Pirahã is an isolate, spoken by about 150 people in the Amazon. It’s technically not an isolate, I guess, but the only other known relation is now extinct. The Piraha are monolingual and are reported to have no interest in other languages (reminds me of some speakers of a certain West Germanic language).
There is a [...]
You might feel that I’m cheating a bit with this week’s language of the week. You won’t find it in Ethnologue, either under this spelling or under the more technically correct Uuwini. If you google it you’ll find 25 or so hits. About half of them originate from some sort of china-egg site or spam [...]
This morning’s Houston Chronicle has an article about Hans Boas from UT Austin and the Texas German Dialect Project he founded and directs. You don’t need any commentary from me - go straight to Hans’ site and explore. It’s fantastic.
*I have called this “(North) Texas German of coruse simply because we are around n in [...]
After a Nhaŋu-induced hiatus of a few weeks, language of the week is back where we left off. We were last in Mongolia. This week let’s cross Russia to the Kola peninsula and environs, passing by the fusion throat singing which happens to be on the radio as I’m writing this, which is too bizarre [...]
Better late than never. After all, if my University can send around an e-mail saying Wednesday (today) is a Monday, my Monday feature can clearly appear in the day of the week!
This week language of the week is Mongolian, because of the post in a comment on languagehat’s blog which intimated that there was not [...]
There was a temptation to make one of the four languages called Lele the language of this week (spoken in Chad, PNG, Guinea, and DRC), but when Lakhota language came up with 89,000 hits, it was too tempting.
There’s a huge amount of information about Lakhota on the web. Here’s a sampling.
A dialect map of varieties [...]
This week’s language of the week is actually three languages: Kele, Kele and Kélé. Kélé and Kele(1) are African languages, spoken in Gabon and DR Congo respectively. Kele(2) (not to be confused with Kela, another Austronesian language spoken in Morobe Province, PNG) is an Austronesian language spoken on Manus Island off the North Coast [...]
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