NativLang

The Aztecs didn't call him Montezuma. Nor Moctezuma. They didn't call chocolate "chocolate". Heck, they didn't even call themselves Aztec! Though they were an oral culture, we have an idea of what their language really sounded like. Here's why.

The story of a Greek town that I'm told still preserves the Spartan tongue. I explore why they don't speak like the rest of Greece and dig into their connection to ancient Sparta. Will their Tsakonian language survive?

Botched rhymes, buried puns and a staged accent that sounds more Victorian than Elizabethan. No more! Use linguistic sleuthing to dig up the surprisingly different sound of the bard's Early Modern English.

How an old letter and a printing press changed our pronunciation of a Scottish name. A story about Scots - neither English nor Gaelic!

Before you pronounce Irish names or thumb through a dictionary, you should know that Irish words do something quite unusual. They can mutate their starting sounds.

This region has a new language around every mountain. Over 50 languages and 7 language families! Learn why the Caucasus is one of the world's language hot zones.

Europe is full of languages! Actually, it may be full of ONE kind of language... Meet Standard Average European!

Whorf ignited a controversy when he claimed the Hopi don't speak or think about time the way Europeans do. Malotki wrote 600 pages to prove him wrong. Come explore Sapir-Whorf and Hopi Time! Do speakers of different languages have different concepts of time?

Do some languages change faster than others? Discover an Australian language that seemed to change incredibly fast in a generation, and meet a linguist who claimed that all tongues evolve at the same rate.

Languages change over time, but how fast? Do they all evolve at the same speed? And how long does it take before a language is no longer recognizable?

Italy's lost language? They gave Rome the alphabet, but we hardly know them. Here's how we pieced together the extinct language of an early Italian civilization.