Teaching language to enhance travel, and traveling to explore language!
Looking to travel to Romania? It’s full of beautiful cities, amazing castles, and scenic views! But what about the language? How easily can you get around as an English speaker, and what other languages might you encounter? Well, it’s actually pretty cut and dry. It’s not as diverse as a country like Indonesia, but there…
Hi! Welcome to another one of my language guides for travelers. This time, I’m writing about Romanian Grammar! It might seem a little bit out of the blue for me to focus on a smaller language like Romanian when my previous posts focused on languages like Spanish, German, and Indonesian. That’s true, but I have…
I have talked a lot about language revitalization on this blog. It might seem a little weird as a topic for a travel blog, but let me explain. Everywhere you travel, you’re going to encounter new languages. This is expected. But there are many small ones on the sidelines, spoken only privately in homes or…
Now that I’ve written a guide to the German language, I think it’s time I write a guide to language in Germany. I’ve done this for all previous language guides, too, so I want to keep up the pattern. Unlike Indonesia and Belize, though, Germany doesn’t have any (recent) history of colonization and imperialist influence….
Germany, for many, is a dream destination. Filled with idyllic valleys and castles straight out of fairy tales, it’s a land with a rich history. But, you might struggle to get around if you don’t know German. Many Germans speak English (in fact, over half of the country’s population speaks it!). If you find yourself…
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…
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?…