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Tiny Tower of Bable

TheHindu recently posted an article confirming a statement that has supposedly been long held. They said that they had finally proven that all of Australia's native languages had descended from a single language. This language formed around 12,000 years ago, and  from time until the British started colonizing Australia in the last 1700s had splintered into around 250 languages. Linguists in Sydney found out that this relates almost directly to the findings that all native Australians come from one people who landed on the Island around 650,000 years ago. This got me thinking about the all but debunked theory of a proto-human language or what could be the first language. It made me think if when people first settled the Island, but a little more than 600,000 years later that they were all still in close enough quarters to have  one Universal Language, why couldn't the original language families that Linguists have reconstructed originated from a single source.
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Tangier Island: The Erosion of its Unique Dialect

Tangier is an island off the coast of Virginia, in the Chesapeake Bay. Examining the accents of its residents, this place is seemingly frozen in time; they speak in an unusual, notably British-sounding, dialect. Their strange accent has attracted linguists, who chalk the dialect up to early British settlement patterns in America. Because the island is isolated (only accessible from the mainland by boat or plane), the British accent of the original settlers has remained, and grows stronger amongst today’s Tangier youth. The Tangier dialect has thrived, leftover from British settlers, but is threatened by an unexpected source: climate change. For this blog post, I’ve read a 2016 New York Times article raising awareness of the dangers of a rising sea level that Tangier residents face.  Several reported flooding in their own yards, which is sure to worsen as the Bay encroaches upon their small island. According to the article, the island has lost “two-thirds of its landmass since 1850...
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Language Birth, Language Evolution, and Language Death

The section that I like the most that we have covered was "The Development and Evolution of Language." I think this is just an interesting subject, because the natural evolution of our language occurs every day. I never had looked at the birth of language really, but the evolution and death I had covered in history classes before. The evolution and death of languages are noted by many assimilation processes, that brought a language under their control. My favorite example is the Romans, who assimilated languages from all around the known world and later created the romance languages in certain areas. These languages went through many changes, with words taken from their former language and adding Latin words. Then their death as this assemblage of languages. This is when the new language emerged as a romance language, which still showed resemblance to both original languages, but became its own language. So, the death of those two original languages died out, but were the...
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