Researchers uncover the origins of the Uralic language family

Welcome to this week’s edition of Discovery Dispatch, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics!

📢 Updates

Announcements and what’s new with me and Linguistic Discovery.

7000 Languages’ Revitalization Fellowship

If you are interested in working to revitalize your community’s endangered language, you might be interested in this fellowship opportunity from 7000 Languages, a nonprofit organization “with the mission to empower communities around the world to teach, learn, and sustain their endangered languages”. The deadline for applications is August 24.

LINGUIST List 36.2339 Internships: Applied Linguistics, Language Documentation: Language Revitalization Fellowship Opportunity, 7000 Languages, remote

The LINGUIST List, International Linguistics Community Online.

More information about the fellowship can be found here.

🆕 New from Linguistic Discovery

This week’s content from Linguistic Discovery.

Revitalizing a language from old manuscripts

Is it possible to revitalize a dormant language that’s no longer spoken?

Yes! You just have to have the right materials—a dictionary, grammatical description, and collection of texts/stories. Together these materials are known as the Boasian Trilogy (after Franz Boas, who stated this documentary practice).

In this special video issue for paid subscribers, I take you on a tour of the Boasian Trilogy for Chitimacha, a once-dormant language I’m helping to revitalize. I talk a bit about their historical context, how linguists go about documenting a language, and what kinds of modern research these manuscripts have enabled.

Revitalizing a dormant language from 80-year-old manuscripts

How archival manuscripts are helping revitalize the Chitimacha language of Louisiana

Linguistic DiscoveryDaniel W. Hieber, Ph.D.

📰 In the News

Language and linguistics in the news.

National Navajo Code Talkers Day

Today is National Navajo Code Talkers Day!

During WWII the U.S. military recruited speakers of Navajo to create a code based on their incredibly complex language. The Japanese were never able to break the code, and it use contributed significantly to U.S. success in the Pacific theater.

Major Howard Connor, 5th Marine Division signal officer during the war, stated:

Were it not for the Navajos, the Marines would never have taken Iwo Jima.

The Navajo were the most famous of several Native American groups whose languages were used as codes during the war. Other languages included Cherokee, Choctaw, Comanche, Cree, Fox, Mohawk, Seminole/Creek, and Cree.

Despite their patriotism and heroic contributions to the war, in March the Department of Defense and U.S. Army scrubbed their websites of any mention of the code talkers as part of Trump’s anti-DEI initiatives.

So if you’re looking for a place to learn more about the code talkers, I highly recommend Code Talker, the only memoir of one of the original Navajo code talkers. I’ve read every book on the code talkers and this is by far my favorite:

Baidu seeks to decipher animal communication

China’s largest search engine, Baidu, is looking to patent an AI system that would decipher animals sounds

• China’s Baidu looks to patent AI system to decipher animal sounds (Reuters)

The K-pop band making Korean Sign Language famous

Big Ocean, a K-pop boy band whose members are deaf or hard of hearing, incorporate Korean Sign Language (KSL) into their videos and performances, and fans are loving it

Archaeologists find oldest rune stone in Norway

This is an older bit of news from January 2023, but researchers have found and dated a runestone in Norway to sometime between 0–250 CE, potentially making it the earliest instance of writing in Scandinavia. Known as the Svingerud Stone, it has several types of inscriptions in different areas, including the beginning of the runic alphabet or futhark, ᚠ (f), ᚢ (u) and ᚦ (th).

World’s oldest rune stone found in Norway, archaeologists believe

The find was kept secret by researchers for more than a year.

ScienceNorwayBård Amundsen

• World’s oldest rune stone found in Norway, archaeologists believe (Science Norway)

The research into this runestone was published later in 2023:

Runic fragments from the Svingerud grave field in Norway | John Benjamins

Abstract In 2021–2023, several rune-inscribed sandstone fragments were discovered by archaeologists of the Museum of Cultural History, University of Oslo, at a Roman Iron Age grave field by the Svingerud road at Hole in eastern Norway. Several of these fragments fit together as parts of one larger sandstone slab. The main fragment with multiple inscriptions was unearthed in a flat grave (cremation) in November 2021. Radiocarbon dating of the organic material dated the burial to before 300 CE (Solheim et al., forthcoming). This article provides a detailed runological and linguistic account of the inscribed fragments, as of July 2023. The focus is on the main finds, while the work on numerous small fragments is ongoing. This find may shed new light on the features and functions of early runic writing.

John BenjaminsKristel Zilmer|Krister S.K. Vasshus

🗞️ Current Linguistics

Recently published research in linguistics.

The origins of the Uralic language family

A recent study finds genetic evidence that the the Uralic language family—which includes Hungarian, Finnish, Estonian, and others—had its origins in people living in northeastern Siberia about 4,500 years ago (c. 2500 BCE).

Ancient DNA solves mystery of Hungarian, Finnish language family’s origins

Where did Europe’s distinct Uralic family of languages—which includes Hungarian, Finnish, and Estonian—come from? New research puts their origins a lot farther east than many thought.

Phys.orgChristy DeSmith

Ancient DNA reveals the prehistory of the Uralic and Yeniseian peoples - Nature

Genome-wide sequencing of 180 ancient individuals shows a continuous gradient of ancestry in Early-to-Mid-Holocene hunter-gatherers from the Baltic to the Transbaikal region and distinct contemporaneous groups in Northeast Siberia, and provides insights into the origins of modern Uralic and Yeniseian speakers.

NatureTian Chen Zeng

Blind people gesture (and why that’s kind of a big deal)

Lauren Gawne over at the Superlinguo blog reports on new research that shows that both blind and sighted people who speak the same language use similar gestures to represent events. Since these gestures can’t have been acquired visually in the case of blind people, this suggests that gesture and speech must be somehow linked in the brain.

• Özçalışkan, Lucero, & Goldin‐Meadow. 2024. Is vision necessary for the timely acquisition of language‐specific patterns in co‐speech gesture and their lack in silent gesture?. Developmental Science 27(5): e13507. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1111/desc.13507.

Each AI chatbot has its own distinctive writing style—just as humans do

Each person’s individual way of speaking is called an idiolect, and linguists can actually measure differences between individual idiolects, such as frequency of word use or use of grammatical constructions. Linguist Karolina Rudnicka realized she could similarly create a linguistic profile for the different Large Language Models on the market.

ChatGPT And Gemini AIs Have Their Own Distinctive Writing Styles—Just as Humans Do

ChatGPT and Gemini AI write in different idioms, linguists find

Scientific AmericanKarolina Rudnicka

• Ridnicka. preprint. The language of AI tools as idiolects—thus comparable to other idiolects. DOI: https://doi.org/10.31219/osf.io/7qwzu_v1.

LLMs do metalinguistic analysis

Continuing on the topic of LLMs, here’s some additional reporting on a study I mentioned last week which showed that recent versions of LLMs are now capable of doing metalinguistic analysis:

As chatbots improve, humans’ unique language abilities are becoming less special

UC Berkeley researchers say large language models have gained “metalinguistic ability,” a hallmark of human language and cognition no other animal has displayed.

Phys.orgJason Pohl

Large linguistic models: Investigating LLMs’ metalinguistic abilities

The performance of large language models (LLMs) has recently improved to the point where models can perform well on many language tasks. We show here that—for the first time—the models can also generate valid metalinguistic analyses of language data. We outline a research program where the <italic xmlns:mml=“http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML” xmlns:xlink=“http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink”>behavioral interpretability</i> of LLMs on these tasks is tested via prompting. LLMs are trained primarily on text—as such, evaluating their metalinguistic abilities improves our understanding of their general capabilities and sheds new light on theoretical models in linguistics. We show that OpenAI’s (2024) o1 vastly outperforms other models on tasks involving drawing syntactic trees and phonological generalization. We speculate that OpenAI o1’s unique advantage over other models may result from the model’s chain-of-thought mechanism, which mimics the structure of human reasoning used in complex cognitive tasks, such as linguistic analysis.

IEEE Xplore

Elephants use gestures intentionally—just like humans

For the first time, researchers have collected evidence that African elephants intentionally and creatively use gestures to signal what they want — a method of communication associated with human language.

The team found that elephants can recognize when someone is paying attention or not, persist with gesturing when their desire is only partially filled, and make their gesturing more elaborate when their first attempts are unsuccessful.

These are the main criteria for a behavior called “goal-directed intentionality,” and, outside of human communication, it has only been widely documented in primates, with some individual exceptions in non-primate species, according to the study.

• Elephants use gestures intentionally—just like humans, new evidence shows (Idaho Statesman)
• Eleuteri et al. 2025. Investigating intentionality in elephant gestural communication. Royal Society Open Science 12(7). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rsos.242203.

📃 This Week’s Reads

Interesting articles I’ve come across this week.

Minimal Pair Puzzles and Word Meaning

Have you ever considered how we differentiate words as meaning-bearing entities? Minimal pair puzzles reveal how we do so, according to a fundamental principle of linguistics.

Psychology TodayMarcel Danesi Ph.D.

Criticising mispronunciation is ‘hypocritical snobbery’

Expert argues that ‘linguistic puritans’ around English will ‘eventually be enveloped’

The TelegraphCharles Hymas

5 Surprising Reasons Unrelated Languages Can Be Similar

Why do some languages sound alike, even if they aren’t related? Sometimes it’s more than random chance!

Duolingo BlogCindy Blanco, Ph.D.

How the alphabet began

And some Dead Language Society lore

Dead Language SocietyColin Gorrie

Explore the History of the German Language and How It Works - Rosetta Stone

From Proto-Germanic to Modern Standard German, see how the German language changed and adapted. Discover key aspects of how German works.

Rosetta StoneJacyb Porter

Speaking of Words: Language Death

Of the 7,159 living languages in the world that the Ethnologue website now lists, it considers 3,193 to be “endangered,” that is, “It is no longer the norm that children learn and use this language.”

InDepthNH.orgMichael Ferber

Do you really need to read to learn? What neuroscience says about reading versus listening

Whether reading a book or listening to a podcast, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities support comprehension in different ways.

The ConversationStephanie N. Del Tufo

Is it time to chart a new path for xenolinguistics through sci-fi? | Aeon Essays

To truly explore alien languages, linguists must open themselves to the maximum conceivable degree of cosmic otherness

Aeon Magazine

How Hindi emerged as the lingua franca of the ‘Hindi Heartland’ at the cost of other languages

An excerpt from ‘The Hindi Heartland: A Study’, by Ghazala Wahab.

Scroll.inGhazala Wahab

Too many em dashes? Weird words like ‘delves’? Spotting text written by ChatGPT is still more art than science

Unusual words or punctuation may serve as ‘tells’ that something has been written by a chatbot. But even with that knowledge, most people struggle to discern human writing from AI-generated text.

The ConversationRoger J. Kreuz

📚 Books & Media

New (and old) books and media touching on language and linguistics.

Books for Linguistics Students

Do you study (or want to study) linguistics? Here are a few books written specifically for linguistics students:

Linguistic Discovery’s Amazon Page - Books for Linguistics Students

Shop recommended products from Linguistic Discovery on www.amazon.com. Learn more about Linguistic Discovery’s favorite products.

🗃️ Resources

Maps, databases, lists, etc. on language and linguistics.

Online Database of Interlinear Texts (ODIN)

The Online Database of Interlinear Texts (ODIN) is a collection of glossed interlinear texts extracted from documents on the web. v2.1 contains 158,007 instances of interlinear examples from 1,496 languages.

ODIN :: The Online Database of INterlinear glossed text

Interlinear gloss - Wikipedia

Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.Contributors to Wikimedia projects

👋🏼 Til next week!

I’ll leave you this week with a joke I got from @the.language.nerds on Instagram:

A priest, a pastor, and a rabbit entered a clinic to donate blood. The nurse asked the rabbit: “What’s your blood type?”

“I’m probably a type O,” said the rabbit.