Language families, writing systems, grammar, translation, speech, and linguistic change. Browse curated, sandboxed HTML presentation decks in Languages, each with crawlable summaries, slide outlines, and topic metadata.
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The World's Oldest Documented Language Family
Computational linguistics is the discipline of making language tractable for machines — and, almost accidentally, of making machines that have changed what language is.
From Esperanto to Dothraki: The Art and Science of Language Creation
The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich's quip — recorded by him in 1945 from an audience member at a YIVO lecture — is the field's epigram. There is no purely linguistic distinction between a language and a dialect. The distinction is political.
A language dies, on average, every two weeks. Within a century, between 50 and 90 percent of human linguistic diversity will be gone. The catastrophe is well-documented and largely unstoppable.
English is unusual. It is the only major European language with no gender, almost no case, and a vocabulary borrowed from a half-dozen unrelated sources. Its spelling is famously irregular. Its speakers, two-thirds of them now, learned it as a second language.
Three of every seven humans alive speak an Indo-European language. The family is the most successful in human history, and its discovery is the founding event of comparative linguistics.
Does the Language You Speak Shape the Way You Think?
No fossil preserves a sentence. No artefact records the first word. The origin of language is the central problem of human evolution and the one for which direct evidence is most absent.
How Contact, Necessity, and Creativity Give Birth to New Languages
Sino-Tibetan is the second-largest language family on earth by speakers — second only to Indo-European — and on present evidence the oldest continuously documented one.
A Comprehensive Exploration
Language is universal among humans; writing is not. Writing has been independently invented at most five times in the history of the species, and most peoples have lived and died without it.