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In this episode I talk about, and in, Gibberish – what it is, where it comes from, how I learnt it, and possible reasons why some people find it difficult to learn.
Hedge Cats / Cathod y Gwyrch
See the score for this tune.
Dancing on Custard / Dawnsio ar Gwstard – a tune I wrote on the harp in 2016.
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In this episode I talk about language families – what they are, and how they develop, and I introduce some major and minor language families.
According to Wikipedia, a language family is “a group of languages related through descent from a common ancestral language or parental language, called the proto-language of that family”.
According to Ethnologue there are currently 142 different language families and 7,111 living languages. The ten largest languages families account for about 88% of the world’s population, and 74% of the world’s languages.
| Language Family | Number of languages | Number of speakers |
|---|---|---|
| Niger-Congo | 1,526 | 519,814,033 |
| Austronesian | 1,223 | 325,862,510 |
| Trans-New Guinea | 478 | 3,580,507 |
| Sino-Tibetan | 453 | 1,385,995,195 |
| Indo-European | 445 | 3,237,999,904 |
| Afro-Asiatic | 365 | 499,294,669 |
| Australian | 204 | 37,032 |
| Nilo-Saharan | 200 | 53,359,610 |
| Otomanguean | 177 | 1,715,045 |
| Austro-Asiatic | 167 | 116,323,040 |
| Total | 5,238 | 6,143,981,545 |
Here’s an illustration a the family tree of J.R.R. Tolkien’s Elvish languages:
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elvish_languages_(Middle-earth)
More information about language families
https://www.omniglot.com/writing/langfam.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_family
https://www.ethnologue.com/statistics/family
https://www.mustgo.com/worldlanguages/language-families/
Dancing Donkeys / Asynnod sy’n Dawnsio
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This epsiode is about polyglottery and was partly recorded at the 2018 Polyglot Conference in Ljubljana in Slovenia.
I talk about what is a polyglot, how many languages you have to speak to call yourself a polyglot, and discuss what polyglots get up to, including the Polyglot Conference and other polyglot events, such as the Polyglot Gathering and LangFest. There are also some sound bites from participants in the conference in a variety of languages.
Definitions of polyglot:
Definitions of polyglottery:
Other takes on polyglottery
Websites of some of the people who took part in the episode
If you took part in this podcast and have a website, blog, YouTube channel, etc that you’d like to see included here, let me know in the comments.
Videos from Polylgot events
More videos from the Polyglot Conference
More videos from the Polyglot Gathering
My photos and videos from polyglot events
