Gift ideas

Gifts for linguistics fans

Know someone who loves linguistics? Pick their favourite topic for gift ideas, with a fact to share when they open it.

  • Catalan Language

    The Catalan language has more than 10 million speakers, making it one of the most spoken Romance languages despite lacking official status in many areas where it's used.

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  • Cuneiform Writing

    Cuneiform writing used over 600 different signs at its peak.

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  • Dutch Language

    The Dutch language uses a lot of "g"-sounds, often in words where English uses "ch" or "k". For example, "goed" (good) and "gekookt" (cooked).

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  • Egyptian Hieroglyphs

    The hieroglyphic writing system included determinatives—symbols that didn't represent sounds, but clarified the meaning of the word they accompanied.

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  • Etymology

    The word "etymology" itself comes from the Greek words "etymos" (true) and "logos" (word), literally meaning "the study of the true meaning of words."

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  • Korean Language

    Korean has no grammatical gender, meaning nouns aren't categorized as masculine or feminine.

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  • Noam Chomsky

    Noam Chomsky is also a highly respected linguist and cognitive scientist, but he's also published numerous works on political activism and critiquing U.S. foreign policy.

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  • Pop Language

    The term pop language often refers to the linguistic style used in popular media which frequently prioritizes brevity, slang, and viral catchphrases to quickly capture the attention of a wide audience across digital platforms.

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  • Semiotics

    The study of semiotics can be applied to anything that conveys meaning, from traffic lights to emojis to even silence.

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  • Silent Languages

    Silent languages, like sign languages, aren't universally understood; there are many distinct sign languages around the world, each with its own unique grammar and vocabulary, just like spoken languages.

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  • Xenolinguistics

    One challenge in xenolinguistics is that we don't know if extraterrestrial communication would even be based on sound or language as we understand it – it could be entirely different forms of communication, like pheromones or electromagnetic signals.

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