Portal:Language/Language of the month

Please do not add new items here. Nominate a language of the month here.

/September 2010

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Sinhala (Sinhalese) spoken in Sri Lanka. An Indu-Arya language with a 2,500 year-long history with 52 letters and used by nearly 15 million Sri Lankans.

/January 2006

Tamil is a Dravidian language related to Kannada, Telugu and Malayalam, among others. As one of the few living classical languages, it has an unbroken literary tradition of over two millennia, with the earliest writings having been dated to circa 500 B.C. Tamil, like other Dravidian languages, is agglutinative and the writing is largely phonetic. It is spoken by a majority of people in Tamil Nadu and northern and north-eastern Sri Lanka, while a significant emigrant population lives in Singapore, Malaysia and other parts of the world. It is officially recognised in India, Sri Lanka, Singapore, and South Africa. Find out more...

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/February 2006

The Gbe languages form a cluster of about 20 related languages stretching across the area between eastern Ghana and western Nigeria. The total number of speakers of Gbe languages is between four and eight million. The most widely spoken Gbe language is Ewe, followed by Fon. The Gbe languages belong to the Kwa branch of the Niger-Congo languages, and break up into five major dialect clusters: Ewe, Fon, Aja, Gen, and Phla-Pherá. In the late 18th century, many speakers of Gbe were enslaved and transported to the New World, causing Gbe languages to play a role in the genesis of several Caribbean creole languages. In the first half of the twentieth century, the Africanist Diedrich Hermann Westermann was one of the most prolific contributors to the study of Gbe. The first internal classification of the Gbe languages was published in 1988 by H.B. Capo, followed by a comparative phonology in 1991. The Gbe languages are tonal, isolating languages and the basic word order is Subject Verb Object. Find out more...

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/March 2006

The Laal region in Africa

The Laal language is a still-unclassified language spoken by about 300 people in three villages in the Moyen-Chari prefecture of Chad on opposite banks of the Chari River, called Gori, Damtar, and Mailao. It may be a language isolate, in which case it would represent an isolated survival of an earlier language group of central Africa. It is unwritten (except in transcription by linguists). According to SIL-Chad missionary David Faris, it is in danger of extinction, with most people under 25 shifting to the locally more widespread Baguirmi language. This language first came to the attention of academic linguists in 1977, through Pascal Boyeldieu's fieldwork in 1975 and 1978. His fieldwork was based for the most part on a single speaker, M. Djouam Kadi of Damtar. Find out more...

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/May 2006

Cyrillic alphabet as given by Meletius Smotrisky in 1619

Russian is the most widely spoken of the Slavic languages. It belongs to the group of Indo-European languages, and is therefore related to Sanskrit, Greek, Latin, as well as the modern Germanic, Romance, and Celtic languages, including English, French, and Gaelic. Written examples are extant from the tenth century A.D. onwards. While it preserves much of its ancient synthetic-inflexional structure and a Common Slavonic word base, modern Russian shares a large stock of the international vocabulary for politics, science, and technology. A language of political importance in the twentieth century, Russian is one of the official languages of the United Nations. Find out more...

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/June 2006

Aramaic is a Semitic language with a 3,000-year history. It has been the language of administration of empires and the language of divine worship. It is the original language of a large section of the biblical books of Daniel and Ezra. It was probably the language of Jesus, it is the main language of the Talmud, and it is still spoken today as a first language by numerous small communities. Aramaic belongs to the Afro-Asiatic language family. Within this diverse family, Aramaic belongs to the Semitic subfamily. Aramaic is a part of the Northwest Semitic group of languages, which also includes the Canaanite languages (including Hebrew). Find out more...

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/July 2006

Political graffiti, in Vulgar Latin, found at Pompeii

"Vulgar Latin" is a blanket term covering the vernacular dialects of the Latin language spoken mostly in the western provinces of the Roman Empire, starting from the second and third century AD, until its direct merging with the early Romance languages in the ninth century. This spoken Latin differed from the literary language of classical Latin in its pronunciation, vocabulary, and grammar. Some features of Vulgar Latin did not appear until the late Empire. Other features are likely to have been in place in spoken Latin, in at least its basilectal forms, much earlier. Our knowledge of Vulgar Latin comes from three chief sources. First, the comparative method can reconstruct the underlying forms from the attested Romance languages, and note where they differ from classical Latin. Second, various prescriptive grammar texts from the late Latin period condemn linguistic errors that Latin users were likely to commit, providing insight into how Latin speakers used their language. Finally, the solecisms and non-Classical usages that occasionally are found in late Latin texts also shed light on the spoken language of the writer. Find out more...

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/August 2006

Taiwanese is the home language for about 60 percent of the population of Taiwan. Native speakers of Taiwanese are known as Hō-ló. The language, a tonal one with extremely extensive tone sandhi rules, is similar to the speech of the southern part of Fujian in China. There are special literary and art forms in Taiwanese such as Chhit-jī-á, a poetic meter where each verse has 7 syllables; and koa-a-hì, Taiwanese opera. Find out more...

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/September 2006

Nafaanra (sometimes written Nafaara, pronounced [Nafaãra]) is a Senufo language spoken in northwest Ghana, along the border with Côte d'Ivoire, east of Bondouko. It is spoken by approximately 61,000 people (GILLBT 2003). Its speakers call themselves Nafana; others call them Banda or Mfantera. Like other Senufo languages, Nafaanra is a tonal language. It is somewhat of an outlier in the Senufo language group, with the geographically closest relatives, the Southern Senufo Tagwana-Djimini languages, approximately 200 kilometres to the west, on the other side of Comoé National Park. Find out more...

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/October 2006

Irish (Gaeilge), a Goidelic language spoken in Ireland, is constitutionally recognised as the first official language of the Republic of Ireland and has official recognition in Northern Ireland as well. European Union foreign ministers have unanimously decided to make Irish an official language of the European Union, beginning in 2007. There are approximately 1.6 million Irish speakers. The language is unusual in possessing initial consonant mutations, and a Verb Subject Object word order. Find out more...

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/November 2006

Latvian (latviešu valoda), sometimes referred to as Lettish, is the official state language of the Republic of Latvia. There are about 1.4 million native Latvian speakers in Latvia and about 150,000 abroad. Latvian is of the Eastern Baltic sub-group of the Baltic language group in the Indo-European language family. There are three dialects in Latvian: the Livonian dialect, Latgalian language and the Middle dialect. The language is of interest to linguists because it retains many archaic features of the early stages of the Proto-Indo-European language, the mother language of Old Latin, Ancient Greek, Vedic Sanskrit, and Proto-Germanic. Find out more...

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/December 2006

Bengali or Bangla (বাংলা, Bengali pronunciation: [ˈbaŋla]) is an Indo-Aryan language of the eastern Indian subcontinent, evolved from Prakrit, Pāli and Sanskrit.

Bengali is native to the region of eastern South Asia known as Bengal, which comprises present day Bangladesh and the Indian state of West Bengal. With nearly 200 million native speakers, Bengali is one of the most widely spoken languages in the world (it is ranked between fourth and seventh). Bengali is the main language spoken in Bangladesh; in India, Bengali is ranked as the second most spoken language. Along with Assamese, it is geographically the most eastern of the Indo-European languages. Find out more...

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/January 2007

Hebrew (עִבְרִית‎ or עברית‎, ‘Ivrit) is a Semitic language of the Afro-Asiatic language family spoken by more than seven million people in Israel and Jewish communities around the world. In Israel, it is the de facto language of the state and the people, as well as being one of the two official languages (together with Arabic), and is spoken by a majority of the population. Hebrew, long nearly extinct outside of Jewish liturgical and scholarly purposes, was revived as a literary and narrative language by the Haskalah (Enlightenment) movement of the mid-19th century. Find out more...

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/February 2007

Nahuatl (['na.watɬ] is a term applied to a group of related languages and dialects of the Aztecan branch of the Uto-Aztecan language family, indigenous to central Mexico. It is spoken by more than 1.5 million people in Mexico, and under the "Law of Linguistic Rights" Nahuatl is recognized as a "national language" which has the same "validity" in Mexico as Spanish and Mexico's other indigenous languages. Nahuatl is known outside of Mexico particularly because the Aztecs spoke Nahuatl, a variant now known as Classical Nahuatl. Find out more...

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/March 2007

Swahili (also called Kiswahili) is a Bantu language the most widely spoken language of sub-Saharan Africa. Swahili is the mother tongue of the Swahili people (or Waswahili) who inhabit several large stretches of the Indian Ocean coastlines from southern Somalia as far south as Mozambique's border region with Tanzania. The number of native speakers is small, under 800,000. However, Swahili has become a lingua franca in much of East Africa and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, becoming a second language spoken by tens of millions in Kenya and Tanzania, where it is an official language. Find out more...

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/April 2007

Ido (pronounced /idɔ/) is a constructed language created with the goal of becoming a universal second language for speakers of different linguistic backgrounds as a language easier to learn than ethnic languages. Ido was developed in the early 1900s, and retains a sizeable following today, primarily in Europe. Its intended usage parallels the current use of English as a lingua franca, and of French, Latin, and Greek in earlier eras. Unlike English, which is a natural and frequently irregular language, Ido was specifically designed for grammatical, orthographic, and lexicographical regularity, and to favor no one who might otherwise be advantaged in a situation due to native fluency in a widespread language. In this sense, Ido is classified as a consciously-created International Auxiliary Language (conIAL). Of the most widely used conIALs, the first one is Esperanto, Ido's predecessor; it is disputable whether the second place in usage goes to Ido or Interlingua. Find out more...

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/May 2007

Turkish (Türkçe) is a Turkic language, a part of the hypothetical Altaic language family, spoken predominantly in Turkey, with smaller communities of speakers in Bulgaria, Cyprus, Russia, Greece, the Republic of Macedonia, and Romania, as well as by several million immigrants in Western Europe. Turkish is the largest member of the Turkic language family in terms of the number of speakers, with 65 – 73.5 million people in the world who speak it as their mother tongue. The history of the language spans over 1200 years. Ancient engravings of the Turkish language have been found in Mongolia in the Orkhon Valley. The rise of the Ottoman Empire made the language widespread, creating the literary language of Ottoman Turkish. Find out more...

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