Curated playlist
Agglutinative languages
- Hungarian languageHungarian has two separate basic words for the color red. Piros is for cheerful things, voros for natural ones.
- Finnish languageFinnish can pack a whole sentence into one word, istahtaisinkohankaan.
- EsperantoEsperanto was invented by one eye doctor in 1887. Ludwik Zamenhof published it in a slim pamphlet.
- Kazakh languageKazakh has been written in three completely different alphabets within a single century.
- Korean languageKorean's alphabet was mocked by nobles for being too easy to learn.
- Uzbek languageIn 1924, Soviet administrators renamed the literary language Chagatai as "Old Uzbek."
- Japanese languageModern Japanese is written with three systems at once. Kanji came from China, and hiragana grew from Man'yogana.
- Tamil languageThe English word rice traces back to Tamil. It passed through Hebrew and Greek on its way.
- Tatar languageThe Tatar language has been written in Arabic, then Latin, then Cyrillic. Politics drove each switch, not its speakers.
- Malay languageAfter Portugal captured Malacca in 1511, Malay scholars fled and spread the language outward.
- Basque languageBasque is the only language isolate left in Europe. It has no known relatives, and roughly 806,000 people speak it.
- Uralic languagesA Hungarian Jesuit went to study Sami while watching the 1769 Venus transit. He published his conclusions in 1770.
- Klingon languageThe Klingon word for hello is also how you ask "What do you want?" Star Trek's made-up language grew real speakers.
- Altaic languagesThe Altaic languages bring together about 66 living tongues from three families, Turkic, Mongolic and Tungusic, spread across the breadth of Asia. Their speakers live from open steppe to forests far to the east. Yet linguists cannot agree…
- SwahiliIn June 1928, a meeting in Mombasa chose the Zanzibar dialect as standard Swahili.