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This paper talks about Chinese loanwords in selected Southeast Asian languages (Khmer, Thai, Hmong, Vietnamese, Tagalog, Indonesian) and compares how different Chinese words got into different SEA languages depending on how the Chinese integrated with the local population.

This study from the University of Pennsylvania explores whether or not Asian-Americans have a certain "sound" to their speaking that distinguishes them from their White counterparts. White and Asian-American audio samples were curated for a test group to listen to in order to guess their races. On average, White and Asian-American participants in the study were around 65% accurate in their guesses, suggesting more success than random guessing. Some individual participants had accuracy as high as 85% or 90%. Some audio samples yielded guesses that were accurate upwards of 90% of the time. Asian-American participants were often more accurate in their guesses, but less able to express how they knew. White participants described the "upspeak" often used as a "lack of assertiveness." They also identified "increased pauses between words" and "jerkier speech". They also noted that Asian Americans used more "filler material" in their sentences like "um," "uh," or "like." I thought that was interesting because in Japanese, similar filler words like あのう and ええと are used. In Indonesian, we often hum as a filler, which I found to be different than typical English speakers' hums, and that I as a bilingual person have started to do when speaking English as well.

For example: "English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary." "Hawaiian is a cousin of Indonesian with a fear of consonants." "Spanish is essentially Italian spoken by Arabs."

There are as many as 800 languages spoken in New York City, and nowhere in the world has more than Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA). You can see many of the languages in the article's map, which is featured in " Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas " by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. The five miles from Astoria to Forest Hills have a dense progression of languages: Greek, Filipino, Urdu, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and others, including more obscure ones like Chavacano, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau, and Bukharian.

Almost every language on the planet includes words that sound like the things they describe. Crash, yawn, glug… speech is just full of these onomatopoeias. And because they have their root in real things they're often easy to identify. Even a non-native speaker might recognise the Hindi "achhee" (a sneeze) or the Indonesian "gluk" (glug). Because these onomatopoeias are so widely encountered, easy to pick up, and convey information might they be the first form of language? That's the argument presented in a recent paper published in Animal Cognition. It points out that our ancestors would have begun encountering more and more noises that we could repeat. Tool use/ manufacture in particular, with its smashes and crashes, would be a prime source of onomatopoeias. Mimicking these sounds could have allowed early humans to "talk" about the objects; describing goals, methods, and objects. Might handing someone a rock and going "smash" been a way to ask them to make a tool? Perhaps different noises could even refer to different tools. Humans are good at extracting information from mimicked sounds. These sounds also trigger "mirror neurons" - parts of the brain that fire when we observe other people doing something - allowing us to repeat those actions. Seeing someone hold a rock a certain way and saying "smash" could have helped our ancestors teach the proper way to smash. But the biggest benefit would be the fact that you can communicate about these objects without seeing them. Having a sound for a tool would allow you to ask someone for it, even if they didn't have it on them. Given these advantages, it's easy to imagine how evolution would have favoured people who mimicked noises. Over time, this would have driven the development of more and more complex communication; until language as we recognise it emerged. Following this narrative, you can see (or maybe hear) how an a human ancestor with almost no language capability gradual