A World of Variety

Posted Fri, February 20, 2009 - 7:23 PM
language

I'm going to start a new series of posts, intended to celebrate the world's diversity of language. It's turned out to be depressingly difficult to find online resources for even moderately obscure languages, never mind the myriad of little-known, inaccessible, or dying languages. The most common information seems to be word lists, a few phrases, links to dictionaries, exhortations to buy things, two or three second badly compressed audio clips, and lots and lots of blinking tags and broken links that make up for in enthusiasm what they lack in scope and rigor. But it's certainly better than nothing, as chasing down articles in scholarly linguistic journals is neither productive or enlightening if your interest, as mine, is in the full impression of how a language is used in everyday speech.

I've spent a fair amount of time trying to wade through the less useful content and come up with more genuinely enlighting information. Luckily, there are some excellent sites out there, both academic and amateur, that focus on obscure but well loved languages. Since I want this series to be a broad overview, and I'm by no means an expert, I've provided links to the source sites. Each article tries to include some historical and geographical context, along with a nontrivial story or sample text, translation, and (when possible) audio of a native speaker. Between the three, it's surprising how many words you can just "pick up" from a language you may never have heard before.

One thing that should be noted: even within a single language family, it's typical for individual languages widely separated in space (or time) to be mutually unintelligible. Not only that, but unrelated languages that have contact with each other, whether through geographic or economic factors, sometime acquire features from each other which tend to make them appear more closely related than they actually are. To keep this series to a reasonable size, I've chosen to arbitrarily pick one representative from each generally accepted world language family. Furthermore, each article contains only a tiny fraction of the work available on the original web site.

In many cases I've had to reformat the samples: the transcription, the English translation, and the audio (joining clips, cropping, volume/noise adjustments, etc.) However, I've linked to the original site for each sample so you can explore the additional resources each has to offer.

I'm planning to start with the indigenous languages of North America, and move south before jumping across to the Old World.

Visit the Language Samples from North America.