Do you speak Uglish? How English has evolved in Uganda Please don’t dirten my shirt with your muddy hands. Stop cowardising and go and see that girl. Don’t just beep her again, bench her. Typos? No, we’re speaking Uglish (pronounced you-glish), a Ugandan form of English influenced by Luganda and other local dialects, which has produced hundreds of words with their own unique meanings. Some will be immediately obvious to English speakers: dirten, meaning to make dirty; cowardising, to behave like a coward. Others offer small insights into youth culture: beep – meaning to ring someone but to hang up quickly before the person answers. Now, Bernard Sabiti, a Ugandan cultural commentator has recorded these colloquialisms in a new book which attempts to unlock what he calls “one of the funniest and strangest English varieties in the world”. Working as a consultant for international NGOs, Sabiti kept being asked “what kind of English do Ugandans speak?” The result? He also credits local musicians for introducing a number of words into the lexicon.
Beautiful web-based timeline software 25 maps that explain the English language English is the language of Shakespeare and the language of Chaucer. It’s spoken in dozens of countries around the world, from the United States to a tiny island named Tristan da Cunha. It reflects the influences of centuries of international exchange, including conquest and colonization, from the Vikings through the 21st century. Here are 25 maps and charts that explain how English got started and evolved into the differently accented languages spoken today. 1) Where English comes from English, like more than 400 other languages, is part of the Indo-European language family, sharing common roots not just with German and French but with Russian, Hindi, Punjabi, and Persian. 2) Where Indo-European languages are spoken in Europe today Saying that English is Indo-European, though, doesn’t really narrow it down much. 3) The Anglo-Saxon migration The next source of English was Old Norse. 7) The colonization of America 8) Early exploration of Australia 14) Where people read English Wikipedia
Where did English come from? - Claire Bowern | TED-Ed There are two other TED-Ed lessons related to this topic: How languages evolve and How did English evolve? (a lesson that fills in some of the details that we omit here due to the fact that the focus of this lesson was further in the past). There is still a great deal of debate about Indo-European, most importantly about the location of the homeland. To learn more about the distribution of languages across the world, see LL-map or The Ethnologue.
The History of English - How New Words Are Created The drift of word meanings over time often arises, often but not always due to catachresis (the misuse, either deliberate or accidental, of words). By some estimates, over half of all words adopted into English from Latin have changed their meaning in some way over time, often drastically. For example, smart originally meant sharp, cutting or painful; handsome merely meant easily-handled (and was generally derogatory); bully originally meant darling or sweetheart; sad meant full, satiated or satisfied; and insult meant to boast, brag or triumph in an insolent way. Some words have changed their meanings many times. Some words have become much more specific than their original meanings. Some words came to mean almost the complete opposite of their original meanings. A related category is where an existing word comes to be used with another grammatical function, often a different part of speech, a process known as functional shift.