linguistic diversity

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 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

One Nation, One Hundred Languages: The Rise and Fall of the Soviet Union’s Grand Linguistic Experiment

The Soviet Union's language policy was a dramatic paradox, beginning with the revolutionary promotion of over 100 minority languages through…

3 weeks ago

The Syntax of Scent: Can We Ever Truly Describe Smells with Words?

Why can we describe a shade of blue with a dozen words, but struggle to articulate the scent of rain?…

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 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

The First-Contact Linguist: The Ethical Tightrope of Studying a Previously Uncontacted People’s Language

What are the ethical responsibilities of a linguist who is the first outsider to document a language from a previously…

3 weeks ago

The Ainu Language: A Linguistic Island in Japan

On the northern Japanese island of Hokkaido, a language isolate with no known relatives is fighting for survival. The Ainu…

3 weeks ago

The World in a Different Order: How Subject-Object-Verb Languages Challenge Our Linguistic Assumptions

For most English speakers, "The dog chased the cat" is the only logical way to say it. But what if…

3 weeks ago

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