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Lingua francas: stories to listen to | HearLore
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Lingua francas
Portuguese languageThe first known phonetic changes in the evolution of Portuguese began not with the Romans, but with the ancient Celtic tribes who inhabited the Iberian…
Russian languageThe Russian language distinguishes itself through a phonetic feature that baffles many learners: the distinction between soft and hard consonants.
French languageThe word for yes in French, oui, is not a Latin inheritance but a direct survival of the ancient Gaulish language, a linguistic ghost haunting the heart of a…
Chinese languageIn the year 1932, a commission in Nanjing made a decision that would reshape the identity of a billion people, yet the debate that preceded it nearly tore…
Spanish languageIn the year 1492, the same year Christopher Columbus set sail to discover the Americas, a scholar named Elio Antonio de Nebrija presented a grammar book to…
ArabicIn the year 125 CE, a man named Garm(')allāhe carved three lines of poetry into a stone in En Avdat, Israel, creating the earliest known continuous text in…
Malay languageOn the 1st of May 683, a stone inscription was carved in the banks of the Tatang River near Palembang, South Sumatra, marking the first known written record…
English languageThe name of the language itself is a ghost of a people who vanished from history, the Angles, one of the Germanic tribes that migrated to Britain after the…
Hindustani languageIn the year 1780, a poet named Mashafi coined a single word that would eventually define the identity of hundreds of millions of people, yet that word was…