areal linguistics

Euro-English: The New Dialect of Brussels

English is the undisputed lingua franca of the European Union, but without the UK to police the grammar, it is…

5 days ago

Meet Ў: The Letter Only Found in Belarusian

Discover the "Short U" (Ў), a unique Cyrillic character found exclusively in the Belarusian alphabet. We explore the linguistics behind…

5 days ago

Why China Abandoned the “Latin of the East”

For over two millennia, the Sinosphere was united by a written language completely divorced from spoken speech—a "Latin of the…

5 days ago

Code-Switching on Paper: How Japan “Hacked” Classical Chinese

Japanese scholars spent centuries using Classical Chinese as their formal written language, despite the two languages having completely incompatible grammar…

5 days ago

Inside Kannywood: The Engine of a West African Lingua Franca

Explore how the vibrant film industry of Kano, known as Kannywood, serves as the primary engine for standardizing and spreading…

5 days ago

The ‘Ə’ Factor: How Azerbaijani Differs from Turkish

While Turkish and Azerbaijani are mutually intelligible linguistic cousins, they are far from identical. This deep dive explores the defining…

5 days ago

The Lemnos Connection: Etruscan’s Long-Lost Cousin

While Etruscan has long been considered a mysterious "language isolate", the discovery of the Lemnos Stele in the Aegean Sea…

6 days ago

The Missing Link: How Etruscan Shaped the ABCs

While most assume the Latin alphabet evolved directly from Greek, the true story features a vital middleman: the Etruscans. This…

6 days ago

Surpassing Tagalog: The Massive Reach of Cebuano

For most of the 20th century, Cebuano, not Tagalog, held the title for the most native speakers in the Philippines,…

6 days ago

The Case of the Missing Consonants: Mandarin’s Evolution

Unlike its southern relatives such as Cantonese, standard Mandarin has completely lost the "entering tone" and the clipped final stops…

6 days ago

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