Firstly, this is not sponsored content. We had interviewed NativLang, the YouTuber, a long time ago for Silly Linguistics podcast, not because we expect money from them but because their videos are so intensely interesting that we binge-watch them for hours in a row. The first video I had watched of them, personally, was watching their video on Hungarian, where he drew and described how Hungarian was unrelated to nearby languages. I was, of course, fascinated.
He is part of a large community of YouTubers who make educational content with animated videos. His style is very unique, with large bulging eyes on characters and a very funny yet photorealistic parody of himself drawn into the videos describing what is going on. The content itself isn’t just advanced… Don’t get me wrong… very advanced. But it is also very beginner-friendly and useful to those just starting out with linguistics. A lot of it is comparative. How does one language compare with other languages? There are typically history lessons involved, all seamlessly placed within them!
There are personal anecdotes from his college career and intensely human stories of real people doing linguistic work, such as when he described how linguists perform first-contact with undocumented languages and natives who speak them and how linguists need to put together languages from context clues. With interesting stories and anecdotes in every video, NativLang puts a sense of uniqueness at the heart of every video.
That is why we ask you to support NativLang by subscribing to their channel. We believe fully that, in order to get more interesting and creative content out of the communities, we need to support the artists and teachers who create that content best and enjoy creating it just as we enjoy consuming it! We are a huge fan of mindless videos as much as the next person, but, with NativLang, you get both entertainment and education!
For some starter videos, enjoy these works by them. These are videos that we would recommend watching first:
First Contact Survival Kit – learn an undocumented language from scratch
What Latin Sounded Like And How We Know
Hungarian Explained
When you are finished with that, you can check out our Patreon Magazine, Silly Linguistics, where we create interesting content ourselves and give it as cheaply as we can sell it to make it accessible to everyone!
-Steve The Vagabond
