Languages Slides
A curated collection of interactive HTML presentation decks, slide outlines, and topics covering Languages.
Popular presentations about Languages
Afroasiatic Languages
The World's Oldest Documented Language Family
Computational Linguistics
Computational linguistics is the discipline of making language tractable for machines — and, almost accidentally, of making machines that have changed what language is.
Constructed Languages
From Esperanto to Dothraki: The Art and Science of Language Creation
Dialects & Sociolinguistics
The Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich's quip — recorded by him in 1945 from an audience member at a YIVO lecture — is the field's epigram. There is no purely linguistic distinction between a language and a dialect. The distinction is political.
Endangered Languages
A language dies, on average, every two weeks. Within a century, between 50 and 90 percent of human linguistic diversity will be gone. The catastrophe is well-documented and largely unstoppable.
The History of English
English is unusual. It is the only major European language with no gender, almost no case, and a vocabulary borrowed from a half-dozen unrelated sources. Its spelling is famously irregular. Its speakers, two-thirds of them now, learned it as a second language.
Indo-European
Three of every seven humans alive speak an Indo-European language. The family is the most successful in human history, and its discovery is the founding event of comparative linguistics.
Language and Thought
Does the Language You Speak Shape the Way You Think?
Origins of Language
No fossil preserves a sentence. No artefact records the first word. The origin of language is the central problem of human evolution and the one for which direct evidence is most absent.
Pidgins and Creole Languages
How Contact, Necessity, and Creativity Give Birth to New Languages
History of Programming Languages
From Punch Cards to AI Assistants: 70 Years of Human-Machine Communication
Sino-Tibetan
Sino-Tibetan is the second-largest language family on earth by speakers — second only to Indo-European — and on present evidence the oldest continuously documented one.
Translation and Interpretation
A Comprehensive Exploration
Writing Systems
Language is universal among humans; writing is not. Writing has been independently invented at most five times in the history of the species, and most peoples have lived and died without it.