Unlocking the Universe of Languages
Over several millennia, a wave of migration spread a single language family from West-Central Africa to cover nearly the entire southern half of the continent. This was the Bantu Expansion,…
How did one language family colonize a third of the planet, from Madagascar to Easter Island? The answer lies in a revolutionary piece of technology—the outrigger canoe—and an even more…
Imagine a language that vanished over 5,000 years ago, leaving behind no written records. This is Proto-Indo-European (PIE), the mysterious ancestor of English, Russian, Hindi, and hundreds of other tongues.…
Linguistics, in the simplest sense, is the study of languages. But what happens when the language itself has been lost to time, when there are...