Communication

The problem with the way French is usually taught in America is that after you learn it in school and go to France, you look like an idiot. […]

Modern Standard Arabic is based on the Arabic used in the Koran. Since the Koran contains the words of the Prophet, it is sought to be preserved unchanged. […]

Language changes faster than we may think. Some languages in the world have evolved and changed in a couple of generations. […]

Diglossic relationships are supposed to be witnessed between dialects, between nonstandard varieties of one particular language. Yet we see similar diglossic relationships between two completely separate languages. […]

We are familiar with bilingualism. Most countries in the world are bilingual or even trilingual. But people can also be bi-dialectal. […]

Some groups of dialects sound very different from one another, but still belong to the same language family. But there are also groups of dialects that are almost identical, yet are considered to be separate languages. […]

Typically, when we say ‘x’ is a dialect of ‘y’, it means that ‘x’ is quite similar to the language ‘y’. The reason why we consider ‘x’ to be quite similar to the language ‘y’ is that the writing system is the same. Sometimes, what appears to be a dialect is actually a different language. […]

In our ordinary daily experiences, such as while watching a TV show or speaking to someone at a convenience store, we hear words in different languages that seem almost the same as the words in our own language. However, the names of the languages are different. […]