BY ERIC TUAN (“Languages of the World”) Although it has not been spoken as a living language in over a millenium, the Gothic language is a vital part of the linguistic heritage of modern-day ...
In the latest posting, I discussed the issue of endangered languages. One interesting question to ask in this connection is whether the size of a given language (i.e., how many people speak it) m...
Unlike most of the postings in this blog, this one contains just a curious observation — rather than firm information — based on several things I’ve been reading or discussing recently. I w...
Some time ago, I discussed Italian dialects, noting that Northern Italian dialects occupy an intermediate position between Southern Italian dialects and French. Curiously, when it comes to the di...
At the end of the last posting I mentioned the following conundrum: if language/grammar cannot count (a generalization that is a corrolary of the Structure Dependence Principle), how come it can ...
Some time ago I was asked by a former student of mine if there is a scientific confirmation to the idea that speakers of certain languages may find it difficult, if not impossible, to learn a cer...
In yesterday’s posting I mentioned Norn, a now-extinct Germanic language that a group of enthusiasts is trying to revive. Another Germanic language that has been seeing a revival lately is Yidd...
To continue with our Scandinavian theme, let’s look at another Scandinavian language today: Faroese. It is spoken by 48,000 people on Faroe Islands (formally, part of Denmark, but self-governin...
The Institute for Molecular Medicine Finland (FIMM) has compiled the Finnish Gene Atlas, which contains genome-wide gene marker data for more than 40,000 Finns. Among the findings are two interes...