Panglot World Languages

Guy Karavengleman (a.k.a. Guy Emerson) is a computational linguist at Cambridge University's Computer Laboratory. His mother is a Penang Hokkien speaker but brought him up speaking English. In his twenties, Guy decided to reclaim his linguistic heritage, and embarked on a many-year-long project to learn Penang Hokkien, depsite a dearth of resources for this language and an absence of speakers to p...

Dr Mashrur Imtiaz of Dhaka University is the first person to document the Kol language of Bangladesh. I am excited to meet somebody that has documented a language from scratch - this is a rare find indeed! While many of the world's 7,000 languages remain to be documented (i.e. we literally know almost nothing about them), each such attempt is a real expedition and adventure into the unknown, both...

Dr Alexander O'Neill of Musashino University in Tokyo returns to the podcast to explain to us the history, significance, cultural output, and current-day relevance of Sanskrit and its relatives Prakrit and Pali. There was a time when Sanskrit speakers could be found all the way from Central Asia to Indonesia. It was a unifying lingua franca that was the centre of education, that books were written...

In this episode, I have the honour of welcoming Professor Ghil'ad Zuckermann, renowned linguist, language revivalist, academician and public communicator of science, to speak about his work reviving the Barngarla language of Australia. Barngarla is a Pama-Nyungan language which in 2011 had zero living speakers - as Professor Zuckermann puts it, a "sleeping beauty". Starting from a 19th-century dic...

Pule (in N'Ko script: ߔߎ߯ߟߍ) is an artist-researcher and cultural technologist from Azania (or South Africa) and is working in transdisciplinary peer-learning, while completing a PhD about the isiShalambombo (anti-)language phenomenon and its manifestation as "effugiolexis", where language forms are obfuscated to avoid being understood from the top down. For example, some European-originated tradi...

Louisiana Creole is a French creole language in the US state of Louisiana. Originally developed among African slaves that had been trafficked across the Atlantic, it later came to be spoken by some whites also. Looked down on by many white families, it was nonetheless often spoken at an early age while playing with other children, leading generations to view it with nostalgia, as the language of t...

Newar (also known as Nepal Bhasa) is a Tibeto-Burman language from the Kathmandu valley in Nepal. It has a rich history of centuries of literature and even has its own script. After being the major language of the valley for most of history, in the 20th Century the Nepalese government attempted to suppress it in favour of Nepali, an Indo-Aryan language that had been rebranded from its original nam...

Laz is a South Caucasian language (i.e. related to Georgian) spoken in northeastern Turkey and southwestern Georgia by around fifty thousand people. Okan Dale grew up in the Laz diaspora in Europe, and is currently based in the US. I failed to mention during the recording that Okan is a polyglot! He speaks German, English, Turkish, Japanese, and Spanish fluently, and also knows French, Laz, Portug...

Fewer than 1% of the languages of the world get any serious attention. It's a whole wide world that almost nobody knows about. This podcast aims to change that. I'm Staś (Stanisław Pstrokoński) and I'm hosting this podcast as a labour of love towards the languages of the world. Each one is both a unique mode of expression with fascinating insights into different ways of thinking and being, and an...