Language

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

For Gen Z, online international streaming services have made foreign language media mainstream

How Australian singer Nellie Melba – born Helen Porter Mitchell – took her new surname from a mill stream in Derbyshire

Why are we fascinated by talking horses and chatty cats in fiction?

The word now used to denote enthusiasm has come a long way from its early days when it was most often used in connection with Christ

It sits on the border between Tibet and Nepal, but Everest is best known by its English name – given in honour of a Welsh geographer

Edvard Grieg may have been Norway’s greatest classical composer, but he actually inherited his name from his Scottish forebears

Despite not being a Francophile, post-Brexit Britain pushed me to find work and a future in France

People may assume that the word ‘cravat’ comes from French, but its ultimate linguistic origin is much more complicated

Why the ‘father of Czech classical music’ switched from a German Friedrich to a Czech Bedrich

What happens when a country can’t read its own past?

A meeting with Kim Cattrall conjures up thoughts of Anne Boleyn, and a shift in stress in the syllables of their surnames