linguistic

Inner Austria consisted of the Imperial duchies of Styria, Carinthia and Carniola and the lands of the Austrian Littoral, from the 14th to the early 17th century. By the 11th century, the Germanization of what is now Lower Austria, effectively isolated the Slovene-inhabited territory from the...

One thing that stands out to me about England and the English language is how relatively homogenous they are in terms of language. Yes, I know you have a variety of dialects and accents. But compare that to the continent or Asia, where (historically) travelling just a hundred km or so you find...

Linguistic Purism: the simple ideal that not all forms of a language are equal. One form of this concept is the opposition to loanwords, words borrowed from other languages. The language with the most well known case of such a purist movement is English, wherein well over half of its vocabulary...

The USSR as a whole didn't have an official official language, though Russian functioned as one in practice (the 'language of inter-ethnic communication' I believe they called it), but what if the Bolsheviks had been interested in Esperanto instead? Stalin was apparently learning the language...

It's a well known fact that in our timeline Brazil could have followed a similar path to the rest of Latin America and been separated into many different countries With that in mind, we have dialects and accents in parts of the country to this day, which is natural considering the continental...

Since Latin was the language of academics, religion, and government for a while in Catholic Europe for a while, could there be a way for a European country (or multiple) to revive Latin as a widespread tongue during the modern era? There are many ways this can happen: 19th century nationalist...

It seems that the Gallo Italic, Italian, Neapolitan, Sicilian, Dalmatian, Romansch, Sardinian, Romanian, Venetian, Portuguese and Spanish have nothing in common but it seems that the languages were affected by the Justinian reconquests. These languages seem to have something in common in their...

Let us suppose some time during the Bronze and or Iron age South Semitic people find and settle in Madagascar. How would this effect the History of the Indian ocean and Africa?

Indo-European languages constitute by far the most successful language family, spoken natively by almost half of world's population (not mentioning large number of L2 speakers). But what if IE success story was reversed (no earlier than 1000 BC)? IOTL Indo-European languages suffered biggest...

Hi all, I've been lurking around in this forum for years but I never felt like I fit in. Though I'm quite interested in history, my other interests are a little different. Over the years, I've been quietly working away at my own alternate history project, which I call Atlas Altera. Now that I'm...

Zarphatic was language used by Jews in France, England and parts of Germany. It was also language likely used by first Jews, who settled in West Slavic lands (as names for Jews on most of Slavic languages indicates-these seems to be borrowed from French rather than from German) before they...

One of the largest and most influential language-shifts in global history could be traced back to the invasion of Europe by Attila the Hun. Before the Huns most of Europe spoke various Indo-European tongues with Latin being the prestige language; the Attila's hordes crushed most of the 5th...

So OTL, we don’t have that many scripts due to extensive globalization and other factors. However, what are some PODs that can make languages like Italian and Spanish unreadable to each other?

How plausible would it be for societies around the world to reach a present day technology level without the following words, or words with near-identical meanings, existing in any language? And how far back would the POD have to be? Religion Science Technology Education Athletics Economics...

What would have happened to the emerging Afrikaans language if the Cape Colony had remained under Dutch control? Would it have been subsumed back into Dutch, creating merely a more divergent version of Cape High Dutch? Would there have been a creole, stigmatized, less Dutch than OTL Afrikaans...

Here's another one of these threads where you write something down and describe it, but for words or phrases. EDIT: Its no longer those. You can freely write down them as you want. Tretch - A disloyal or untrustworthy person, derived from Treachery/Treacherous. The word was created for the...

Your challenge is to prevent the extinction of at least one language.

One thing I like about Israel (without discussing their state legitimacy here please) is that they took Hebrew, a language that was at the point spoken either by a handfew of historians and teachers and brought it back to life and now it is the official language of a country. I once made a...