English Language
This word is a 3-letter word in English associated with excitement or joy.
What is Yay!
This word, spelled “Привіт”, is the everyday informal greeting Ukrainians use with friends.
What is “Pryvit”?
This term, often shouted during celebrations or dances, is used to hype people up and show national pride.
What is "¡Wepa!"?
This term describes the dominance of one language over another, often leading to the marginalization of minority languages and shaping who gets to be heard or seen as “educated.”
What is Linguistic Hegemony?
This is the most spoken language in the world by native speakers.
What is Mandarin Chinese?
This popular nonstandard structure can be seen when someone says, “I can’t not have cake.”
What is a double negative?
Unique to the Ukrainian alphabet, this letter with two dots appears in “Україна” and signals the /ji/ sound.
What is “Ї” (Yi)?
This is the common informal greeting in the Dominican Republic, often used between friends.
What is "Qué lo qué" or "KLK"?
While many outsiders describe Caribbean Spanish as "too fast" to understand, this term refers to the idea that how we judge speech is often shaped more by bias than by actual linguistic difficulty.
What is raciolinguistic ideology?
This process occurs when speakers alternate between two or more languages or dialects in a single conversation, often to adapt to different social settings.
What is code-switching?
A specific dialect or accent in English that is often characterized by words and phrases such as “like”, “omg”, “duh”, “totally”, and “grody.”
What is a valley girl accent?
When a Ukrainian calls out «Оксано!» instead of «Оксана», they are using this grammatical case reserved for direct address.
What is the vocative case?
The fast pace of Dominican speech, especially among younger speakers, is often tied to this musical genre known for its rapid beats and energetic flow.
What is dembow?
Used to mark group belonging. This linguistic term can reveal who is an insider or expose an outsider based on how they speak.
What is Shibboleth?
When colonial powers imposed their own languages in Africa, Asia, and the Americas, it often resulted in the erasure of native tongues. This phenomenon is an example of what broader linguistic process?
What is language colonization or linguistic imperialism?
Named Oxford’s Word of the Year in 2024, this word defines low-quality internet content consumed by modern teens.
What is Brain Rot?
The mixed Ukrainian‑Russian variety often heard in rural areas and some cities, and long stigmatized as “improper”, is commonly known by this name.
What is Surzhyk?
Dominican Spanish is shaped by a blend of Taino, African, and Spanish influences. This unique grammatical feature involves using this word as a filler, similar to "um" or "like" in English. This word often means "thing" in the D.R.
What is "vaina"?
This term refers to how time and space shape the way narratives —and the identities within them—are constructed in language and literature.
What is a chronotope?
Bolivia has the most official languages, with 37 languages recognized by its constitution. This includes Spanish and 36 indigenous languages.
What country has the most constitutionally recognized languages?
In American English, this process alters the pronunciation of a word based on the sounds surrounding it.
EXAMPLES- how “handbag” is often pronounced “hambag.” Sandwich/ Sandwitch, Library/ Libarry
What is assimilation?
Restored to official orthography in 1990 after a Soviet ban, this letter represents the hard /g/ sound and distinguishes words like «гра» (game) from «ґрати» (bars).
What is “Ґ” (Ge with upturn)?
The use of the diminutive suffix "-ico" instead of "-ito" (e.g., "momentico" instead of "momentito") is a linguistic influence from this group of languages.
What are the Taino Languages?
Coined by Irvine and Gal, this process describes the way an opposition at one social scale reappears at smaller or larger scales, creating endlessly nested hierarchies.
What is fractal recursivity?
Encompassing more than 1,500 languages across sub‑Saharan Africa, this is the world’s largest language family by number of individual languages.
What is the Niger–Congo language family?