Table of contents for Issue 78 in Silly Linguistics

What makes languages so hard to learn? Why do some people when looking at a language they don't know recoil in horror and say "Oh no no, I could never learn that! Anyone who can learn languages must have sold their soul to the devil for this magical ability. You lot who can do it don't know how lucky they are!" People like this think there is a trick to learning languages and there is. But it is not the one you think it is. You don't have to be the most clever or study 24/7. You just need to go about it the right way. I have always been interested in languages but I fell head over heels in love with them in 2014 when I discovered the language…

Standard language is a codified form of a language, which represents its official form. It serves the purpose of overcoming dialectal variants, and being universally understandable by its speakers. In order to be fair for everyone, it is supposed to be based on a certain dialect, but not to represent any dialect in particular. Language naturally consists of its dialects and varieties (we'll leave the discussion of the difference between a language and a dialect for some other time). Most, if not all, linguists would agree that dialects are the richness of a language and that they should be preserved. However – at least in the case of Serbian and many other Balkan languages, but probably even more universally – the sentence they use: „You should care for your dialect…

Imagine an Earth where all the men spoke Mandarin and the women spoke Swahili. That would be fascinating, right? Well, such a world doesn't exist but we do have a scaled-down version of one— a small African town where the men and women speak different languages! Yes, you read that correctly. In Cross Rivers state of south-eastern Nigeria, nestled between two mountains is a small town called Ubang. Here, men and women use different languages to communicate with each other. This fascinating linguistic phenomenon is a rarity and perhaps the only one of its kind in the entire world. A Gift From God The people of Ubang are not unaware of their uniqueness, they are proud of it and see themselves as special people. In fact, the history of the…

Languages are curious things. You think languages are all perfectly logical and consistent but they change in strange ways. Just look at the words goose and geese. Why is it not gooses? Well, it’s because languages change over time and sometimes the changes that happen cause other changes to happen. The oldest version of English that is recorded is called Old English and it was spoken from about 400 AD to 1100 AD In the period of time just before written records, the form of the word “goose” was “gō s” and the plural was “gō si”. Languages like English and Frisian had yet to differentiate from each other and they were just Germanic dialects spoken in the lowlands of what is now Germany and the Netherlands. English and Frisian…