Endangered Languages: An Introduction
A language is considered ‘dead’ when it has no fluent native speakers remaining, and extinct when no complete records of it remain. Languages have died off or changed beyond recognition throughout history, but in the past 200 years this process has rapidly...
A History of the Danish Language
Danish is one of the many Germanic languages of the Indo-European language family, a descendant of Old Norse and one of the (more or less) mutually intelligible languages of Scandinavia. Although only spoken in Denmark, the Faroe Islands and parts of Iceland and...
The Scandinavian Languages – All the Same?
Languages grow like trees, forking and branching from common roots and blossoming into what we perceive as “different languages” as they develop. Occasionally separate languages develop and end up, although deemed different languages by law and culture, far more...
A History of the Polish Language
Polish began to emerge as a distinct language around the 10th century, as the Polish state was established by Mieszko I, the ruler of the Polans tribe
Constructed Languages
While they might seem irrelevant to the world of commercial translation, constructed languages have a number of benefits beyond adding detail to what is still a fantasy world. Between international languages designed to ease human communication, experimentation...
An Introduction to Esperanto
International languages One of the great utopian dreams of the 1800s and early 1900s was that of a single unified language, one which would reduce international conflict and facilitate shared trade and understanding among all the peoples of the world. It was an idea...
A History of Mandarin Chinese
One dialect among many The various related varieties and dialects of Chinese referred to as Mandarin are the culmination of a common thread of language stretching back more than three thousand years, with the earliest known examples of Old Chinese coming from...
A History of Portuguese Language
The last flower of latium Although Portugal itself is a tiny country, Portuguese is one of the most influential spoken languages in the world, with native speakers across the South Atlantic in Brazil and across Latin America. Miguel Cervantes called it “the...
A History of the Italian Language
With its roots in Ancient Latin, Italian is one of the European Romance languages along with Spanish, Portuguese, French and Romanian. Indeed, its vocabulary remains the second-closest tongue to Latin (behind Sardinian) and at present, it’s the third most spoken first...