Language Facts

During the mid-twentieth century when air travel was becoming more common, English-speaking countries dominated the design and manufacturing of aircraft, as well as much of their operations. So at a 1944 convention in Chicago aiming to resolve some of the problems of air travel at the time, they established English as the language of aviation. The aim was to help avoid misunderstanding and confusion over the radio and between international crews. Although air travel is now much more widespread, with many non-English speaking countries participating in air transportation, English still persists as the language of the skies. There are a few arguments why English is still a good choice in aviation. For a start, English is a much-used language when it comes to international communications. It’s the official language of several major global institutions, it’s the accepted language of the scientific community, and it’s the most-learned language in the world. Of course, the most important thi...

The Canary Islands are arguably more renowned for their magnificent marine life, carnivals, and partying However, they are also home to the incredibly peculiar Silbo Gomero language, which is spoken on the island of La Gomera. What sets this language apart from all others is that Silbo Gomero is whistled. The island's deep gullies and mountainous terrain make traveling challenging, but the higher-pitched sound of whistling is clearly audible, which led to its development out of practicality. At the end of the 20th century, the language was on the verge of extinction. Since 1999, Silbo Gomero has been taught in schools with the goal of preserving it. In 2009, UNESCO included Silbo Gomero in the Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity. Despite the fact that there are other whistled languages spoken around the world, only Silbo Gomero is fully developed and widely "spoken." More than 22 000 Gomerans speak it. In actuality, it is still a language t...

Like the Islands themselves, ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi, the Hawaiian language, is a living, breathing part of the native culture. This relationship between land and language is displayed in details such as how many terms exist in Hawaiian for “rain” alone: more than 200. This breadth of names is highly specific and descriptive, a reminder of how thoughtfully ancient Hawaiians observed and were connected to their environment. With these words they distinguished Hawaii’s rains in many ways: by color, intensity, duration, at what times they would arrive, the angles or paths they’d fall in, or how a certain rain is linked to a place or area throughout the Islands. There’s the kili noe , a fine, light rain; not to be mistaken for the kili ʻohu , which was even finer and lighter. Depending on where you lived on Oʻahu, when the rain fell in a shape that would circle your home, that was a pōʻaihale rain. The island of Niʻihau has a special rain, the kulu pākakahi , which appears in November. There’s a ...

The Basque people speak to the world in Euskara. The Basque language, or Euskara, is spoken in the mountains between Spain and France. Euskara is a genetically isolated language; in other words, it is related to no other known language family. Since it is spoken in the mountains, the people here didn’t get out too much hence the isolation of the language. While certain aspects of Euskara have similarities with other non-Indo-European languages, no definitive connection has been made between Euskara and any other language in the world. Because the Basque Country sits in both France and Spain and many Basques are at minimum bilingual, people often think Euskara must be a dialect of French or Spanish or some sort of related Romance language. However, Euskara is oddly unrelated to French and Spanish, although it borrows some words from these languages. After all, they are linguistic neighbors, just not linguistic relatives.

Shakespeare is credited with creating as many as 1,700 words in total, spread over all of his published works. He achieved this by combining words, modifying existing ones with prefixes and suffixes, converting nouns into verbs, verbs into adjectives, and adding new ones altogether. Although many of these 1,700 words are referred to as Shakespearean inventions, many of them were likely in use during the Elizabethan and Jacobean eras but were not recorded before Shakespeare used them in his works. In these instances, Shakespeare is only the first person to record these phrases in writing. Moreover, Shakespeare is often inaccurately credited with the first use of words that are found in other writers, according to historian Jonathan Hope, who notes that Victorian scholars who read texts for the first edition of the Oxford English Dictionary read Shakespeare's texts more thoroughly than most and cited him more frequently.