Peter Trudgill
08 September 2022
The hidden curse of British Latin
Discoveries of tablets inscribed with curses provide an insight into the language spoken by the British lower classes
Read the full article01 September 2022
Why baize is far from evergreen
The word arrived in English in the 1500s from France along with the ‘bay-coloured cloths’ it described
Read the full article25 August 2022
Why riffs are as English as Keef
Many popular musical terms have their origins in West African languages – but ‘riff’ probably isn’t one of them
Read the full article18 August 2022
The lost tongue of the Beothuk
A 17th-century encounter between the peoples of Newfoundland and incoming Europeans had a tragic end
Read the full article11 August 2022
A certain amount of confusion
The use of ‘amount’ rather than ‘number’ when referring to plural nouns is on the increase. But is it actually wrong?
Read the full article04 August 2022
Why ‘-son’ rises in our surnames
Many family names in Britain seem likely to have descended from bynames of Norwegian and Danish origin
Read the full article28 July 2022
The roots of true Taiwanese
Colonialists of all stripes have squeezed the island’s indigenous languages out in favour of Mandarin and Hokkien
Read the full article14 July 2022
The arrival of Latin in Britain
Archaeological evidence indicates the language was used in southern England before the Roman invasion of AD43
Read the full article07 July 2022
The letters we have made redundant
There are 26 letters in the English alphabet, but three of them need not be there at all. Could they be put to better use?
Read the full article30 June 2022
The slow death of Udmurt
An emphasis on Russian culture has left the languages of many small, semi-nomadic peoples vulnerable to extinction
Read the full article23 June 2022
The matter of me-avoidance
It’s all me, me, me as our linguistic expert considers a reader’s complaint about the misuse of pronouns
Read the full article16 June 2022
How a captive kept Gothic alive
It is the only East Germanic language we have records of – and we only have those because of an accident of history
Read the full article09 June 2022
A cattle class in double French
English has a lot of words taken from French.. and some that we have ‘borrowed’ twice
Read the full article02 June 2022
Making a subtle preposition
Why do some British broadcasters appear to suffer from a linguistic inferiority complex about natural English grammar?
Read the full article26 May 2022
The demise of Comancheria
Comanche was once a powerful imperial language, but there are fewer than 100 native speakers today
Read the full article19 May 2022
Discovering a hidden dialect
A brand of English made it all the way to Iwo Jima – but linguists only found out thanks to a travel show on Japanese TV
Read the full article12 May 2022
Why Hispanos sound different
The Spanish spoken by descendants of the first Europeans to colonise the US diverges from that of Mexicans and Latinos
Read the full article05 May 2022
Settling down in unsettled lands
Charting the far-flung, uninhabited countries where English was the first language ever spoken
Read the full article28 April 2022
A city starved of its language
Following a former Canary’s flightpath to Krasnodar leads to an ominous sense of history repeating itself
Read the full article21 April 2022
English is an Indian language
It has been in use on the subcontinent since the 1600s and now has millions of native speakers
Read the full article07 April 2022
Britain’s little Bengali houses
The bungalow seems synonymous with the UK, but its origins can be traced back to north Indian languages
Read the full article31 March 2022
A word you may be interested in
It has two meanings and a fascinating new use. Now read on... if you can be bothered, that is
Read the full article24 March 2022
Russia’s push to crush Ukrainian
Peter The Great and Nicholas II were part of a centuries-long effort to suppress the language
Read the full article17 March 2022
Cancelling other cultures
PETER TRUDGILL on the schools that took children away from their homes and forced them to abandon their own language and practices
Read the full article10 March 2022
Greek roots of a seized city
PETER TRUDGILL explains how Catherine the Great’s ‘Greek Project’ led to the naming of Khersón
Read the full article03 March 2022
When Welsh was widespread
One region of England was still predominantly Welsh-speaking well into the 18th century – and its roots remain strong today
Read the full article24 February 2022
Silent witnesses to pomposity
Unpronounced letters in a word are often nothing to do with tradition, and merely the creation of snobbish scholars
Read the full article17 February 2022
A tribe lost in myths of time
The Picts, their practices and their fate are supposedly shrouded in mystery. The truth is somewhat different
Read the full article10 February 2022
Toffs didn’t learn the lingo
The Grand Tour offered the privileged a taste of Europe’s treasures, yet they failed to embrace foreign languages
Read the full article03 February 2022
Lingering effects of lingua franca
PETER TRUDGILL on how people with no common native language once communicated, and how that gave birth to the secret slang Polari
Read the full article27 January 2022
Rule by the few, not the many
PETER TRUDGILL examines the origins of words about who governs us, and finds the oligarchy has been around longer than you’d think
Read the full article20 January 2022
Don’t duck the Peking question
PETER TRUDGILL on why cities have different names... and how using one or the other doesn’t necessarily identify you as a vile colonialist.
Read the full article