Did you know that…?

 Learn something new about each of the languages in our project:

• Bosnian

  Bosnian and Serbian have many loanwords from Turkish and Arabic, even the name for Bosnia’s capital contains the Turkish word saray, which in modern Turkish means “palace”. 

  Information provided by Ms Nathalie Stummer

  

• Brianzoeu

  One of the characteristics of the dialect is that it is full of sounds one finds in French and German, but not in Standard Italian, e.g. incheau (today, oggi in Italian). Is this also due to the numerous forms of foreign rule in Northern Italy down the centuries: Spanish, Austrian, French? 

  Information provided by Dr Fabio Caiani

  

• Catalan

  Different varieties of Catalan are spoken not only in Catalonia but also in the autonomous community of Valencia, the Balearic Islands, a strip of eastern Aragón, el Carxe, Andorra, Pyrénées-Orientales (France) and Alghero (Italy). 

  Information provided by Dr Anna Vives

  

• Esperanto

  Esperanto is a constructed language which was devised by L. L. Zamenhof (1859-1917). Its vocabulary is largely (but not only) based on the Romance languages. 

  

• Galician

  The closest language to Galician is Portuguese. The Galician-Portuguese language had already developed in the northwest of the Iberian Peninsula by the 9th century, but in 1139 the independence of Portugal led to a different evolution of the varieties north and south of the Minho River. Today, Galician and Portuguese are considered different languages, but they have a very high degree of mutual intelligibility. Since the mid-20th century, numerous initiatives have strengthened the ties between Galicia and the Lusophone world. 

  

• Hasawi Arabic (Saudi Arabia)

  A common feature of Hasawi pronunciation is the use of a voiceless fricative consonant, similar to the first sound in the word “she”, in word endings with an attached second-person pronoun referring to a feminine listener. This feature is gradually disappearing in the speech of young speakers, however. It is being replaced by the same form used for masculine and neuter grammatical genders, resembling that of the contemporary koine used across many regions of Saudi Arabia. 

  Information provided by Mr Abdulrahman Alsayed

  

• Hindi

  Hindi features postpositions: its “prepositions” follow the noun instead of preceding it. 

  Pereltsvaig, Asya. Languages of the World. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024

  

• Hokkien

  Hokkien is closer to Old Chinese (spoken around 3,000 years ago) than other forms of Chinese today. For instance, it preserves certain peculiarities of pronunciation that have been lost in Standard Mandarin. 

  Information provided by Dr Yvonne Chi

  

  Source: Photo by Yvonne Chi

• Irish

  The translation for ladybird is bóín dé, which literally translates to ‘God’s little cow’ 

  Information provided by Miss Ciara Rooney

  Irish makes frequent use of what appears in English translation as the conditional tense to describe the habitual past. So, for example, an Irish speaker might say “Bím fuar” to mean “I am usually cold” but this is translated directly in English as “I would be cold”. This has the unusual effect of infusing the Hiberno-English spoken in Ireland with frequent uses of what seems to be a conditional verb form (“I would go to mass”, “he would be an angry man”) without the corresponding conditional clause “if”.  

  Information provided by Dr Niall Sreenan

  

• Janoubi (Saudi) Arabic

  (Kashkasha (k=sh): This feature is associated with southern tribes of Saudi Arabia and Yemen. Kashkasha is only used for the second person female singular pronoun. Instead of saying “kaif halik?” (How are you?), we say “kaif halish?”). 

  Information provided by Mr Abdullah Alahmari

  

  Source: Photo by Abdullah Alahmari

• Ladin

  Even though Ladin is a language of Italy (it’s spoken between the two Italian regions of Trentino-Alto Adige and Veneto), Ladin and Italian are not mutually intelligible. 

  Information provided by Dr Damiano Benvegnù

  

• Lithuanian

  One of only two Baltic languages still in existence, Lithuanian retains many archaic features, which are believed to have been present in the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language. 

  Information provided by Dr PJ Lennon

  

• Mantuàn

  As in many other dialects, it has specific names for specific, local dishes. For example, capunsei are cylindrical-shaped bread gnocchi, typical of Mantova. 

  Information provided by Miss Simi Singh

  

• Punjabi

  Punjabi is a language of the Punjab region of India and Pakistan, the region where Sikhism originated in the 15th century. Sikh people adopted it as their cultural and religious language. Speakers of the Punjabi language in India as well as Punjabi Sikhs use the Gurmukhi script. 

  Information provided by Miss Simi Singh

  

• Scots

  “Until the Renaissance period, English and Scots were definitely the same language, gradually growing more and more distinct until they became no longer mutually intelligible (at least, not easily so). Although some people still dispute the language status of Scots and consider it a dialect of English, it is not as similar to English as Danish is to Norwegian, yet these latter examples are generally considered distinct languages.” 

  Pereltsvaig, Asya. Languages of the World. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 

  

• Scottish Gaelic

  Scottish Gaelic, like Irish, is a Celtic language belonging to the Goidelic branch. “Despite their geographical proximity to English, Celtic languages exhibit several traits that are unusual from an Anglocentric perspective”. One of these traits is a basic VSO (verb-subject-object) order. 

  Pereltsvaig, Asya. Languages of the World. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 

  

• Shanghainese

  Even though spoken Mandarin, Cantonese and Shanghainese (amongst other varieties of Chinese) are not mutually intelligible, they all share the same written standard form. 

  

• Surzhyk

  Surzhyk has no rules. Neither grammatical, nor phonetic, nor spelling. This is an absolute nightmare for any linguist and great news for those who speak it: you can take the root of a Ukrainian word, add an inflection of a Russian lexeme, and create hybrids that are beautiful in their creative freedom. That’s why it’s easy to speak Surzhyk, and it’s a great and easy-to-learn springboard on the way to the sea of one hundred percent pure Ukrainianness. 

  Information provided by Mrs Viktoriia Medvied

  

• Swiss German

  [Swiss Standard] German is considered to be the official language [in the German-speaking areas of Switzerland], but in reality, and everyday life it is mostly Swiss German that is used. The two languages coexist, but it is absolutely clear to everyone in which situation to use which language. 

  There are many dialects in Swiss German, for example Züridütsch and Baslerdiits, to name just a few. They all have their own words and expressions on top of a sometimes extremely different pronunciation, and so at times, even among each other, speakers of Swiss German have problems communicating seamlessly with each other because of this. 

  Information provided by Miss Emma Pfister

  

• Syrian Arabic

  To express the height of love between family members, friends, or lovers, people sometimes use expressions that generally mean ‘may you outlive me!’. One such expression is تقبرني or تقبريني, literally meaning ‘may you [be the one who will] bury me’. Another example is ‘يا بعدي’ or ‘يا بعد عمري’ meaning ‘O you [who I wish to be alive] after I am gone’. 

  Information provided by Dr Ayah Durkawi

  

• Ukrainian

  “Many lay people in Russia think of Ukrainian as a dialect of Russian. Linguists, on the other hand, treat Ukrainian as a separate language.” 

  Pereltsvaig, Asya. Languages of the World. An Introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2024. 

  Why do you think this is the case?

  

• West Rumelian Turkish

  Languages within the Balkan sprachbund, all of which are Indo-European except for Turkish, are characterised by replacing the infinitive by subjunctive constructions. Rather than Standard Turkish görmek istiyorum (infinitive + finite verb) “I want to see”, I say isterım görim “I want that I see“ (finite verb + subjunctive), which corresponds syntactically how I would say it in Albanian or Macedonian. 

  Information provided by Dr Orhan Elmaz