The Last Words of Old Prussian: How a Language Was Erased by the Sword

The death of a language is usually a slow fade, but Old Prussian was not so lucky. It was systematically…

3 weeks ago

Island Sign: The Spontaneous Birth of a Language in Martha’s Vineyard

Long before Nicaraguan Sign Language became famous, another sign language emerged organically on Martha's Vineyard. Due to a high rate…

3 weeks ago

The Emperor’s Fading Echo: The Precarious Survival of the Manchu Language

Once the official language of China's last imperial dynasty, Manchu is now on the verge of extinction with only a…

3 weeks ago

The World’s Smallest Languages: When a Language Has Fewer Than 10 Speakers

What happens when a language's entire world can fit into a single room? We explore the most extreme cases of…

3 weeks ago

The Whispering Road: How Sogdian Became the Lingua Franca of the Silk Road

Long before English dominated global trade, the language of the Sogdians, an Iranian people from Central Asia, connected the great…

3 weeks ago

Language Stories: Darwin and the Birth of Ethnolinguistics

The narrative of Charles Darwin's voyage aboard the HMS Beagle, while famous for its contributions to evolutionary biology, is seldom…

2 years ago

Resurrecting Dead Languages: A Journey into Linguistic Archaeology

Linguistics, in the simplest sense, is the study of languages. But what happens when the language itself has been lost…

2 years ago

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