About
About LinguistStory
Linguist stories of the world: news about languages, and about the people who study them.
LinguistStory covers linguistics for curious readers who are not linguists. We write about how many languages there are and why nobody agrees on the number, about languages with no known relatives, about the ones losing their last speakers and the people working to keep them, and about what a linguist actually does.
How we check a story
A number goes into a story only after we have read it on its source, on the day the story is published: a catalog like Ethnologue or Glottolog, a government survey, a university or a peer-reviewed paper. Every story ends with its sources and the date we checked them. Language counts change as catalogs are revised, so when a source updates we update the story and show the new date.
When sources disagree on a figure, we give each number and say where it comes from. When something is not known, we say that too.
What you will find here
- News: new research, and new counts of the world's languages.
- Stories: languages with unusual histories and the communities behind them.
- Explainers: plain answers to the questions people ask about linguistics.
New stories also go out through the RSS feed.