Language

Discussions on whether there are any famous Belgians often throw up the same names – but very rarely is Beethoven one of those suggested

Our English language was brought to us across the North Sea by boatmen landing on the east coast

What links Philip Glass, Volodymyr Zelensky and Giuseppe Verdi?

Contronyms – words like ‘sanction’ and ‘cleave’ – are a puzzling phenomenon in English, in that they have two opposite meanings

The word repechage was heard regularly at this summer’s Olympics, but its modern usage bears little relation to its original meaning

Why does the Sri Lankan cricket squad have a player with such an English-sounding surname as Mathews?

Despite leaving for Santander, Britain and all its quirks will not leave me

President Erdoğan wants English speakers to pronounce his country’s name differently. Will he succeed?

Flemish physician Jan Baptist van Helmont was the first to recognise gases other than air, and coined the word ‘gas’, from the Greek ‘chaos’

Where is Han Solo when you need him?

Reports about the Olympic Games in Paris illustrate the differences in sporting language between American and British English

What do you get when you mix Ancient Greek with Scottish Gaelic? An almost flightless mountain bird

Many slang and everyday Latin words, rather than upper-class vocabulary, shaped modern languages such as French and Spanish

My relentless pursuit of French fluency and European belonging has had its ups and downs but I realise I am making progress

In medieval times a ford over a stream would have been somewhere to play, and this is reflected in their names

One of the most famous questions in English literature is often misunderstood by modern readers

Would the world be a simpler and more economical place if we all spoke the same language?

Foreign language teaching in Britain is on the decline, which risks making the country more cut-off and inward-looking than ever before

This technical terminology is easily understood and describes the act of parsing playful sentences that are designed to confuse

Rather surprisingly, the French word for ‘customs’ is related to the English word for a low sofa-bed

Some of England’s waterways are named after the towns they flow through, rather than the other way round – a process known as back-formation

Why are the German and English names for stringed instruments so different?

The addition of suffixes to indicate a change in size is a common feature of many languages – but the word ‘cello’ is a unique example

Being French and yet so invested in British life, you get double the highs and double the lows

The use of the word ‘hi’ as a greeting in Britain began in the early 1960s – probably influenced by American TV programmes and films

The geographical spread of Romansh in Switzerland is shrinking as speakers start to use the German of their near neighbours

Its origin is uncertain, but the term ‘muggins’ is one of the very few alternative first-person pronouns to ‘I’ and ‘me’ in the English language

Most people in Haiti speak Kreyòl, while their eastern neighbours speak Spanish

The language is embedded in my family history; I just don’t have time for it yet

Even the world’s most prominent linguistics experts cannot agree on when humans first acquired the capacity for language

Between 350AD and 600AD, ‘boat people’ took Brittonic Celtic across the Channel from south-west England to Normandy and Brittany

The word is linguistically Persian, but most of the ‘stan’ nations are now inhabited by speakers of Turkic languages