A Year In Language

Every day another language

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A Year in Language, Day 155: Tongan Tongan is a Polynesian language, part of the larger Austronesian family. It is spoken by almost 200,000 people, half of which live in Tonga and half abroad, mostly in New Zealand. Like most of its Polynesian sisters Tongan is highly isolating, with almost no inflection to speak of, and distinguishes inclusive “we” (me, you, and maybe others) from exclusive “we” (me, others, not you). It is also an ergative-absolutive language, marking the subjects of intransitive verbs like objects, and man verbs that would be transitive in English are intransitive in Tongan.

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A Year in Language, day 154: Dzongkha Dzongkha is a Sino-Tibetan language, the family of the Chinese languages and, you guessed it, Tibetan. It is the official language of Bhutan, a small country between India and Tibet and, as such, is also known as Bhutanese. Like most Sino-Tibetan languages, Dzongkha is generally isolating in grammar (sparing use of inflection) and has a largely monosyllabic lexicon. Also like the rest of it’s family it has restrictive phonotactics, aka. phonetic syllable structure, that restrict most syllables to consisting of one consonant followed by one vowel and possibly one final consonant. Compared to most of the worlds languages Dzongkha is restrictive in what consonants are allowed to be syllable final, though compared to most Chinese and other East Asian languages it is practically a free for all; Dzongkha allows 5-8 different consonants, depending on dialect and register. Mandarin by comparison allows 2, both of which are nasals. Dzongkha is written using Tibetan script, which places it in the Brahmi family that encompasses most of South and Southeast Asia. Though the numbers below twenty are base ten, above twenty it uses a base twenty (vigesimal) counting system, similar to French. The language is named for the Dzong (“district”) architecture for which Bhutan is famous

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A Year in Language, Day 148: Armenian Armenian is an Indo-European language spoken primarily in Armenia, just below Georgia and east of Turkey. Armenian’s place in the Indo-European family is a bit of a mystery. Like Greek it is typically placed on a branch all its own. It shares unique features with both Greek and Persian, making both candidates for relatives. The major issue is the Centum-Satem split, a feature of Indo-European that divides most of the family into two major groups based on a common phonological change. Most of the languages west of Poland are Centum, and Satem to the east. Armenian perplexity shows features of both. Is it a missing link between the two? Did it simply inherit features from geographic contact? Is it’s departure from Indo-European just that ancient? We don’t know for sure. Armenian, like Georgian, has a unique alphabet with uncertain origins, though the influence of Greek on Armenian is more clear than in Georgian. The creation of the Armenian alphabet is credited to Mesrop Mashtots, a linguist and theologian, in 405 CE, though Roman and Greek historians mention unique Armenian letters some centuries prior. Mesrop is also often credited with creating the Georgian alphabet and a few other Caucasian writing systems, though this is probably just historical boasting. There are two standard varieties of Armenian relating two its historical rule by two different empires; the Ottomans and the Persians. Eastern Armenian is the most widely spoken variety within Armenia while Western Armenian is most common amongst Armenian diaspora. This is due to the Armenian Genocide under Ottoman rule.

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A Year in Language, Day 147: Seri Seri is a native language of Mexico spoken in the state of Sonora. It is generally considered to be an isolate, though it is sometimes classified as a “Hokan” language, a proposed, but not widely agreed upon, family of languages that if it exists would include many isolates and small language families spoken in Baja California and the surrounding area. Seri is spoken by less than 800 people, but is not classified as endangered, merely vulnerable. What this means is that though their numbers are small the language is in vigorous use among the community including young people. It’s not dying, just small. That said modernization and the influence of Spanish could still threaten it, so vulnerable it is. Seri contains sounds common to languages of the West Coast and Mexico; the voiceless lateral velar (like a mix between an “s” and an “l”) and labialized velar and uvular fricatives. Also common of its geographic sisters it allows for large consonant clusters. Seri is a highly inflectional language, and between intense derivational morphology and a cultural use of fixed expressions Seri is naturally resistant to loan words.

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A Year in Language, Day 141: Plains Sign Language Plain Sign Language (PSL) is a sign language used as a common trade language across most of modern day Canada, Central and Western United States, and Northern Mexico. Unlike most of the worlds sign languages PSL was common use amongst hearing and deaf people alike. The origins of PSL are uncertain, it dates back before European contact and does not mirror the grammar of any of the many native language groups who used it. If you have ever seen a (quite possibly racist) depiction of a native american moving their hands vigorously while speaking, this is the origin of that stereotype.

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A Year in Language, Day 140: Tetum Tetum is an Austronesian language of the Nuclear Malayo-Polynesian branch, nuclear in this sense meaning of the core cluster of languages in Maritime Southeast Asia as opposed to the further flung Oceanic languages. It is spoken by 5-600,000 people on the island of Timor. Due to the uneasy political history of Timor, which is still divided down the center, Tetum has a number of regional varieties. In East Timor the Tetum-Portuguese creole language, Tetun-Dili (literally Tetum of Dili, the capital city) is in wide use as a lingua frana, though it is not mutually intelligible and generally classified as a distinct language. Outside of the Creole, Tetum proper has long been a lingua franca of the islands tumultuous central region, displacing colonial languages in rare form, though even non creole Tetum has many Portuguese loans.

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A Year in Language, Day 139: Pictish Pictish is a now extinct Celtic language once spoken in Scotland. While the Pictish people are well attested by outsider records in the first millennium AD, all that remains of their language are placenames and the names of historical Picts. Pictish had been spoken in Scotland since the first few centuries AD. Though they were located to the north, where the Gaelic branches of the Celtic family (Irish and Scots Gaelic), it is now thought that Pictish was a member of the Brittonic branch, like Welsh and Cornish. The debate as to what kind of language Pictish was has gone on basically as long as the language has been extinct. Older theories include it being a member of the extinct continental Celtic branch (like Gaulish), that it was a Germanic language related to Old English, and even that is was non-Indo-European, predating the arrival of Celts or Germans to the isles. The end of Pictish was slow, and likely a process of assimilation to the Gaelic speaking Scots over the course of the later few centuries of the first millennium. Indeed, the son of the last Pictish king was the first of the Scottish kings.

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A Year in Language, Day 135: Concept: Case Alignment Case alignment is a method by which linguists categorize languages, specifically in how they mark subjects and objects, grammatical elements collectively called “core arguments”. You may think you have a good grasp on whats a subject and whats an object. I’m here to tell you you probably don’t. Most people think of subjects as things that do or perform the action of the verb, and objects as things that undergo the action. But its not true. In English we have plenty verbs that show experience or change of state, things one cannot really “do” with any kind of agency (ex. feel, sleep, change, etc.) and of course we have passive constructions as well where the subject is explicitly not active. All subject actually means is a specific grammatical function. We know what subjects are because subjects must fall in certain places in sentences and have effects on other parts of speech (like verbs or case markers). Thus different languages can assign the roles differently. To understand the different types of case alignment its important to understand the difference in types of core arguments, of which there are at least 3, which an astute reader will notice is one more than “subject” and “object”. If you consider a sentence like “Jennifer eats steaks” its readily apparent that there is a subject and an object, and if either were lacking it would need to be implied or replaced. This is what we call a “transitive” verb, meaning it needs two core arguments. Lets call the first one, the slot occupied by “Jennifer”, “A”, for “agent” (I’m saving subject for later). Lets call the other one, the slot occupied by steaks” “O” for object. There is, as those of you who paid attention in English class may know, another type of verb: “intransitive”. Intransitive verbs take one and only one core argument. A parallel English example would be “Jennifer dines”. I can add a prepositional statement to let you know what she dined ~on~, but I can’t simply add an object, “Jennifer dined steaks” is not a correct sentence. Let’s call this argument, the subject of an intransitive verb, “S”, for “subject”. So to recap we have S, the subject of an intransitive verb, A, the subject of a transitive verb, and O, the object of a transitive verb. The most common case alignment is called Nominative/Accusative, or just Accusative for short. These are the names given to the subject and object case in languages with this alignment. Accusative languages group S and A together, marking both as “subjects” and differentiates O as an “object”. English, Latin, Japanese, and Swahili are all Accusative languages. The second most common is Absolutive/Ergative, or Ergative for short, once again named after the cases. Ergative language mark S and O together (the absolutive case) and mark A differently (ergative). Though second most common after Accusative, Ergative languages only compromise less than a sixth of all languages, and many exhibit split-ergativity, wherein they mark like an Ergative language in some situations, and like an Accusative language in others. Basque and Inuktitut are Ergative languages. Next up are Active-Stative languages, also sometimes called semantic alignment. In these languages determining something as subject or object is a matter of semantic distinction; objects are generally core arguments that lack agency and undergo the action, subjects are core arguments that have agency and enact the action. There are two varieties, Split-S and Fluid-S. In Split-S languages verbs carry with them grammatical requirements for if they take a subject or object (i.e. “dine” must always have a subject marked argument, “feel” must always have an object marked argument, etc.) while in Fluid-S languages the marking is, well, fluid, it can change to show shifts in agency or volition (i.e. “fell me” means I fell by accident, “I fell” means I purposefully threw myself on the ground). Guarani is a Fluid-S language, and Cherokee is Split-S. Austronesian alignment is called so because only Austronesian languages have it, notably the Philippine languages, Formosan Languages, and Malagasy. This alignment has elements of Accusative and Ergative alignment, shifting between the two depending on the agreement of the verb, which is marked not to a subject but the topic of the sentence. I’d go into more detail but frankly its complicated and this post is bloated as is. There are a smattering of other unique alignments, direct for when S, A, and O, remain undistinguished, tripartite for when all three are marked distinctly, as in Nez Perce, and there is even a transitive alignment, claimed to exist in only one language, Rushani, and even then only in the past tense, which marks A and O alike, leaving S separate. A fascinating thing to consider is this: why do all these alignments exist, and furthermore if there are 3 types of core arguments why are more languages not tripartite? Once again it’s important to realize that for all its variety languages love efficiency. The arguments of a transitive verb never coexist with the argument of an intransitive verb, thus you don’t actually ~need~ to note the difference. All you have to do is make sure you’re A’s and O’s can be told apart, and then lump S into one of the two. What’s most interesting to me is this: most intransitive verbs have semantically passive subjects i.e. they are predominantly full of words with experiencer and change of state type meanings. Thus it seems to me that it’s more natural to dump S in with the similarly passive O. And yet the languages that do that (Ergative) are massively outnumbered by Accusative languages, which account for 90% of spoken languages, which do just the opposite. Why? I just don’t know.

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A Year in Language, Day 134: GuaraniGuarani is one of the official languages of Paraguay spoken by some 5 million people in central South America. Guarani is unique amongst pre-colonial American languages in that not only is it thriving amongst the original ethnic Guarani speakers, but also amongst other even non-native peoples. It is the source of several English words for South American animals such as “Tapir”, “Piranha” and “Jaguar”.Guarani is well known for its nasality. Not only vowels but consonants can become nasalized. Like many languages of the Americas it is polysynthetic, having an intense level of inflectional and derivational morphology. It is also what is called a “Fluid-S Active-Stative” language. This is a lot of fancy nomenclature for how Guarani defines its subjects and objects. Subject and object can be tricky terms cross linguistically because they are purely grammatical terms. You may have learned in school that subjects perform the action of the verb and objects undergo it, but that’s simply not true in English. For one you have all kinds of verbs for experiences and changes of state where the subject is simply the thing undergoing something (“She transformed”, “the cup broke”, “the dog sleeps” etc.) and of course we even have passive verbs that completely reverse the situation. What defines a subject and object in English and other languages is simply their relation to the verb in terms of grammatical marking. Or perhaps I should say most other languages. Guarani marks subjects and objects fluidly (hence the name) based on their semantic (i.e. meaningful) role in the sentence. Imagine if in English you could say something like “break cup”, meaning the cup shattered, or “cup break” meaning that the cup purposefully shattered, or perhaps broke something else. In Guarani being a subject actually does mean that it plays an active, agentive role in the action of the verb, and being an object denotes passivity or a lack of agency.

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A Year in Language, Day 133: Slavic Language Family The Slavic language family is a branch of the Indo-European family. It shares a common ancestor with the Baltic languages forming the greater Balto-Slavic family. The Slavic languages split from Balto-Slavic sometime in the second millennia BCE. Though the Slavic languages have been distinct from other families for thousands of years it is the most recent of all the modern Indo-European families to diversify from a common point. The ancestral Proto-Slavic tongue was spoke in what is now Ukraine up to around 500 CE, and even after that it would spend about 500 years as “common Slavic”, a more diverse linguistic unit than Proto-Slavic, but still a continuum of mutually intelligible dialects who could share the innovations of language change. It wan’t until around 1000 CE, around the same time the Normans invaded Britain to begin the birth of Middle English, that the Slavic peoples expanded their territories rapidly and in doing so created suitably isolated linguistic groups to develop independently of one another. The oldest recorded Slavic language is Old Church Slavonic, recorded primarily by the saints Cyril (for whom the Cyrillic alphabet is named) and Methodius (who clearly got the historical shaft) who brought Christianity to the Slavs. Old Church Slavonic was being written and recorded near the end of the common Slavic period, meaning that common Slavic is actually an attested language, more or less. Today the Slavic languages are grouped into three genealogical/geographic units; West Slavic, East Slavic, and South Slavic. The East Slavic language’s major players are Russian and Ukrainian. West Slavic contains Polish and the Czechoslovakian languages. South Slavic is the most disputed group as it is also the most diverse and contains the most conservative languages of the family Bulgarian, and the Serbo-Croatian languages. Slavic morphology, like their Baltic sisters, is some of the most conservative among Indo-European languages, meaning they mimic the patters of that ancient ancestor more accurately than, say, Romance or Germanic languages. Most Slavic language have “hard” and “soft” consonants, referring to palatalized and unpalatalized series (palatalization generally results in a “y” sound after the consonant, as in the Russian word for no, anglicized as “nyet”). Slavic languages are also known for unusual consonant clusters, allowing consonants next to each other in ways that are rare cross-linguistically. Both the palatalization and clusters have a partial origin in the loss of a certain group of common Slavic vowels known as “yers” In common Slavic these where very short unstressed vowels, kind of like the English schwa, which were generally something like /i/ or /e/. When they went away two things happened: consonants that were once kept separate were now adjacent and the effect the vowels had on nearby consonants, namely palatalizing them, stuck around and became a contrasting feature.

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A Year in Language, Day 132: Low German Low German, also known as Plattdeutsch, is a West Germanic language spoken in Northern Germany and bordering regions of the Netherlands and Denmark. The “low” in Low German refers to the literal elevation of the countryside, just as the “nether” in Netherlands. The “platt” in its more Germanic name means “flat” and is also a geographical reference. Like all the continental West Germanic languages Low German exists on what is called a dialect continuum, meaning that there are no definitive borders where different varieties of German, Dutch, and other languages are spoken. Instead dialects vary from region to region, with each town able to understand those adjacent to them but not necessarily ones multiple stages removed. To better understand Low German’s place you need to understand the term “isogloss”. Simply put, an isogloss is a geographic region within which a particular linguistics feature is found. This is more refined than simply denoting an area where a dialect is spoken. For example, in America we can say that people speak Southern in the South, a region south of the Mason-Dixon line and going as far west as Texas. But not all Southerners speak the same and people on the edges of that region certainly don’t speak like the ones in the core. To be more scientific we would need to separate all the little features that typify southern accents and then draw those borders on a map. The result would be a bunch of bubbles all across the south denoting things like “within this region people pronounce “caught” and “cot” the same (merge /ɑ/ and /ɔ/)” and “within this region people pronounce “pin” and “pen” the same (merge /ɜ/ into /ɪ/ before /n/). Like an incredibly complex ven diagram we could see that there are regions where most of these features are in effect, regions where only some are, and ones completely removed from them. This granular view of language as simply bundles of features is probably the most accurate portrayal of what languages actually are. Coming back to the West Germanic dialect continuum, we have a historical “High German Consonant Shift”, a period where many of the consonants in High German changed in a way that distinguishes it from its sisters, things like /t/ -> /s/ (English “out”, German “aus”) and /p/ -> /f/ (English “ship”, Dutch “schip”, German “Schiff”). Different individual features of this shift effected different regions, creating a distinctive north-south layering of isoglosses known as the Rhenish fan. Dutch completely escapes the northernmost bounds of the shift, standing above whats called the Uerdingen line, above which old Germic /k/ remains unadulterated and below which it softens to /ç/ in certain environments, as such it is more commonly known as the ik/ich border, a reference to the pronunciation of the first person pronoun. Low German straddles this line, and sets its generally recognized border slightly further south at the Benrath line, across which /k/ is further altered in even more conditions to /x/, so north of the line, in Low German, one pronounces the verb for “to make” as “makken” and southern of it, in High German, it is “Machen”.

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A Year in Language, Day 131: Punjabi Punjabi is an Indo-Aryan language native to Western India and Pakistan, and is the tenth most widely spoken language in the world. It is also the most commonly used language of Sikh people the world over. Like Hindustani, which has the twin standardizations of Pakistani Urdu and Indian Hindi, Punjab is commonly written in two scripts depending on which country and faith you ascribe to. Hindus and Sikhs in India write it with the Brahmic derived Gurmukhi script, whose name literally means “from the Guru’s mouth”. Muslims in Pakistan use an Arabic derived script by way of Persian and Urdu called Shahmukhi, “from the King (Shah)’s mouth”. Unlike most Indo-Aryan languages Punjabi is tonal, having three tones that can be used to distinguish words from one another. Phonetically Punjabi patterns similar to other Indo-Aryan languages, patterning consonants in bilabial, dental, retroflex, palatal, and velar positions, though it lacks the four way split of Hindi and other languages in favor of a three way division of voiced, voiceless, and aspirated. It has a cross-linguistically common ten-point vowel system; the common /a/, /e/, /i/, /o/, and /u/ in “tense” and “lax” variants, similar to the distinction between English “long i”, as in “Sikh” and the “short i” as in “hit”. Punjabi is a fusional language like most Indo-European languages and makes use of inflectional suffixes. It has 5 cases, though one of these cases is “Oblique”, which is effectively linguistic jargon for “kitchen sink”. Whenever a noun is marked for oblique case it is almost always followed by one of a large array of postpositions which carry all manner of grammatical implications.

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A Year in Language, Day 126: Klallam Klallam is a Salishan language of the Pacific Northwest, related to Saanich which was covered in a prior post. Like Saanich it is also a language I know of through my old professor Timothy Montler who has worked with members of the tribe to produce a published grammar and dictionary of the language. Klallam is currently considered extinct as the last native speaker died in 2014, though there are a handful of second language speakers and a desire to revitalize the language. Like other Salishan languages Klallam is polysynthetic, inflecting and compounding words to a high degree, and has a large consonant inventory including glottalized consonants, labialized consonants, and lateral fricatives (kind of like a “l” and an “s” fused together). Klallam makes ample use of reduplication, normally targeting just the first syllable of first consonant of the root, for a wide array of grammatical functions. With the right roots and inflection Klallam can construct words with consonant clusters to rival those of Slavic and Caucasian languages, for a good example I recommend this page of tongue twisters, especially the last one: http://www.cas.unt.edu/~montler/Klallam/kttd.htm (click the text to hear a recording).

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A Year in Language, Day 124: Concept: Linguistic Diversity There’s no denying that the world is full of languages. Even after a full years worth of posts I would not have covered even 5% of them. While impossible to accurately count conservative figures place the number at around 6-7,000 languages spoken in the world currently. It’s interesting to consider this level of diversity when you consider that every distinction in language is a barrier to mutual comprehension. It would make sense, especially in our increasingly global society, for less languages to be spoken, yet this is not the case. Despite the best efforts of colonialism, Babel still holds sway and languages continue to stubbornly split and diversify. As in biology, diversity is a tool linguists can use to determine points of origin. Simply put, things are more diverse where they came from, as any migratory group settling and flourishing elsewhere contains a smaller sampling of the original population. Lets use a familiar example: English. In America the majority of distinctive accents lie in the northeast, which is where most of the first English colonists settled. Variety in American accents generally becomes less distinct as you go west, with most of the west coast possessing a common speech. Go back across the pond to England and you will find almost every city has a unique variety of the language. You can even tell which part of London and what social class someone belongs to. As one might expect the vast majority of linguistic diversity is found in East Africa, where humanity and by extension language in its entirety originated. The second most diverse area is the Indian Subcontinent, which has led to some theories that the region may be the locus of a “second exodus” for humanity after migrating out of Africa. Another country known for diversity is Papua New Guinea with some 800 languages spoken across it’s 8 million people. A related theory connects human migration to sound inventories. Specifically, that the further you get from the origin the smaller and less complex the inventory. In wide strokes this works; Sub-Saharan Africa is home to the languages with the largest number of consonants (some of the !Kung languages have almost 50 consonants), and the Polynesian languages, on the last places humanity made it to, average less than 10. It should be noted this theory is not without holes; Caucasian languages and certain language families of the America’s are also notorious for large sound inventories.

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A Year in Language, Day 121: Marshallese

Marshallese is in the Micronesian branch of the Austronesian language family. It is spoken by 40-50,000 people primarily in the Marshall Islands.

Unlike most languages of this family, Marshallese actually has a sizeable inventory of sounds, mostly due to its use of secondary articulation features. Almost all the consonants come in palatalized, velarized, and labio-velarized forms. It’s vowel system is theoretically simple, four vowels in a “vertical system”, meaning that vowel height alone distinguishes them (vowel frontness not necessary). However due to all the secondary articulation and commonplace semi-vowels (consonants like /w/ and /j/), all of which are notorious for coloring vowels, the surface realization of these four vowels can be manifold. It is actually a cross-linguistic tendency; the larger the inventory the less allophones and vice versa.

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A Year in Language, Day 120: Evenki

Evenki is a member of the Tungusic language family whose members are spoken in Siberia and bordering parts of China. Evenki is the largest member of the family and its namesake; you will often find, especially in older sources, this language referred to as Tungus. Tungus was the term used for the ethnic Evenks and their language by the neighboring Yakuts (a Turkic ethnic group) people and is no longer considered appropriate. Evenki is likely the ultimate origin of the English word “shaman” Evenki is spoken by around 17,000 people and is endangered as fewer young people learn it. The phonetic inventory of Evenki is fairly standard, 20 or so consonants and a standard 5-6 vowel system, though Evenki populations in different regions, primarily those across the Russian/Chinese border, have considerable variety. Russian Evenks generally use the Cyrillic alphabet, while Chinese Evenks use a Latin script or even Mongolian, a modified version of which has long been used for the related Manchu language.

Evenk is an agglutinative language with a large case system. Evenk distinguishes alienable and inalienable possession, meaning it marks differently for possession of objects and property and possession of limbs and relations, the logic being that one does not “have” a mother or an arm in the same way one may “have” a television or a home. It is also noteworthy in having a possessed case instead of a possessive. In most languages with possessive constructions the marking goes on the possessor, for example in the English phrase “the bee’s knees” it is the bee that gets marked, not the knees, though both are part of the construction. In Evenki it is the opposite (sometimes at least, like I said it has multiple ways to express posession).

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A Year in Language, Day 119: Hunnic

Hunnic is a now extinct language once spoken in the Hunnic empire. If you remember Attila the Hun from the history books, that’s who were talking about. It was spoken between the 4th and 5th centuries CE. Despite their expansive conquest and influence no direct attestation of the language remains.

The entire corpus of the Hunnic language consists of three words recorded by Roman historians; “medos”, meaning mead, “kamos” a barley drink, and “strava” a funerary feast. The rest comes from the names of people and places within the Hunnic dominion. This is further complicated by the fact that the secondary de facto language of the empire was Gothic, an East Germanic language, meaning that what Hunnic terminology we do have or can reconstruct sometimes turns out to be Gothic (or even Slavic or Latin) instead.

The most popular theory currently is that the Huns spoke a Turkic language, or a Mongolic language with Turkic influence, which matches both the profile for the geographic origin of the Huns (the central Asian steppes), and lines up with proposed analogs to known Hunnic terms in other Turkic languages. Despite the name and contemporary folklore, the people and language of modern day Hungary are not related to the Huns of Attila.