• Quantity of living languages: 6912 • Quantity of language on the verge of extinction: 516 • Language with the largest quantity of native speakers: Mandarin Chinese • Language spoken by the largest quantity of non-natives: English (250 million native speakers versus 350 million non-native speakers) • Country where the largest variety of languages are […]
In English, we use concision (many short words or phrases) as well as an economy of language (fewer words), the preference we demonstrate for the impersonal vision of reality (objectivity), our calls to evoke feelings (appeal to the senses, images), the abstract analysis and the lack of naming of the agent of an action (passive […]
Synesthesia, a peculiar neurological phenomenon whereby the stimulus of one sensory or cognitive pathway automatically and involuntarily cross-activates another sensory or cognitive pathway, is an incredibly interesting and intriguing topic which will be consuming the energies of many a researcher for the foreseeable future, and surely beyond. There are many variations of synesthesia, with grapheme […]
Tuesday night, at some moment during my CNN and BBC viewing marathon of inaugural activities and the apparent zenith of Obamamania, one of the many political analysts/commentators referred to “the power of words”. Although I’ve read one of Barack’s books and seen dozens of his debates and speeches, never underwhelmed by the man’s use of […]
While language change may occur at varying speeds and due to diverse and numerous causes, many changes have political roots or explanations. Much of language change, obviously, has come about from human migration and the use of a language by non-native speakers, with the influences of the phonetic, syntactic and morphological rules of the migrants […]
The history of the European continent has defined countries that we recognize as having regional languages as well as official languages. Because of that, several countries are multilingual and it is quite common to learn several languages at once and use them on a daily basis. Within minority languages, Catalan is the language with the […]