Language

Under Language we cover the European languages as cultural and historical objects — their reconstructed Indo-European roots; the family branches (Germanic, Romance, Celtic, Slavic, Baltic, Hellenic, plus the non-Indo-European Finno-Ugric and Basque islands); the major standard languages and the minority and revived ones; the orthographic and lexical histories; the literary registers; the contemporary cultural-policy questions around language revitalisation, dialect preservation, and the survival of small linguistic communities.

We write about language as cultural infrastructure. A word’s etymology tells us where a concept came from; a script’s history tells us which institutions carried it; a dialect’s survival tells us which communities have held together against the homogenising pressure of modernity. The questions are technical when they need to be, and accessible the rest of the time.