Archives

The psychology of accents

Everyone has an accent. Whenever someone says they don’t have an accent, I think what they mean is that their accent is very close to some standard or accepted group. Like someone who lives in Minnesota in America could be said to not have an accent if they sound very similar to other Minnesotans. But […]

Colloquial Icelandic

Icelandic is an awesome language. It is descended from the language of the Vikings, and an older form of it, called Old Icelandic, is the language most of extant Old Norse literature is written in. Old Icelandic was part of the Western dialect group of Old Norse. Old Swedish and Old Danish made up the Eastern […]

I don’t always learn minority languages

Some of the hardest languages to learn are difficult not because of grammar or pronunciation (although that might be a factor), it is because there are so few resources for them. How are you supposed to learn a language if you don’t have anything to learn? This is why it is so cool when I […]

The guy who over pronounces foreign words

We all know that guy who likes to be pretentious and say things in a way which is very different to how most people pronounce things. A note to whoever does this. You are not being clever by overpronouncing these words. You just want to sound clever, but actually you are just showing that you […]

Wikitongues Kickstarter

Wikitongues is a project which aims to catalogue all the world’s languages. Help out Wikitongues with their mission to share and help learn every language in the world! They are currently running a Kickstarter which will help them immensely in this goal. They want to provide language lessons and phrasebooks, amongst many other project to the […]

Greek contribution to the alphabet

Writing is an amazing thing. It allows us to put our thoughts down on some medium which can then be interpreted by others at any time as long as they are looking at the medium on which you wrote something. This can be days, weeks, months, years or even centuries later. Writing is what allows […]