Month: February 2016

It seems that a good part of the language learning activity in the world is aimed at learning English. English is quite a young language. It is the combination on one small and cloudy North Atlantic Island of Anglo-Saxon, Norman French, Scandinavian even Latin and other influences. The collision of the different writing systems of these various languages and the famous “vowel shift” in England around the time that printing became widespread (15th century) all have contributed to the notoriously inconsistent spelling of English. Who would have thought that his language would become the most common international language? Who knows how long this will last?

Every language has its history, its culture and its charm. Every language has people who speak it, whom we can get to know. In the modern world where we can travel so easily and communicate cheaply by telephone or Internet we have an opportunity that no previous generation had. We can share a part of our lives with people all over the world in their languages. We can learn their languages more easily. Of course The Linguist helps make that even easier.

I learned nine languages and would gladly learn another nine. It gets easier with each language. There is no unlearnable language. Even a language as different from English as Chinese can be learned and give immense enjoyment.