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If you ever wanted to learn the quirks of South African English, now you can :D

All languages have dialects. And English is no exception. I live in South Africa, and as such, I speak South African English. It is not wildly divergent from other types of English but some of the differences can be a bit confusing for some visitors. For instance “just now” means “later” (sometimes “much later”), but […]

Chinese language and dialects

The Chinese language is made up of 11 “dialects”. They are not so much as dialects, as they are pretty much stand alone languages. Even those so called dialects have subdivisions in themselves which can be hard for speakers of that dialect to understand others of that dialect. The subdivisions of Chinese are Gan, Mandarin, […]

Paul Frommer created the Na’Vi language for the film Avatar

If you follow this blog, you will know that I love conlangs! I love hearing people talking about conlang and how they created them. Paul Frommer is a linguist who was hired to created a language for the movie Avatar. The language would be spoken by the tall blue skinned people of the planet Pandora. […]

Minority languages

All languages are important. Each developed in a different part of the world, under different circumstance, and spoken by different people. Not only that, but each has its own ways of doing things, with its own idioms, expressions and grammatical pecularities. Each and every language is a unique way of looking at things. Whenever we […]

Windows 10 Start Menu in Atlaans

Atlaans is a constructed language I created which is a mix of German and Dutch. It is fun to play around with languages. I was wondering one day what it would sound like to apply Dutch pronunciation to German, so Atlaans was born 😀 Working with conlangs is fun though because you can translate things […]

The Last Speakers of the Lost Whistling Language, Sylbo

Whistling languages are very interesting. They match the rhythm and intonation of some other language, in this case Spanish, and allow people to communicate over long distances because whistling carries far further than speech. The whistling language Sylbo is spoken on this small island, and is not used as much nowadays, but there are school […]