linguistics
18 articles
American Sign Language: History, Structure, and Linguistic Status
ASL's history from Gallaudet and Clerc in 1817, Martha's Vineyard Sign Language, Stokoe's 1960 recognition, ASL grammar and spatial syntax, classifier predicates, and Deaf cultural identity.
Animal Communication Research: Bees, Prairie Dogs & Apes
Honeybee waggle dances encode distance and direction. Prairie dogs use adjective-like calls. Bonobos learn symbols. Learn what animal communication research reveals about the origins of language.
Color, Language & Perception: Does Language Shape What We See?
Russian speakers perceive blue distinctions faster than English speakers. The Pirahã have minimal color terms. Munsell chip tests support weak Sapir-Whorf effects in color perception.
Constructed Languages: From Tolkien's Elvish to Klingon
Tolkien spent 60 years on Quenya and Sindarin. Klingon has ~250 fluent speakers. Learn about the art of language creation, Esperanto's 2 million speakers, and what conlangs reveal about human language.
Creole Languages: How Pidgins Become Native Tongues
How pidgin languages evolve into creoles: Haitian Creole, Tok Pisin, Gullah Geechee, substrate and superstrate influence, Bickerton's bioprogramme hypothesis, decreolization, and endangered creoles.
Creole Languages: How New Languages Form from Contact
Creoles like Haitian Creole and Tok Pisin emerged from colonial language contact. Learn about the pidgin-to-creole continuum, Bickerton's Language Bioprogram Hypothesis, and creole grammar.
Endangered Languages: The Race to Document the World's Disappearing Tongues
How languages die and how linguists are racing to document them: UNESCO's 6 endangerment levels, Ainu in Japan, Cornish revival, ELDP projects, language nest programs, and digital preservation tools.
Historical Linguistics: Reconstructing Languages That No Longer Exist
How historical linguistics reconstructs proto-languages: the comparative method, Proto-Indo-European, Neogrammarian hypothesis, laryngeal theory, internal reconstruction, and the limits of palaeolinguistics.
How Languages Change Over Time: Sound Shifts, Drift, and Divergence
How languages evolve through Grimm's Law, the Great Vowel Shift, semantic change, grammaticalization, language contact, and time depth estimation via glottochronology.
Language Endangerment: Why 40% of Languages Are Dying
40% of the world's 7,000 languages face extinction. Learn about UNESCO's endangerment criteria, successful revivals like Welsh and Māori, and language nesting strategies.
The World's Language Families: From Indo-European to Sino-Tibetan
An overview of the world's major language families by speaker count, including Indo-European, Sino-Tibetan, Afroasiatic, Austronesian, language isolates, endangered families, and classification debates.
The Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis: Does Language Shape Thought?
Strong vs weak Whorfianism, the Hopi time controversy, Pirahã number system, Russian blue color experiment, Guugu Yimithirr spatial reference, Berlin and Kay color universals, and neo-Whorfianism.
Lost Languages: How Linguists Crack Ancient Scripts
Linear B was deciphered in 1952. Mayan glyphs took centuries. Etruscan and Rongorongo remain mysteries. Learn the methodology behind decipherment and why some scripts resist all efforts.
Phonetics vs. Phonology: The Science of Speech Sounds
The distinction between phonetics and phonology: articulatory, acoustic, and auditory phonetics, the IPA, phonemes vs. allophones, minimal pairs, distinctive features, tone languages, and formant frequencies.
Proto-Indo-European: How Linguists Reconstruct a Lost Language
Proto-Indo-European was spoken 4,500–6,000 years ago. Learn about the comparative method, sound correspondences, PIE root reconstruction, and the Anatolian homeland hypothesis debate.
Sociolinguistics: How Society Shapes Language
How society shapes language: Labov's Martha's Vineyard study, code-switching, diglossia, register shifting, Bernstein's code controversy, language and gender, linguistic landscape, and language policy.
Syntax: How Human Languages Build Sentences
How syntax works: constituency tests, phrase structure rules, X-bar theory, dependency grammar, head-directionality, SOV vs SVO word order, movement transformations, and the recursion debate.
Writing Systems of the World: A Complete Comparison
From logographs to alphabets, writing systems encode language differently. Learn about the major types, Unicode coverage, writing directions, and the historical emergence of writing.