China is a remarkably linguistically diverse nation, although outsiders may not perceive it as such. What is commonly known as Chinese is...

Mandarin is not the only language spoken in China. It may be the lingua franca and widely promoted by the government, threatening the...

Chinese is often presented as a single language with several dialects—but this classification is largely political. Linguists have long...

Is Chinese one language with many dialects or a language family consisting of many different languages? For political reasons, Chinese is...

Chinese isn’t just one language—it’s several. What most people think of as “Chinese” is actually Mandarin, the largest Chinese language...

Many people are aware of the various dialects spoken throughout China, but linguistically, classifying them as dialects is erroneous. The...

People often talk about Chinese as if it were a single language. In fact, it’s more like a language family, with countless “dialects”...

Everyone has heard of the Maya civilization that once ruled over a large swath of Mesoamerica, but when the land was colonized by the...

If you’re not overly familiar with Guatemala, you probably think that it can be classified as a monolingual Spanish-speaking country,...

Guatemala is a more linguistically diverse country than most people give it credit for. It’s true that the majority of the country speaks...

Long ago, Central America was bustling with cultural and ethnolinguistic diversity, home to a plethora of flourishing Maya and Aztec...

To classify Guatemala as a purely Spanish-speaking nation is simply inaccurate. Spanish is indeed the lingua franca of the country,...

Spanish may be the official language, primary language, and lingua franca of Guatemala and Mexico (and, indeed, most of Central America),...

Not everyone in Guatemala speaks Spanish. Indeed, most of the population does, clocking in at around 93%—but that means, of course, that...

It’s estimated that there are around 7,000 languages spoken around this vast world we live in—even though most people could only name a...

Latin America is known for speaking Spanish (or Portuguese in the case of Brazil)—the Latinate languages these countries speak are how...

Most people, if asked to name a language spoken in Guatemala, would immediately jump to Spanish. If they were asked to name another one,...

Guatemala is home to the largest number of present-day Mayan language speakers, who are spread primarily across Guatemala, southern...

Don’t let the lingua franca status of Spanish in most Central American countries fool you—an abundance of indigenous languages are still...

The world is a lot more linguistically diverse than most people think—and there are far more languages spoken in each country than most...