Hajong
Jan 7, 2024 to Jan 20, 2024
Hajong is an Indo-Aryan language closely related to Bengali and spoken in northeast India, and very much resembles a dialect of Bengali (the ethics of which is a good subject for a later post).
If you just heard the name Hajong--and this might sound bad--but you'd probably guess it was an East Asian or Southeast Asian language. It certainly doesn't sound Indian, even though it's related to other Indian languages. So what gives?
Well, Hajong is spoken by 80,000 ethnic Hajong people, but they didn't always speak Hajong as we know it. Instead, linguistic evidence suggests that they originally spoke a Tibeto-Burman language, meaning it was distantly related to languages like Tibetan, Burmese, and Mandarin.
While we don't have direct historical evidence of this, we can tell because the Hajong language features a lot of traits similar to Tibeto-Burman languages that are absent in neighboring or related Indo-Aryan languages.
For example, Hajong has the unique vowel sound অৗ, and if you can read Bengali you'll notice that that vowel letter doesn't exist in the normal Bengali script. It represents the phoneme /ɯ/, which sounds sort of like an "uh" sound but higher in the mouth. This sound appears in almost no Indo-Aryan languages but in many Tibeto-Burman languages.
In terms of grammar, Hajong uses honorifics--only referring to elderly people by name or title, never by a pronoun--which is atypical of Indic languages but again attested in East Asian languages. And in the vocabulary, common words "dang'o" (big) come from its Tibeto-Burman ancestors. It's fascinating how languages like Hajong shed light on their own history.
Papiamento
Dec 24, 2023 to Jan 6, 2024
I've been in Aruba this week on vacation, and despite being a Dutch colony right off the coast of Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking South America, Aruba doesn't speak any of these languages. Rather, it speaks all of them--or at least a creole language with its roots in all of them. Enter Papiamento, a language with 300,000 speakers and quite the convoluted history!
Aruba was originally settled by an unknown fishing culture thousands of years ago, based on archeological evidence. They were later completely supplanted by the Caquetio, who were indigenous Arawak peoples that sailed north from what's now Venezuela. Hundreds of years later it was invaded and colonized by Spain, until being replaced by the Dutch, who were in search of salt. For a decade in the middle of Dutch possession of the island it was also controlled by the British.
Each of these languages had its own admixture into Papiamento, but what's missing is Portuguese, which makes up the majority of Papiamento words. Its influence comes from Portugal's regional trading power in the Antilles.
Around 80% of Papiamento vocabulary is Portuguese or Spanish, and almost 20% is from Dutch, with some words from Arawak as well as some from Niger-Congo languages brought over through slavery.
Nowadays Papiamento is even used as a literary language in Curaçao, where it has become the official language taught in schools at all social classes, which is quite unique among creole languages. It's also the language of Aruba's national anthem, as well as recently being used in poetry and films.
Ket
Dec 10, 2023 to Dec 23, 2023
Ket is a Yeniseian language spoken in Central Siberia along the Yenisei River (hence the name). It's highly endangered, and it's unclear how many native speakers remain - numbers range from 10 to 153 - and whether anyone is fluent in the language anymore.
Numbers aside, Ket is somewhat of an odd language. Unlike its neighbors in Siberia and certainly unlike Russian, its verbs mostly take prefixes, and they can incorporate other words into the verb to show more detail in how an action was performed.
Its classification is also a prominent subject of debate within the linguistics community. As noted before, Ket is a Yeniseian language and is spoken deep in Siberia, but some have noticed similarities in vocabulary and grammar (specifically that prefixing verb structure, which is otherwise rare) to another language family... the Native American Na-Dené languages including Navajo, spoken in the US.
This hypothesis is known as the Dene-Yeniseian hypothesis, and it's gaining traction. It has some degree of consensus, even if it's not quite absolute, and it's quite a significant claim. If true, this would be the first language family we'd see to have correspondences between the Americas and Eurasia, giving us more insight into the ancient history of human migration.
But at the same time, it's hard to both substantiate and get excited about it. With so few speakers left, it's getting harder and harder to do the research we need on Ket - the same is true of its potential Native American relatives, like Tlingit and Haida, which are only at 200 and 13 remaining speakers respectively.
In the end, it's just another testament of what keeping languages alive can do for us. These indigenous languages are important - and they could hold the key to unlocking new knowledge on ancient human history.
Inuktitut / ᐃᓄᒃᑎᑐᑦ
Nov 26, 2023 to Dec 9, 2023
Inuktitut (sometimes just called Inuit) is a Native American language spoken fluently by forty thousand people in northern Canada. It's related to languages spoken all across the North American Arctic, and even has a relative spoken in the Russian Far East, Yupik.
The most famous thing about Inuktitut is the saying "The Inuit have over a hundred words for snow," apparently being the reason that the Inuit can tell apart different types of snow at all. It's an argument often used to prove linguistic determinism, that language affects how people think.
While the statement isn't necessarily false (though the number is generally exaggerated), the usual conclusion is flawed in that it assumes the language affects the culture, rather than the language and culture affecting each other mutually. How could the Inuit make words for snow before they even knew the difference? They didn't.
Such sayings seem like harmless fun facts at first, but linguistic determinism often builds into dangerous statements like "English has more words for colors than the Ancient Greeks, so they must have all been colorblind" and even "African American English sounds unsophisticated and improper, so white people must be smarter than Black people.".
Linguistics is a field defined by its interactions with politics, and this is no exception. While it may be tempting to study language in a vacuum, it is paramount to remember the people behind the language, and know that what you say about how language determines thought can hurt people.
Sesotho /
Nov 12, 2023 to Nov 25, 2023
Sesotho is a language spoken in South Africa, Lesotho (both named after the Sotho peoples), and Zimbabwe by over 13 million people. It constitutes part of the Southern Bantu branch, making it related to languages like Zulu, Xhosa, and distantly to Swahili.
It's one of the 16 official languages of Zimbabwe and the 11 of South Africa. These two countries have some of the highest numbers of official languages in the world, behind India and Bolivia.
Due to Apartheid, though, Sesotho became associated with a lower legal status and level of education, the latter partially as a result of the opaque English spellings in the language, which don't fully represent its complexity.
Enter Ditema tsa Dinoko, a new alphabet invented by and for southern Bantu peoples. It's a geometric script formed on a vowel base that's modified by consonant diacritics, making it an abugida, like those used in South and Southeast Asia.
The script derives its name from the art style litema, meaning that despite the script's artificial creation, it has its roots in traditional Bantu culture and art, such as Sesotho murals and Zulu beadwork.
Ditema tsa Dinoko is proof that art and language are intertwined, and writing doesn't have to be abstract-- and that relying on traditional, Indigenous knowledge to innovate new writing techniques is a powerful tactic indeed. After all, they know their languages best.
The text above reads "Ditema tsa Dinoko".
As a featural abugida, similar sounds have similar symbols.
These symbols can be colored according to traditional symbolism, and be arranged for aesthetic purposes. In the above example, the first syllables di and te cluster together.
Bengali / বাংলা
নমস্কার (nômoshkar) - Hello!
Oct 29, 2023 to Nov 11, 2023
This week, I'll be looking across the sea to South Asia, focusing on one of the most spoken languages of the world, Bengali.
Bengali is a North Indian (or Indo-Aryan) language spoken in India and Bangladesh, but has significant diasporic speaking communities all across the world—including right here in Bellevue.
With over 250 million speakers (roughly matching the 90 million people in West Bengal and the 160 million in Bangladesh), Bengali is the sixth most spoken first language in the world.
However, it's not a very commonly taught language, with its rank falling to 15th place in terms of second language speakers*. Well-known apps like Duolingo don't teach Bengali: it's scrapped in favor of less-spoken, but more popular languages like Korean, Japanese, and even fictional languages like Klingon and High Valyrian.
*Yes, I recognize the irony of me saying this.
It's a shame, too, because Bengali literature is also some of the richest in the globe. World-famous poet and composer of both the Indian and Bangladeshi national anthems, Rabindranath Tagore, was a native Bengali speaker.
But it's also a good time to talk about it, too! Durga Puja, a Bengali festival celebrating the goddess Durga, started just two days ago, on the 20th. And speaking from my own experience, Bengali language and culture continues to thrive, even in America.
Lushootseed / dxʷəlšucid
haʔɬ sləx̌il! - Good day!*
Oct 15, 2023 to Oct 28, 2023
For the inaugural post of Language of the Week, we're starting off close to home with Lushootseed.
Lushootseed is a Native American language spoken by the Coast Salish people of the Puget Sound region, and that makes it the language that was originally spoken in the Seattle-Bellevue area.
The culture and identity of the Coast Salish people is vested in the language, which is why it is so important to preserve it. The Tulalip, Puyallup, and other tribes in the area have done phenomenal work teaching the language to the next generation, remaining resilient even without any surviving native speakers.
*The Lushootseed language uses a different alphabet than English. In accordance with the Puyallup Tribe's official statement, I won't be providing Anglicized transcriptions, but a pronunciation guide is at right.
*Pronunciation Guide (click for audio!)
ʔ is pronounced like the pause in "uh-oh" (a glottal stop).
ɬ is pronounced like the Welsh "ll" sound, which is like a combination of the h and l sounds (a lateral fricative).
ə is pronounced like the English "uh" sound (a schwa).
x̌ is pronounced similar to the French "r", but devoiced, as in the word "prisme" (a uvular fricative).
i is pronounced variably as the vowel in "pit", "peel", and "gate" - here, because it is after x̌, it is pronounced as the gate vowel.