"The myths, or the received wisdom, about Portuguese language in Brazil is that, of course we know we speak a very different version of the language, but this has always been explained to us as maybe perhaps a defect of sorts?" says linguist and translator Caetano Galindo, author of Latim em Pó, a history of Brazilian Portuguese. "You look deeper into things and you find you have to wrap your mind around a very different reality.”
Read moreAllusionist 126. Survival: Custodians of the Languages
In Australia, there were hundreds, perhaps thousands, of languages. Until English arrived.
Read moreAllusionist 118. Survival: Bequest
When the Europeans arrived in Aotearoa New Zealand, as well as guns, stoats and Christianity, they brought ideas of cisgender monogamous heterosexuality that were imposed upon the Māori people as if there had never been anything else. But one word, takatāpui, proved otherwise.
Read moreAllusionist 117. Many Ways At Once
The Scots language didn’t have much of an LGBTQ+ lexicon. So writer and performer Dr Harry Josephine Giles decided to create one.
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