Skeptophilia

The last two posts have been about biological extinction; today's, to continue in the same elegiac tone, is about language extinction. A...

Linguists estimate that there are a little over seven thousand languages spoken in the world, sorted into around four hundred language famil...

Given my ongoing fascination with languages, it's a little surprising that I didn't come across a paper published a while back in th...

Here's a question I wonder if you've ever pondered: Why do the Spanish and French speak Romance languages and not Germanic ones? It...

The first thing I learned in my studies of linguistics is that languages aren't static. It's a good thing, because my field is histo...

My novel In the Midst of Lions ,  the first of a trilogy, has a character named Anderson Quaice, who is a linguistics professor.  He also ha...

The title of my master's thesis was The Linguistic and Cultural Effects of the Viking Invasions on England and Scotland .  I don't t...

One of the unresolved mysteries of European anthropology is where the Etruscans fit into the big picture. The Etruscans lived in northweste...

The aphorism "No matter what you know, there's always more to learn" is something you'd be likely to see on one of those c...

A year ago I wrote about linguistic isolates  -- single languages, or small clusters of related languages, that have no apparent relation to...