Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Could a nearly extinct language from Siberia be related to Navajo and other Native American languages? The fascinating Dené-Yeniseian hypothesis proposes a direct linguistic link across the Bering Strait, telling…
Ever wonder how linguists estimate when languages like Spanish and French split from their common ancestor? The answer lies in a controversial method called glottochronology, which acts like a "carbon…
How can linguists be so certain that English and ancient Sanskrit are cousins, while neighboring Finnish is a total stranger? It's not guesswork—it's a rigorous scientific process called the comparative…
Long before English vowels did their famous shuffle, a far more ancient and dramatic event rocked its linguistic family tree. This was the Great Germanic Sound Shift, a systematic chain…
While most languages belong to vast family trees, some stand utterly alone. These linguistic isolates, like the mysterious Basque of Spain or the endangered Ainu of Japan, have no known…
Over several millennia, a wave of migration spread a single language family from West-Central Africa to cover nearly the entire southern half of the continent. This was the Bantu Expansion,…
How did one language family colonize a third of the planet, from Madagascar to Easter Island? The answer lies in a revolutionary piece of technology—the outrigger canoe—and an even more…
Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious ancestor of English, Russian, Hindi, and hundreds of other tongues.…
The question, “what is the hardest language to learn?” has been a topic of curiosity for many and remains a subject of debate among linguists...