What's this Blog About?

What's the different between a country's national language and its official language? What legal rights do people have if they don't use a majority language?

Most of us don't consider the numerous ways that alongside history, things like laws and policy affect not only how we speak, but which languages we use. This blog is here to explain in clear terms how much politics plays an active role in our linguistic landscape and what that can mean for each of us.

In addition to language policy and history, it will also go over legal position smaller languages and signed languages.

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Isan's 'Dialect' Dismissal

Think about the word 'dialect' for a moment. From a linguistic perspective, the term is pretty bland. Usually, linguist use to refer to a variety of language spoken in a particular area and/or by a particular group of people. It's worth noting that by that same definition, the standard or prescribed form a given language is also one of its dialects. Okay, that's how linguists see it, now let's think about the word dialect in the way that non-linguists use it. This is where things get a bit more hairy If you spend a lot of time with English speakers, you'll notice that there's a specific way the word is used. It's fine to talk about the different dialects of German, Thai or Arabic. Using the word to refer to varieties of English however will get you looks. Few people mention the Louisiana or Glaswegian dialects of English. Even if a given variety has a different grammar and syntax, Anglophones generally prefer the term "accent." For r...

The Politics of an Alphabet

We generally don't think about the use of an alphabet as a political statement. In fact for many people, a language using a particular writing system seems more like a given than anything else. It seems obvious that Bulgarian uses Cyrillic and Korean uses Hangul - that's what tradition calls for and inertia keeps in place. I'll use any excuse to show Korean script For many countries though, a lphabets and writing systems can and do change and very often the choice can carry a lot of political weight to it. Kazakhstan and the trend of Central Asia In 2017, Nursultan Nazarbayev, the president of Kazakhstan at the time signed a decree that pledged to switch the Kazakh language form the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The transition plan is meant to be completed by 2025. This will not be first time for Kazakh to take on a new alphabet. In fact it would be the third time in less than 100 years. The written form of Kazakhstan has taken a rather circuitous pat...

What We Overlook Talking About Smaller Languages

When I was younger I was really fascinated to learn that Quechua was still spoken today. You might know Quechua as the language of the Incan Empire, or the French sporting goods company. It’s a fascinating language with evidentiality markers, bipersonal verb conjugations and lots of other features that are catnip for a grammar nerd like me. I could go on for days, but that would be missing the point I want to make here, which is that Quechua isn’t a language. Well that's a bit misleading. I should say that Quechua isn't a single language. In reality, Quechua is a term that people often use to refer to a whole group of related languages spoken throughout the Andes region of South America, many varieties of which are not mutually intelligible with each other. A rough sketch of where 'Quechua' is spoken A linguist much more informed than I am once explained it to me that using the term Quechua the way we do was like calling all the West Slavic languages (thi...

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