Generally speaking, creoles and hybrids took more from the dialects of their superstrata than from the standard languages. Hybridization took place in England, in the area called Danelaw (extended from London to Chester), between the10th and the 11th Century, when Danish was probably used for some time. This is testified by the fact that places […]
A precise boundary between the two terms, Pidgin and Creole, does not exist mostly because they both represent “corruptions” of higher languages and include a wide variety of phenomena. The Oxford English Dictionary suggests the definition of Pidgin English “as an English specialized jargon corrupted according to another language to permit intercommunication”. This is the […]
As it happened to Latin in relation to Romance languages, varieties of English have developed autonomously during centuries, shaping into different languages. Some linguists consider this being the cause of the death of English, while others address this issue as a natural consequence of usage. What is sure is that, generally speaking, Natural languages are […]
Louisiana may be considered as a unique example of multicultural and multi-language coexistence. The extraordinary interaction occurred between dialects deserves, among US States, the name of “exotic sister”. To explain such a peculiarity we must remount to Louisiana’s historical background as well as geographical and economical aspects: a strategic position, touched by the Mississippi River […]
The language of all Slovans was the Praslovan language. This was before the eight century and all Slovan languages, including the Slovak language, have developed throughout the centuries from this old original language. Although there are no written documents from these times, by comparison with certain words from different Slovan languages, linguists were able to […]
Slovak (Slovenčina) is the official language of Slovakia. It is an Indo-European language that belongs to the West Slavic Languages. More than 5 million people speak Slovak in Slovakia. This language is also spoken in the United States (1, 200 000), the Czech Republic (320 000), Serbia (60 000), Ireland (30 000), Romania (22 000), […]
There are approximately 6,912 living languages in the world today. Most languages belong to larger language groups or families, which is a group of similar or related languages that developed from a common ancestor, referred to as protolanguage (“proto” means “early” in Greek). Let’s take a look at a few major language groups, including an […]
Philippine languages, which belong to the family of Austronesian languages, are as diverse as the islands that make up this archipelago. Among the major languages is Ilocano, sometimes spelled Ilokano and also referred to as Iloko/Iluko. It is the third most spoken language in the country, claimed by close to 8 million Filipinos as their […]
