An international auxiliary language (or auxlang) is a language used to enable communication between speakers from different parts of the world who don’t speak each other’s native languages. In the modern era, the de facto IAL is clearly English. There’d also be parts of the world where something else is used as a regional auxiliary language, like Russian in the countries that …
Arpitan (also known as Franco-Provençal or Patois even though that second term can also be considered disparaging, and as Romand in Switzerland) is a Gallo-Romance language traditionally spoken in the east of France, western Switzerland and northwestern Italy (in the Aosta Valley and parts of Turin). It’s difficult to ascertain its present number of speakers, as reliable census data is …
Last week, I spent a few hours going down the rabbit-hole that is experimenting with interactive fiction. This is a rabbit-hole that I do go down every once in a while, because I catch myself longing for a game to play that has a specific set of features (turn-based/not action, “quality” stemming not from difficulty but from story or general fun vibe, builds up complexity over time …
Armenian is an Indo-European language with about 5–7 million speakers. It is a pluricentric language with two standard forms: Eastern Armenian, which is spoken in the modern country of Armenia itself and among Armenian populations in neighbouring countries to the east, and Western Armenian, which is mostly spoken in the diaspora. Historically one of the reasons for the split is that the …
The centum-satem isogloss divides the Indo-European languages from a pretty ancient stage in their development. Essentially, the split concerns the treatment of the Proto-Indo-European velar consonants. The traditional analysis is that PIE had nine of them:
| Labiovelars | Plain velars | Palatovelars |
|---|---|---|
| *kʷ | *k | *ḱ |
| *gʷ | *g | *ǵ |
| *gʷʰ | *gʰ | *ǵʰ |
In the centum languages, the palatovelar series merged …
Farsi, a.k.a. Persian, is an Indo-European language spoken by 74–110 million people primarily in Iran, Afghanistan (where it’s known as Dari) and Tajikistan (where it’s known as Tajik). Historically it was an extremely influential language, exporting vast amounts of vocabulary to Ottoman Turkish and Urdu (and other Indic languages) for example, and also being the main foreign language …
English is a Germanic language with approx. 373 million native speakers and 1.08 billion L2 speakers, making it the most widely-spoken language in the world (and third-most common native language). Countries where English is the L1 of the majority include the US, Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand and Ireland. English is also widely spoken, and often a lingua franca, in many countries in …
This is a page all about using the International Phonetic Alphabet to write English.
The consonantal phonemes of English are much more consistent between different dialects and accents than the vowel ones are. Below is a table of the phonemes English is usually analysed as having:
| Labial | Dental | Alveolar | Post-alveolar | Palatal | Velar | Glottal | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Nasal | m | n | ŋ | ||||
| Plosive/affricate, … |
For the last few days I have been dabbling in the Shavian alphabet. If you haven’t heard of Shavian before, it’s a phonetic alphabet designed in the 1960s specifically to represent …
Chinese languages are typically written in Chinese characters, which are logograms where each one represents a syllable. The vast majority of logograms represent a single morpheme, too, but there are some exceptions (bisyllabic morphemes and bimorphemic syllables written with two characters, and some characters that represent a polysyllabic word or phrase). About 20% (and 30% of the 500 most …
Jessica Smith is a socialist and a feminist who loves animals, books, gaming, and cooking; she’s also interested in linguistics, history, technology and society.