Distant Cousins From Across the Oceans

Imagine speaking a language separated from its closest relatives by thousands of kilometres. Imagine if these languages were part of an immense family that spanned more than three-quarters of the globe. Before Europe’s Age of Exploration, speakers of this language family had navigated the oceans without a compass and colonised a massive area from Madagascar … Read more

6 Language Family Trees That Will Make You Want to Learn Them All

We recently shared an illustration showing many of the world’s languages and how they’re all related to each other. And a lot of you really liked it, so we thought we’d give you a closer look at each language family. With some familiar names and some not quite so familiar, these illustrations show the staggering … Read more

The Language Forest: how are world languages related?

Have you ever wondered how different languages in the world are related to each other? Some of the answers may be surprising… Did you know, for example, that the Finnish language isn’t directly related to Danish or Norwegian? It’s actually a Uralic language, in the same family as Hungarian and Estonian, whereas the others are North … Read more