In this, our 30th and final post in the Tongues of the World series, we’re going to have a look at how far we’ve come, and perhaps share a bit of the process with our readers. As it turns out, the subject of human language is a broader, richer, more complex field than any of us knew going into it. It’s unbelievable how much we’ve learned about the world just in exploring the tongues of other cultures, for as we now know, the study of a language is about so much more than sounds and grammar–it is about the history, …Continue reading →

Overview: The Nahuatl languages belong to the greater Native American language family known as Uto-Aztecan, which covers a wide variety of languages and dialects originally spoken by the indigenous peoples of modern-day Mexico and the southwestern United States. Generally spoken by people of the Nahua (or Aztec) ethnic group, it is one of the most commonly spoken indigenous American languages, with an estimated 1.5 million speakers mostly concentrated in the rural areas of central Mexico. Nahuatl has been brushed aside to make way for the Spanish language throughout most of modern history, and as a consequence shows a high degree …Continue reading →

Overview: The Quechua group of languages is the most widely spoken of all the indigenous American languages, estimated to be the mother tongue of anywhere from 8 to 10 million people. These estimates, based primarily on South American census data, are sometimes considered to be artificially low. Statistics on the number of speakers are scarce and unreliable, as the mountainous regions of the Andes where these languages are spoken are frequently remote and/or impoverished. As many as 44 Quechua dialects have been reported, but this number could easily be higher. There are many misconceptions about this family of languages. The …Continue reading →

A series about the diversity and beauty of human languages would be incomplete if the entire Western Hemisphere were left out, which is why Tongues of the World will be devoting its next two articles to some of the most widely spoken Native American languages. Because of the decimation of indigenous civilizations through contact with Europeans starting in the fifteenth century, all of these languages are now extinct or threatened, meaning that they tend to have fewer total speakers than many of the other languages presented in this series. All the same, they are more than worthy of consideration.   …Continue reading →

Overview: Pashto is the language of the Pashtun people, also known as Afghans (in Persian) or Pathans (in Hindi/Urdu). The exact number of people who speak Pashto, whether as a mother tongue or a secondary language, is unknown but estimated to be above 50 million in most cases. These estimates can vary widely from source to source, as censuses in the countries where Pashto is most often spoken–Afghanistan and Pakistan–are often unreliable or simply don’t exist. Pashto is one of the official languages of Afghanistan (along with Dari, or Persian) and is spoken by a significant minority in Pakistan. Roots …Continue reading →

Overview: With at least 85 million speakers around the world, Italian is the dominant language of the Italic branch of the Indo-European family of languages. It has seen much standardization over the years after being formed from disparate dialects on the Italian Peninsula, some of which are now in danger of extinction. The Italian language has integrated to a certain extent with the languages of its neighbors, including France and Germany, and especially along its northern border. Political wrangling over dominant versus minority dialects has frequently been a source of unrest in the history of Italy. The term lingua franca …Continue reading →

Overview: Turkish, which is spoken in much of Turkey and Cyprus as well as in neighboring countries, is the primary language of the Turkic language family that spans much of Eastern Europe and Central Asia. Within that, it is also a part of the Oghuz sub-branch of Turkic languages, which all belong to the proposed Altaic family according to proponents of the Altaic language theory. Most of the languages within the Oghuz family have a high degree of mutual intelligibility with one another. Turkish is widely spoken throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and Eastern Europe, with greater than 80 …Continue reading →

Overview: Yue Chinese, including Cantonese, is one of the most important varieties of the Chinese language, spoken in many areas of southern China including the densely populated island of Hong Kong. Cantonese is the most widely spoken Yue dialect and is often used as a lingua franca even by people who do not speak it natively, so much so that many people refer to all the Yue languages as “Cantonese.” The number of Chinese immigrants abroad who speak Yue or Cantonese is quite significant, especially within the United States. Yue Chinese is a good example of how a tongue can …Continue reading →

Overview: Tamil is a Dravidian language, meaning that it belongs to a family of languages found mostly in southern India, which at one time might have been dominant all across the Indian subcontinent. It is related to a few other major Indian languages such as Kannada and Telugu, as well as Malayalam, which actually used to be a dialect of Tamil but branched off into a separate language many centuries ago. Tamil was named the first of the now four Classical Languages of India (the other three being Sanskrit, Kannada, and Telugu). It is mostly spoken in the regions of …Continue reading →

Overview: Swahili, or Kiswahili as it is called within the language itself, is a widely-spoken tongue throughout Eastern Africa and is ubiquitous along the coast of the Indian Ocean. It frequently serves as a lingua franca in the areas where it is found, especially in the countries of Kenya, Uganda, Mozambique, Tanzania, and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Roughly twenty times as many people speak Swahili secondarily as speak it as a first language, probably exceeding 100 million people in total. The name Kiswahili actually comes from an Arabic word, one that roughly means “language of the coastal dwellers.” …Continue reading →