Stories of the world’s languages
Guided tours of the globe: how one word took two roads, the people who made scripts and saved languages, the words that need a whole sentence elsewhere…
One word, two roads
tea · chá · 茶 · 5 chapters
Almost every language calls tea either something like te or something like cha — depending on whether it arrived by sea or by land.
The people behind the languages
Inventors, decipherers, revivers — and last speakers · 10 chapters
A king who made an alphabet for his people, a silversmith who could not read who made a script for his, a man who turned an ancient language back into a mother tongue… Sometimes a language’s fate rests on one person.
The “untranslatable” words
saudade, hygge, komorebi — and the myths that travel with them · 6 chapters
Some words take a whole sentence to explain in another language. They are not truly untranslatable — but they show what a culture thought worth a word of its own.
A family written by canoes
The Austronesian voyages · 5 chapters
Setting out from Taiwan, across the Pacific and the Indian Ocean — long before Columbus, Austronesian speakers had carried their languages over half the globe.
From Sanskrit to English
Discovering Indo-European · 5 chapters
In 1786 a British judge in India noticed that Sanskrit words for father, mother and three looked strikingly like Latin.
Clicks, tones and the Bantu journey
The languages of Africa · 5 chapters
Africa has more than two thousand languages, nearly a third of the world’s. It has the most varied sounds on Earth, and a migration that remade half a continent.
Before Columbus
The languages of the Americas · 5 chapters
When Europeans arrived, the Americas held more than a thousand languages in well over a hundred unrelated families. Many are still spoken; many have fallen silent.
Languages without relatives
Language isolates · 4 chapters
Most languages have hundreds of relatives. A few have none anywhere in the world.
Chinese is not one language
The Sinitic languages and China · 5 chapters
People from Shanghai, Guangzhou and Xiamen may not understand each other’s home speech at all. To a linguist these are different languages in one family.
Voices growing faint
Endangerment and revival · 5 chapters
Every few months a language may lose its last native speaker. But some languages have come back from the dead.