Author: 101translations

The Basque language is spoken in parts of Spain and France, places from which, historically, many migrants left to start new lives overseas. As a result of this, there are small pockets of Basque speakers around the world, particularly in North America.

Minority languages often struggle to survive, surrounded by majority languages that give advantages in commerce and the wider world. But Basque is surviving surprisingly well, perhaps partly because Basque speakers in Spain and France were already used to managing two or more languages in their daily lives.

Like many others, Basque fortune-seekers flocked to California during the gold rush in the nineteenth century. Most of them, of course, failed to make their fortune panning for gold, but they tended to go into other sectors, including mining and herding sheep, in various parts of the United States. Their friends and relatives joined them, and gradually a sizable Basque community took root in America, with an area of Idaho noted for its large Basque population.

For a while, it looked as though Basque was losing out to English, but it has witnessed a surprising resurgence. Basque-Americans get together to play and sing traditional music and songs, to eat Basque meals, and to speak Basque, showing that they have no problem with being Basque and American at the same time.

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We’ve written before about the different types of communication animals use, and what these have in common with human language. Primates – apes and monkeys – which are so close to humans, give us some clues about how human language originated.

A new theory is coming out of research carried out at the University of Warwick, England, led by Chiara de Gregorio. It suggests that human language may originate in laughter. Primate species, including humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, all enjoy a good laugh and laugh in response to various stimuli, including being tickled – and our laughs are remarkably similar, with rhythmic intervals between successive sounds. To the researchers, this suggests that we all share a common ancestor species that liked to laugh too, and that laughter has remained essentially the same for about 15 million years!

Humans’ laughter differs from that of other apes – we are able to use it politely in response to social cues, whereas they do not. This indicates a greater awareness and control of delicate social situations. At some point in our evolutionary history, this may have been the change that sparked the development of human language.

And that’s no laughing matter.

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Regular readers of our blog know that while our business is facilitating communication between humans, we’re very intrigued by how animals communicate too.

Recent research by scientists from the University of Zurich and Harvard University explored vocal exchanges between bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They found out that the bonobos – which are similar to chimpanzees – string together different sounds into phrases and, further, that these phrases seem to communicate specific meanings. For example, one sound, which showed that the animal had an intention, could be connected with another, which meant that the group needed to stay coordinated, to give a combined meaning like: ‘Let’s all do this thing together.’

While bonobo communication falls sort of being an actual language, it is essential for the well-being of the social groups they live in. They inhabit dense forested areas and often cannot see the other members of their group. By communicating as they do, they can ensure that they all stay together and direct each other towards certain common goals.

This research into the communication style of an animal with which we humans share a relatively recent common ancestor provides insights into how our language may have evolved, and that the complex sentence structures we use today are likely to have started with simpler building blocks.

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The speaking of Spanish in the US has become a focus of the culture wars, with some Americans seeing it as an assault on ‘American values’. When Bad Bunny, a rap artist, performed in Spanish at the Super Bowl, Donald Trump complained that nobody understood a word he was saying.

That wasn’t true, though. Not even close. In fact, America has almost as many Spanish speakers as Spain – about 40 million – with many more studying Spanish at school or college and speaking it well as a second language.

At the same time, however, families who move to the US from Spanish-speaking countries tend to assimilate quite quickly, becoming primarily English speakers within a couple of generations, and finding out, when they visit their countries of origin for their holidays, that it’s hard to have a conversation with their Abuelita. And Spanish speakers in the US, and to some extent in Latin America, make abundant use of loanwords from English, like ‘picop’ (pick-up truck] and ‘jaiscul’ (high school), and even import grammatical structures from English.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: linguistic diversity is beautiful, and there’s no reason why people can’t happily speak two or more languages. The more communication the better!

We’re sure that Abuelita would agree.

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Sámi are an indigenous culture living across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. There are nine Sámi languages with North Sámi the most widely spoken, with around 20,000 speakers.

One of the challenges with preserving the use of Sámi is the fact that the speakers live in different places, with different levels of official recognition.

In Sweden, it is recognised as a minority language and officially children have the right to be taught through it, but in practice often there aren’t enough teachers, local areas don’t implement the law, or the number of speakers is too low to provide classes. Over the generations, this has led to the current situation, which is that only a small percentage of Sámi people speak their own language fluently enough to effectively pass it on to their children. There are also strong folk memories of earlier times, when Sámi children were punished and made to feel ashamed for using their mother tongue.

Today, experts point out that, while it is very important for minority groups to speak the majority language fluently, there’s no reason why they can’t also speak their own language. The human brain evolved to manage more than one language, and the benefits of bilingualism are very well-known.

Younger generations of Sámi speakers are increasingly creating online content in their native tongue, providing some hope for a brighter future for a language under pressure.

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You may have come across the bouba/kiki question before. This is the fact that, the world over, people from all sorts of linguistic backgrounds feel that ‘bouba’ sounds “round” and ‘kiki’ sounds “spiky” and, more broadly, that certain sounds should ‘look’ a certain way.

That might sound funny, but it offers some insights into the origin of language, and how it may have developed.

A researcher in comparative psychology, Maria Loconsole, explored whether other species make similar associations. She tested newly hatched chicks, whose birdbrains had not yet been influenced by their experience of the world. She placed chicks in front of images of round, blobby shapes and of sharp, spiky shapes, and then played them recordings of human voices saying ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’. The results were amazing: 80% of the chicks approached the round shape when they heard ‘bouba’, and the same percentage approached the spiky shape when they heard ‘kiki’.

What does it mean? Given that the ancestors of humans and the ancestors of birds parted evolutionary ways about 300 million years ago, it’s suggestive of a perceptual bias that dates very far back in our evolutionary history. One theory suggests that this instinctive bias might relate to the physical properties of moving objects and may have provided some evolutionary advantage in terms of helping animals to avoid predators in their environment.

In humans, who have developed language, the bouba/kiki effect has had many impacts on how we talk and perceive the world around us. It might sound funny, but this is a very important area of research.

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We know that humans started using language more or less as we do about 100,000 years ago, but what did they sound like? And what about the precursors of modern humans, who must have incrementally moved closer to using language much as we do today? What sort of noises did they make?

It may be impossible to reconstruct a whole language or communication system with the few artefacts we have from the extremely remote past, but the fossilised bones of our ancestors provide some clues about what they sounded like. They can tell us about the position of the vocal tract, the structure of the brain and the size of the spinal cord and how these gradually evolved over time to what we see today. If, as researchers believe, the gradual development of language provided our ancestors with an evolutionary advantage, this will have impacted on how the human body developed over time.

About 27 million years ago, an ancestor we have in common with various monkey species was the first to be able to make some vowel sounds, a necessary precursor to language. 3.2 million years ago, Australopithecus Afarensis could make some vowel sounds, but not ‘i’, and probably communicated with a limited number of distinctive sounds. 1.6 million years ago, Homo Erectus walked much as we do, might have cooked food, and was able to use a wider range of sounds, perhaps employing onomatopoeia to create simple words. 50,000 years ago, when Neanderthal people had spread across Europe, they had the cognitive capacity for language, but probably sounded quite different to us, with more nasal sounds, like in modern-day French. Their complex behaviours suggest that they had language, as we do, and used it to organise activities such as hunting, discussing abstract concepts, and teaching skills to each other.

40,000 years ago – very little time, really, when you think about it – Cro-Magnons, early modern humans, were not speaking the same languages as we do now, but they were speaking in the same way. Their vocal tracts, brain structure, and the size of their spinal cords were the same as they are now.

Check out The Language Puzzle – a fascinating book by archaeologist Steven Mithen – if you’d like to know more!

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Socotri is the native language of Socotra, an archipelago that’s part of Yemen. Most of the approximately 50,000 inhabitants are Socotri people from the Al Mahrah tribe. Their language is one of the oldest in southern Arabia.

Socotri is a semitic language related to other languages spoken on the Arabian mainland, including Mehri. It is used not just for everyday communication, but also for the rich tradition of poetry on the island.

Of course, as is the case with so many minority languages, today Socotri is under threat. Recognising its importance, in 2026, the Socotri Language Center for Studies and Research, supported by UNESCO, held a special day dedicated to the language and its cultural and intellectual importance.

One of the most hopeful signs for the future? A new digital platform with keyboard layouts for laptops and mobile phones, making it easier to integrate the use of Socotri into an increasingly globalised world, and into formal educational curriculums.

And in case you were wondering – yes, 101translations can also translate into Socotri.

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What can we learn from ancient dental plaque?

A lot more than you might think!

Researcher Anita Radini was examining 1000-year-old dental tartar from a woman’s bones in Germany when suddenly she noticed that it contained some bright blue pigment. Wanting to know more, she had it analysed and found out that it was ultramarine.

Ultramarine is a pigment that, 1000 years ago, was sourced only from lapis lazuli originating in a single region of Afghanistan. This extremely valuable substance was worth as much as gold and was used in mediaeval painting to render the robes of the Virgin Mary in the intricate manuscripts being produced by the leading artists and calligraphers of the day.

The presence of this pigment in the woman’s dental tartar suggested that she had probably been one of those artists, using her tongue – as artists do – to bring the bristles of her paintbrush to a neat point. But some art historians doubted that a woman would have been skilled enough to work with such a valuable substance and proposed that she must have been the real artist’s cleaning lady.

Ultimately, Radini and her colleagues were able to prove that some women in religious orders at the time were indeed creating art of this calibre, and even located a number of manuscripts signed by their female creators. The evidence is clear that female scribes, as well as male ones, were indeed making books with lapis lazuli pigment in the same area and around the same time this woman was alive.

This amazing breakthrough opens up many research avenues into the work of women artists and calligraphers and the manuscripts they created to communicate the Christian message of mediaeval Europe – and into the rich, surprising potential of dental tartar as a vehicle for clues to the past.

Think of that next time you lick your pencil.

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In general, humans tend to show neural synchrony when they talk, play or sing together. And it has long been recognised that when mothers and their small children play together, their neural activity becomes synchronised.

New research shows that this process takes place between mothers and children even when they are not interacting in their native language, showing that this brain-bonding process is effectively translated along with their thoughts.

By studying mothers and their children at play, first in their native language, and then in another language, and measuring their neural activity, the researchers showed that brain synchrony occurred in either language, as compared to when mothers and children played separately.

The implications of this research are considerable. Parents in bilingual relationships, for example, often acquire their second language later in life, and worry that they will not be able to interact with their children on as emotional a level as the parent using their mother tongue. In fact, the children will experience brain synchrony regardless of the language or languages their parents use with them, and whether or not they are fluent in those languages.

And, of course, motherly love is the ultimate universal language!

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