Sometimes it feels like we spend a lot of time talking about languages that everyone knows about. Your biggies. Your French, German, English, Korean etc. But if only a tiny fraction of the world’s languages make up for more than half of it’s population, we must be missing something. Amid these throngs of dominant state…
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A few years ago I ended up composing this tiny little “article” about the Chukchi language and people. It was one of my first articles and it’s just about as God-awful as you’d expect. To show you just how awful, I’ve taken a screenshot of the article and published it here as an image… …
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If I had a dollar for every time someone started gabbing about what the easiest or most difficult language to learn is I’d be a regular Scrooge McDuck. Typically I’d tell you that there is no hardest language and that it’s all subjective and based on your motivation and the similarity of your target language to those you…
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Most of us don’t go to bed thinking about endangered languages every single night. Hell, most people don’t think about them at all. I do, though. I sometimes lie awake thinking about things that could be done to further the efforts being made in endangered language documentation or revitalization. I’ve actually lost sleep thinking about ways…
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The modern world has a rich linguistic tapestry, with around 6,500 to 7,000 languages spoken across the planet. There is no fixed figure, as academics dispute whether some are distinct languages or whether they are variations of the same language. However, those in the translation services sector believe the figure to be just shy of…
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Many folks – even within the language enthusiast community – are still having a hard time getting behind endangered language preservation or documentation efforts. At a glance it can be easy to write these languages off as marginal, irrelevant or even downright backwards but upon further examination it should become abundantly clear that in doing…
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