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, every language emerged as a dialect of another language, slowly changing over thousands of years from whatever original protolanguage we all shared. There is…
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 a difficult process. 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…
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 our language really changed from…
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 what you expect. If you’ve just found your way here, you might…
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…