english

One thing that stands out to me about England and the English language is how relatively homogenous they are in terms of language. Yes, I know you have a variety of dialects and accents. But compare that to the continent or Asia, where (historically) travelling just a hundred km or so you find...

Linguistic Purism: the simple ideal that not all forms of a language are equal. One form of this concept is the opposition to loanwords, words borrowed from other languages. The language with the most well known case of such a purist movement is English, wherein well over half of its vocabulary...

How could we make N.Italy be part of it? An example of that is Mid was replaced by With in English and Con was replaced by Amb in Catalan

It may seem a bit far fetched, knowing the tumultuous history of the island, but is there any chance that Great Britain could be an independent unified state, and if so, how could they change history? Right now it is hard to imagine Britain as anything different than it currently is. The three...

I always get confused by the term 'Scandinavia' but I will lose it liberally for this 'What if.' I shall be referring to the nations (in no particular order) of Iceland, the Faroe Islands, Norway, Denmark, Sweden, Finland and Greenland... So... A gradual process beginning in 1800 with most...

What if American Jewish migrants eventually have a patois or mixed language created from English and Yiddish as their main native language? What would that language be like(like how much English or Yiddish would penetrate the language, would it be written in Hebrew or Latin characters, what...

For this challenge, you have to have Americans and Brits be speaking variants of English about as distinct from one another as Dutch and Afrikaans. Is this possible? What could the differences be? What effects would it have on the wider world?

In OTL, English is arguably the farthest from any other Germanic language, and in fact blurs the line between Germanic and Romance languages, especially French, and to a lesser extent, Spanish. Basic Dutch, German, and Scandinavian still sounds vaguely familiar to a Native English-speaker, but...

What would it take to have AVVE (African-American Vernacular English) completely spilt from English.

How different do you think History would be if most languages of the Indo-European language family developed a route similar to English and Persian? By the 20th century, they don't have cases and gendered nouns (possibly English also makes the step towards having non-gendered pronouns like...

With a POD around 1680 to 1750, English would develop pretty similarly enough to OTL to be mutually intelligible, but with enough time to change and feel like it was from an alternate world. Social developments, cultural developments, territorial annexations, migrations, writers, literature...

As the title says, what if the Austro-Hungarians adopt English as the command language in their common army? Let's say, it happen somewhere between 1890 and 1900. What are your thoughts? How does it influence the military performance and Austria-Hungary in general?

From its proto-form and early Roman influence, to the Norman conquests, to its transformation into a global lingua franca and contender for having most words, the English language has cultivated a vast and particularly fascinating vocabulary. It combines both a diverse array of foreign and...

As in this video, Drake was very close to discovering the "Great Southern Continent" But all he saw was the endless ocean. But what if, his ships got blown off course, and discovered Antartica in the 1500s? Would he be able to return home, not circumnavigating the earth as an Englishman, but...

Before Woden was wise he would go to his uncle, Ingemynd, for council and advice. Ingemynd always had good council, for he had lived long and remembered. One day, Woden asked of his uncle how his Cynn, the Ése, came to be. Wise Ingemynd began; "It was Ídel then, void of life, before the...

With a POD of let’s say 1066 have Engliah use the Cyrillic alphabet. It must also be influenced mostly the same way as it is OTL. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_language_influences_in_English This alternate English must be recognizable with the only major thing changing being the...

Basically The Angles, Saxons and Jutes were West Germanic in origin. (or if you want to be specific, Invaeonic/North Sea Germanic) and as a result, Old English was/is a West Germanic language like it's two descendants English and Scots. Then the famous Vikings came into the picture...

The Terror that Conquered Britain "And never before has such terror appeared in Britain as we have now suffered from a pagan race" Point of Divergence - January 6th, 878 Outskirts of Chippenham, England Guthrum overlooked the lit up town from a hill. The night had a silence to it, as...

The challenge is to establish an alternate Belgium that while losing Flanders to the Netherlands, still manages to have a sizable population of Dutch / Flemish speakers and even a significant number of English speakers (who largely outnumber of the OTL German speakers). The latter would entail...

So when looking up older Scandinavian & German documents from the 15th to early 18th centuries they used "hard" C just like English and all the Romance languages do today. This is of course because of the importance of Latin as the religious language. Eventually, all the Germanic languages...