Welcome back to episode 62, everybody! It’s time to get REAL NERDY and examine some language isolates. Let’s go on a trip around the world to learn about Burushaski in Pakistan and India, Mapuche in Chile and Argentina, and — of course — Basque in Spain and a bit of France. We’ll explore the culture and a bit of grammar, and listen to some of the amazing sounds produced by the speakers of these unique languages!
Next, of course it wouldn’t be a Language Nerds Do Earth episode without the BREAKING language news from the New York Times: as it turns out, parentese has universal qualities around the world. Linguists investigated the way parents talked to their infants in hundreds of languages and found similarities across all of them. Take part in the study to see how intuitive you are at identifying parentese!
Check out the videos where we got the audioclips of these amazing language isolates:
Finally, wanna learn more about Basque? We already did an episode all about it! Why did we cover it twice? We forgot! Oh well.
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