A new language discovered in India!

Oct 7, 2010 by

The recent report of a new language being discovered in the remote northeast corner of India highlights several important points. First, the realization that Koro, this newly discovered language, is not just a dialect of previously...

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Languages of France: part 2

Sep 3, 2010 by

In yesterday’s posting we reviewed a number of languages spoken in France which are not closely related to (Standard) French, such as Basque and Catalan (mostly spoken in Spain), Walloon and Flamand (mostly spoken in the...

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Language vs. orthography

Jun 28, 2010 by

In his comment to my postings about drawing a boundary between language and dialect, Alexander Francis correctly pointed out that another factor that affects people’s perception of whether they share the same language or speak...

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Language or dialect?

Jun 25, 2010 by

In his comment to an earlier posting, Joel Hoffman said that “what seems like a dialect to one person might seem like a completely different language to another”. And this goes right to the core of why it’s so...

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Language, dialect or jargon?

Jun 23, 2010 by

Linguists generally struggle with defining language versus dialect (we’ll take up this issue in later postings), but not everything a layman might call a language or a dialect would qualify as either for a linguist....

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