Curated playlist
Stress-timed languages
- Danish languageDanish once shaped the placenames of Yorkshire. Today even Swedes and Norwegians often struggle to follow it.
- Norwegian languageNorway has two official written forms of Norwegian. Students must study the one that isn't their own.
- German languageMartin Luther based his German Bible translation on the speech of Saxony.
- Thai languageThai once had three tones, and now it has five. The change came from lost voiced consonant sounds.
- Dutch languageIn 1925, South Africa legally declared that the word Dutch includes Afrikaans.
- Swedish languageSwedish changed how strangers address each other within just a few years. The du reform ended titles like herr and fru.
- Russian languageRussian is one of only two languages spoken aboard the International Space Station.
- ArabicArabic builds whole families of words from three bare consonants. The root k-t-b gives book, writer, desk and library.
- Catalan languageCatalan, the Romance language its speakers call català, was once the target of an order that officials were told to carry out quietly. Secret instructions went to local officials known as corregidores in Catalan territory. They "will take…
- Persian languageMarco Polo used Persian at Kublai Khan's court in China. It was the only non-European language he used there.
- Faroese languageFaroese went unwritten for roughly 300 years after the Reformation.
- English languageThe words they, them and their in English came from Norse. They pushed out the Anglo-Saxon forms hie, him and hera.