Omniglot News (31/08/25)

Here’s the latest news from the world of Omniglot.

New language pages:

• Naman, a Southern Oceanic language spoken on Malekula Island in central Vanuatu.


• Mbugu (kiMbugu) / Maʼa (kiMaʼa), a Bantu language spoken in the Lushoto District in the Tanga Region in the northeast of Tanzania.


• Mwerlap (N̄wërlap), a Southern Oceanic language spoken in the Banks Islands in Torba Province of Vanuatu.

New adapted script: Tang-galog (𗒨𗓸𗈒𗄀𗄻𗄀𗈒), a way to write Tagalog with the Tangut script devised by Chen Carson D. Callueng.

New adapted script: New Futhorch (ᚾᚣᚹ ᚠᚢᚧᚩᚱᚳ), a way to write Modern English with Old English / Anglo-Saxon runes devised by John Higgins.

New numbers pages:

• Naman, a Southern Oceanic language spoken on Malekula Island in central Vanuatu.


• Mwerlap (N̄wërlap), a Southern Oceanic language spoken in the Banks Islands in Torba Province of Vanuatu.


• Newar (नेपाल भाषा), a Tibeto-Burman language spoken mainly in central Nepal, and also in northern India.

On the Omniglot blog there a new post entitled Facting Facts about the verbification of the word fact, and other fact-related factlets, factettes and factoids, and there’s the usual Language Quiz. See if you can guess what language this is:

Here’s a clue: this language is spoken in New Caledonia.

The mystery language in last week’s language quiz was Iramba (Nilamba), a Bantu language spoken in the Singida Region in central Tanzania.

In this week’s Celtic Pathways podcast, Birches, we unearth the Celtic roots of words birch (tree) in various languages.

It’s also available on Instagram and TikTok.

On the Celtiadur blog there’s a new post entitled Coughing about words for cough and various other things in Celtic languages, and I made improvements to the posts entitled To Choke and Birch (Trees).

In other news, I spent yesterday exploring Chester with Richard Simcott and Israel Lai (see photo below), friends I know from language-related events. Richard was our guide – he grew up in Chester and has relatives there, although he lives in North Macedonia. He’s studied even more languages than I have, runs the Speaking Fluently blog, and is the organiser of the Polyglot Conference and other language-related events. Israel is a composer, language enthusiast and podcaster from Hong Kong, who lives in Mancester, where he did a PhD in music composition. He has also studied many languages, including Welsh, and runs the blog Rhapsody in Lingo and a podcast 絮言．狂想 (seoi5jin4 kwong4soeng2), which discusses language and linguistics in Cantonese. We had a great time exploring the city and nerding out about language-related things.

More of my photos of Chester

For more Omniglot News, see:

https://www.omniglot.com/news/

https://www.facebook.com/groups/omniglot/

https://www.facebook.com/Omniglot-100430558332117

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