Archive:More about language
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WELCOME TO THE SCHOOL OF
LANGUAGE AND LITERATURE
part of the Faculty for Humanities.
Hello and welcome to the Wikiversity School of Language and Literature. Here we share our knowledge of methods and ways of writing poetry and prose, and learn non US-English languages and explore their cultures, too. We also discuss many works of literature and literary epochs they belong to, as well as their historical development and the main characteristics by which they can be recognized.
Science that studies the structure of a language and its development is called linguistics. Wikiversity's School of Linguistics is part of the Faculty of Social Sciences.
School history
The School of Literature and English Studies was founded within the Wikiversity's Department of Humanities on 15 July 2004, in the time when Wikiversity was still part of the Wikibooks project. Eventually, it became one of the most developed of Wikiversity's schools.
On 30 March 2005, the School of Foreign Language Learning was founded within the Department of Practical Arts and Sciences, though it failed to organize or function adequately.
Soon after the Wikiversity became a separate Wikimedia project, these two schools were merged together, creating the School of Language and Literature, as part of the Faculty of Humanities.
School bulletin board
- We are always looking for contributors to our school--please see our list of projects if you're looking for a place to start! Signed, Trinity507
- We are in the process of reformatting the school homepage in the hopes of making it easier to navigate--please bear with us and feel free to jump right in and help! Signed, Trinity507
Notice of New Resources
- The School of Language and Literature library was founded February 21st, 2009.
- The School of Language and Literature resource catalog has been revised and updated (still under construction) as of February 21st, 2009.
Departments and divisions
Foreign language departments
see also School of Linguistics and the Foreign Language Learning Center
organized in alphabetical order
- Arabic language department
- Aymara language department part of the South American Languages Division
- Breton language department part of the Brythonic Celtic Languages Division
- Chinese language department
- Cornish language department part of the Brythonic Celtic Languages Division
- French language department
- German language department
- Hebrew language department
- Italian language department
- Japanese language department
- Klingon language department language invented for Star Trek by Marc Okrand
- Korean language department
- Quechua language department part of the South American Languages Division
- Southeast Asian language department
- Spanish language department
- Tolkien language department languages invented by J.R.R. Tolkien
- Turkish language department
Writing and literature departments
Disputed departments
listed here are all of our substantial but disputed pages
Tasks
all of our potentially valuable but empty, underdeveloped or nonexistent pages
- Topic:Portuguese
- Indonesian
- Department of Germanic Studies(under major construction)
- American poetry
- American poetry
- British novel
- Slavic
- History history of literature
Catalogs and Directories
Did you know...
- ...that Old English is grammatically closer to modern German than to modern English?
- ...that Slavonic languages are mutually more similar than the German dialects?
- ...that John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, author of The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit, has highly influenced later fictional literature worldwide? And did you know that he was also a great expert in languages, and that he has created about twenty artificial languages himself?
- ...that Esperanto is the most famous among many artificial languages? It is an auxiliary language created by Polish doctor Zamenhof, whose pseudonym was doctor Esperanto.
- ...that Tamil is the oldest surviving language in the world, still spoken in the state of Tamil Nadu, India.
Wikiversity language courses
- Introduction to Russian
- Introduction to Sanskrit Language (stub)
- Introduction to Swedish
- Mandarin
- Latin stream
- Introduction to Latin
- Introduction to Arabic
- Introduction to Breton
- Introduction to Finnish
- Introduction to Filipino
- Hindi
- Introduction to Italian
- Introduction to the Dutch Language
- Introductory Ancient Greek Language
- Japanese question words
- Portuguese Alphabet
- Rules of Esperanto grammar
- Russian language
- Spanish
- ESL for Primary School
- Introductory Esperanto
- Learning the Basics of French
- Introductory Korean
- Korean writing system
- Aztec language
- Maya language
- Kernewek Onan
Selected biography

Vuk Stefanović Karadžić (1787-1864) was one the most prominent Serbian linguists. He reformed the Serbian Cyrillic alphabet by applying the principles one letter per one sound and write as you speak, and realized the idea of introducing the spoken language into the Serbian literature. He was collecting and publishing Serbian folk stories and poems. His major books were Serbian Dictionary and Serbian Grammar, both published together in 1818, in which he for first time used the reformed alphabet. Although there were some opponents of Vuk's language reform, his principles were finally accepted and realized in Serbian literature and linguistics. Vuk's language was a base upon which the modern Serbian standard language was developed.
Notable quotes
"Language is guardian of a nation. As long as the language exists, as long as we keep it, love it, and respect it, as long as we write in it and speak it; the nation exists as well, and it doesn't flow over into another one, nor it will disappear."
— Vuk St. Karadzic, Serbian slavicist