Teaching language to enhance travel, and traveling to explore language!
What is a language? That might seem like a weird question for me to be asking on a blog about language (and travel!). But the answer is actually pretty complicated. See, when you think about it, every language emerged as a dialect of another language, slowly changing over time into something new. There is a…
You’re likely to encounter a lot of languages in Indonesia. Most of them are not well-documented. Others are just not common outside of small communities. Several months ago, I wrote a guide to the languages you might encounter in Belize. That post seems to be pretty popular, and I had fun making it. So I…
We make a lot more sounds in speech than you probably realize. In fact, linguists have made a chart of them all, called the International Phonetic Alphabet or the IPA (not to be confused with Indian Pale Ale!). Still, as a non-linguist, this chart is not very easy to understand. So, let’s get into what…
I want to talk more about what I’ve been calling “vigilante revitalization”. I recently wrote a series of posts about dying languages, discussing the importance of revitalization and why it’s difficult. Now, a new obstacle has come up: AI-generated books. If you’re new here, or didn’t see those posts, the most relevant one for understanding…
What is adventure and wanderlust, really? I can tell you one thing: it’s not scrolling through Instagram and spending time in front of a screen. At least, not always. I’ve noticed something that tends to happen to me when I travel, and it revolves around the thing you’re reading this on: screens. Social media has…
When my family and I made our way from Glasgow to Inverness in Scotland, we decided to make what we thought would be a quick stop to check out a cool landmark. We didn’t expect Stirling Castle to be a full-day experience that we had to tear ourselves away from! (I’m writing this in more…
It doesn’t take a lot of looking to see that language constantly changes. New slang constantly develops alongside new words for new concepts. In fact, the Oxford word of the year for 2024 is ‘brain rot’, a term that emerged in the last year or two. But how much has it changed from Old English?…
Hello again! In the last couple of weeks I’ve been talking about language death. This will be the last of three posts about the topic, in which I talk about how you can help with language death. It’s probably not going to be entirely what you expect. If you’ve just found your way here, you…
Last week I wrote about why language death is such a big deal. This week I wanted to expand on this idea a bit further and talk about some of the ongoing difficulties with language revitalization that linguists have to deal with. Why Language Revitalization can be Difficult Linguists who work in language revitalization have…
Language death is a constant problem and always will be. How many languages do you think about on a daily basis? And how many would you say you actually know about? Maybe 10-20? If you list out all the languages you’ve heard of, the list might not be very big. The list of languages you…