identity politics

Inside the Dainu Skapis: The Cabinet That Saved a Language

Discover the incredible history of the Dainu skapis, a 19th-century card catalog built by Krišjānis Barons that houses over 200,000…

7 days ago

One Language, Two Anthems: The Power of Bengali Poetry

Discover the unique linguistic phenomenon of Bengali, the only language in the world to claim the national anthems of two…

1 week ago

The Bloody Origins of International Mother Language Day

Did you know that International Mother Language Day was born from a massacre? Discover the moving history of the 1952…

1 week ago

Ithaca & Ulysses: The Greek Diglossia Struggle

For over a century, Greece was locked in a fierce linguistic civil war between Katharevousa, an artificial "high" language of…

1 week ago

The Town That Fought Over Its Apostrophe

What happens when a local council tries to erase a single punctuation mark from a place name? In the English…

2 months ago

How Dr. Seuss Invented ‘Nerd’

Where did the word 'nerd' come from? The answer lies not in a dusty dictionary, but in the whimsical pages…

2 months ago

The Treaty That Had Two Meanings

New Zealand's founding document, the 1840 Treaty of Waitangi, exists in two languages—but it tells two different stories. A crucial…

2 months ago

The Doctor Who Invented a Writing System

Discover the forgotten story of Dr. J. W. P. Davis, a Liberian doctor who invented a unique writing system for…

2 months ago

The Telegram That Named a Country

The name "Pakistan" is famously an acronym for the homelands of Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and Sindh. But a fascinating, debated…

2 months ago

The Novel That Made Pidgin Literature

When Amos Tutuola published *The Palm-Wine Drinkard* in 1952, its "broken" English was celebrated abroad but scorned as a national…

2 months ago

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