Language

Swahili illustration © Ben Jones/Heart Agency.

Swahili on the Road

How did Swahili become an East African lingua franca? It was not by accident.

Gaelic illustration © Ben Jones/Heart Agency.

The Ghosts of Gaelic

Gaelic language and culture in Scotland have a long history, often subsumed by English. Is there hope for their future?

Woodcut illustration from the Roxburghe Ballads showing a man pleading before a lawyer or magistrate, early 17th century. Bridgeman Images.

The Tudor War on Libel

As rude rhymes and rumours threatened reputations, the Elizabethan government attempted to regulate barbed language.

A 17th-century manuscript of the Gospels in Cyrillic. National Library of Poland. Public Domain.

Inventing Cyrillic

The Cyrillic alphabet is celebrated across the Slavonic-speaking world, but not only as an appreciation of literacy – it has a political dimension too.

Birdlore: ‘De avibus’ (On Birds), from De proprietatibus rerum (On the Properties of Things), by Bartholomaeus Anglicus, 1240.

The Meaning of Lore

How ‘lore’, a largely neglected medieval word, has found a new lease of life in fandom.

Edmund ‘Ironside’, from the Genealogical Chronicle of the English Kings, late 13th century.

Toad Testicles, Foul-Beard and Broad-Arse

Nicknames can easily raise an eyebrow, but they have value to the historian beyond humour.

Sign of the Times

Speech, rather than hearing, has been at the heart of the long history of deaf exclusion.

A fragment of text inscribed on the Mesha Stele, c.840 BC. Louvre/Wiki Commons.

Inventing the Alphabet by Johanna Drucker review

Inventing the Alphabet: The Origins of Letters from Antiquity to the Present by Johanna Drucker explores the birth of the alphabet before the Greeks.

scene from The New Art and Mystery of Gossiping, Being a Genuine Account of All the Women’s Clubs in and about the City and Suburbs of London, c.1760.

The 1600s Were a Watershed for Swear Words

Swear words are a constant, but their ability to cause offence is in flux. In the 1600s, today's obscenities were mundane.

The ‘Course Boys’ outside Ivyholme at Dulwich College. Sandy Wilson is fourth from left in the front row; Peter Parker is sixth from left.

Learning Japanese

Official secrecy and institutional rivalry obscured the achievements of two crash programmes hastily launched to teach Japanese during the Second World War.