2272: Intro to Hunsurik: Brazil's Own German Mar 6, 2021
The language of Hunsurik, a German language spoken in Brazil, in many ways mirrored the historical process seen in the development of German in the 18th and 19th centuries. In those times, there was no standard German, neither in spelling nor in dialect. Eventually in the early 19th century this started to take place in Germany along with the unification of the country around what is now the standard, but with mass immigration to the Americas, German use in Brazil instead involved the Hunsrück dialect in part due to numerical superiority among the German immigrants. The spelling as well does not resemble that of Standard German, resembling certain aspects of Dutch and Portuguese orthography, but despite having around 3 million speakers and a number of school its writing is not standardized or even completely codified.
2161: Urdu & Hindustani Nov, 14, 2020
"Is urdu a language?" is not a question I would ask at the tenser parts of the India-Pakistan border, but the answer is not immediately clear, and so worth asking. Urdu is the national language and lingua franca of Pakistan, and many describe it as the Persianized form of Hindustani, but it is also recognized by the constitution of India. Through contact with the Muslim territories to the west, the Indo-Aryan language draws heavily from Persian, especially for its upper register, and is written in the Persian script. Likewise, Hindi, especially in the west around Delhi, has the same basic structure and base of vocabulary (about 99%), but draws from Sanskrit for its higher register and uses the Devanagari script. There is a significant level of mutual intelligibility between the two.
1271: National Languages: Colonies Jun 3, 2018
Historical reasons for picking a national language have been discussed here before, but there are also other dimensions which former colonies had to grapple with. Some former colonies chose to stick to the language of the past colonial power, as with Nigeria or India, because there were so many languages spoken that it acts as a lingua franca; this is similar in Malaysia where, though the majority speak Malaysian, the government did not want the Malay to be unequally powerful, and all three countries use English. In other countries, such as Indonesia, having a distinct national language was deemed necessary in order to promote national unity against foreign powers, even though at least hundreds of languages are spoken there. Some countries opt for no official language, and will allow for more regionalism, or will use a de facto national language, such as is the case with the US.
Check out the video released today: https://youtu.be/tY6_zs7-k5I