Lund Language Diversity Forum Blog

A blog about the wonderful diversity of the world's languages, updated biweekly by the members of Lund Language Diversity Forum.

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August 16, 2022 | Niklas Erben Johansson

Summer etymologies: The Latin of Latin?

Right before Latin emerged as the dominant language on the Italian peninsula and beyond, Etruscan was one of the major languages in the Mediterranean. …
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June 3, 2022 | Sandra Cronhamn

Hypercorrection

When I was a child in the mid-90's – before communication over the internet was widespread – I used to be pen pals with …
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April 22, 2022 | Niklas Erben Johansson

You don’t talk like you walk but you speak like you eat

Languages differ in what information can be conveyed through grammatical rules and what people in different speech communities talk about. While many languages use …
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April 8, 2022 | lldf

Echo Reduplication

In a previous post I discussed reduplication, with a particular focus on Austronesian languages. If English were to have such grammatical features, it would …
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March 15, 2022 | Olof Lundgren

A tool for generating maps of language features

Many linguists are also fan of maps, which can be a very neat tool to illustrate areal phenomena. Many maps are also easily accessible …
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January 14, 2022 | Sandra Cronhamn

Inalienable possession

In many languages, English included, there is only one grammatical word class for nouns—namely, nouns. Other languages, however, make more fine-grained distinctions within this …
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December 10, 2021 | lldf

Cross-lolguistic variance in writing

Laughter is universal – all cultures enjoy jokes and laughter. Sometimes we cannot stop ourselves from laughing, even at a bad pun such as …
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