Historically Speaking: How language & accent shape your brain
Twenty Thousand Hertz
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Language Is Not a Concrete Thing
All languages are made up of a variety of speech sounds called phonemes. These are the noises we make by constricting the different parts of our mouths and throat in one way or another. Changing the location of that constriction and how much it's closed off will create different kinds of sounds. Each of the world's 7,000 languages vary on how they use all of the sounds our mouths can possibly make. English uses a large set of 44 phonemes with an unusually large number of vowels.
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