Language & Words
Whistled and drummed languages: speech carried across a valley
In mountainous and forested regions, people developed ways to encode ordinary speech into whistles and drum tones that carry far beyond shouting range.
Language & Words
Untranslatable words, scripts and living dialects.
Language & Words
Children who grow up with three languages
Multilingual childhood is the global norm rather than the exception, and most of the anxieties attached to it in monolingual societies are not supported.
Language & Words
Sign languages are languages, and each one is its own
They are not gestural versions of spoken languages, they are not universal, and they have grammar of a kind that spoken languages cannot easily produce.
Language & Words
Loanwords are a record of who talked to whom
The borrowed vocabulary in a language is a layered account of contact, and the layers can be dated and attributed with surprising precision.
Language & Words
How oral poets remember thousands of lines
Performers in oral traditions recite epics far longer than anyone could memorise word for word. The explanation, worked out through fieldwork in the twentieth century, changed how scholars read ancient poetry.
Language & Words
Counting differently: number systems and the bodies behind them
Base ten is not inevitable. Languages have counted in twelves, twenties and sixties, and the traces of those systems are still in everyday vocabulary.
Language & Words
Hello: what greetings are actually doing
The formulas people exchange on meeting carry almost no information and do a great deal of work, and the rules for getting them right are among the hardest parts of learning a language.
Language & Words
Dialect, language and who gets to decide
There is no linguistic criterion that reliably separates a language from a dialect. The distinction is made politically, and the politics are usually visible.
Language & Words
What a name tells you, and who gets to give one
Naming systems encode kinship, geography, occupation and religion, and the modern assumption that everyone has a fixed first name and a fixed surname is unusual rather than natural.
Language & Words
What language revival actually involves
Roughly half the world’s languages have few enough speakers to be at risk. The efforts to keep them are less about dictionaries than about finding somewhere the language is needed.
Language & Words
How writing systems spread, and why they rarely arrive intact
Scripts move across languages far more readily than languages do, and every time one arrives somewhere new it has to be bent to fit sounds it was not designed for.
Language & Words
Against "untranslatable": what those word lists actually show
The internet loves a word that supposedly has no English equivalent. What is usually being demonstrated is not a gap in translation but a difference in what gets compressed into a single word.