Grammar

Language in your hands: The guide to creating your very own language

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uto aveyalaza
for my students

This is what can be read as one of the first things in Jessie Peterson’s (née Sams) book How to Create a Language: The Conlang Guide. You won’t be able to find the origin of the language in italics in any common resource. You can try putting it into Google Translate  and have it detect a language for you, but the translation will most certainly not result in “for my students”. This is because the sentence is not written in any of the languages spoken in the world, but rather one of Peterson’s constructed languages (conlangs).

Conlangs are languages created by people for a variety of reasons, be they aesthetic, for a literary project, … ↪

Shaetlan: a young language with old roots – a Nordic language now officially recognized

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A Danish review of the book can be read here.

Shetland is an archipelago and it belongs administratively to Scotland. Scotland belongs administratively to the United Kingdom. The United Kingdom is liberated from the European Union, but it used to be part of the EU. The British do not feel European, at least a small majority, so they brexited. The Scots do not feel English, but they are not allowed to vote for independence. The Shetlanders do not feel Scottish, and there are a fair few who would like to have Home Rule, somewhat like the Faroe Islands have within the Danish Kingdom. There are some 23,000 people in Shetland (yes, IN Shetland, not ON Shetland). They have their … ↪

Now recognized: An old language with Scandinavian roots in the North Sea

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Shaetlan is a Mixed Language spoken in the Shetland archipelago, the northernmost part of the UK. As shown in the blog from 2022, it emerged due to a long drawn contact situation. There was a situation stable of Norn/Scots bilingualism. Norn was a West Scandinavian variety and Scots a West Germanic variety. This bilingualism was additionally in sustained contact with the Dutch/Low Germanic varieties. Those were spoken by those involved in the Hanseatic and Dutch fishing trades. This multilingual ecology led to Shaetlan, a Grammar-Lexicon Mixed Language with a predominantly Scandinavian grammar, but with a mainly Anglian vocabulary.

Shaetlan serves as an example after the fact for Bakker’s type of mixed languages that he calls G-L languages. These tend … ↪

Lingua Franca: Elusive contact language of Christian slave colony based in Algiers finally pinned down

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Not long ago, I wrote a review on Lingoblog.dk, discussing Nolan’s (2020) book The Elusive case of Lingua Franca. That book was an open-ended study akin to an enchanting yet frustrating detective novel, in search of the famous contact language of the Mediterranean. It discusses the difficulties in tracing that famous ‘mixture of all languages, by means of which we can all understand one another’, ‘that all over Barbary and even in Constantinople is the medium between captives and Moors, and is neither Morisco nor Castilian, nor of any other nation’, as Miguel de Cervantes describes in Chapter XLI of the Don Quixote, most probably, the “Lingua Franca”.

Cervantes wrote the masterpiece of Don Quixote … ↪

Mbessa: The Cameroonian language that refused to be swallowed by Kom

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Africa Map Cameroon
Mbessa (Mbesa) is a kingdom of over 25,000 people in the Anglophone Northwest Region of Cameroon. Mbessa, like the hundreds of other kingdoms in the grassfields of the Northwest Region, is actually called a Fondom and it is headed by a powerful traditional authority called the Fon, and specifically called Foyn in the Mbessa language. It should therefore be understood that Fondom equals kingdom while Fon or Foyn equals king.

The kingdom of Mbessa was founded in the 18th century (circa 1772) by an exiled Nkar man called Tfukenu and a self-exiled Oku prince called Nsuung Nyiete (Mala 2013). Geographically, Mbessa is located between Akeh, Din, Kom and Oku, all of which are neighbouring Fondoms.

Mbessa is found in a

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Around the world on International Mother Language Day

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International Mother Language Day was celebrated for the first time in 2000 following the 1999 UNESCO initiative. The aim is to preserve cultural and linguistic diversity as well as multilingualism.

According to UNESCO, differences in language and culture must be maintained in order to promote tolerance and respect. Every mother tongue contains unique ways of thinking and expressing itself and provides access to the special culture and traditions of a language community. Every two weeks, a language and its cultural and intellectual heritage disappear, leaving at least 43% of the approx. 6-7000 languages ​​spoken in the world threatened. A similar proportion of people’s known possibilities for structuring their thoughts and their world are thus in danger, and if they disappear, … ↪

Lang Belta: the Belter language from SYFY/Amazon’s The Expanse

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The Belter language, which in the TV show is referred to as Lang Belta, is a Creole language spoken by the Belter people in the The Expanse universe. A creole language can be characterized as a new language, based on the vocabulary of an existing language, but with an innovated grammatical system.

The Expanse takes place 200 years from now, in a future in which Earth has colonized the solar system. In this world, people emigrated to the Asteroid Belt from Earth looking for work, and now survive by scavenging materials in the Belt. In this contribution I will outline the construction and general characteristics of this very complex and interesting Creole and discuss some of its grammatical characteristics.

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