TRANSCRIPTION: http://chiaralanguagefreak.com/2023/04/30/the-language-journey-goes-on/

In the last episode, I talked about how Tagalog was important to me.

It is an idiom on which the official language of the Philippines is based.

Starting from there, I began discovering all the main Asian languages in a sort of ideal journey from those islands to Europe.

I started with the Maleo-Polynesian languages, to Chinese, the ones of the Indochinese peninsula, Korean, Japanese, and so on.

I really liked the website http://proel.org/. It is simple, but it allowed me to have an overview.

I was really even emotionally involved in what I was reading and finding out.

My favorite language family, the one I found the most fascinating, was the Paleo-Siberian languages. It is a group of languages spoken in the Easternmost corner of Siberia, in the Kamchatka peninsula and surroundings.

I used to feel genuine anxiety when reading that a language was in danger of extinction.

My second favorite family was the Altaic languages, the language family of Turkish, Mongolian, and Manchu, spreading from the Northern and Western borders of China up to… well, Greece. I remembered I had found another website, https://altaica.ru/e_index.php. At that time, the English version was minimal, while most of the pages were in Russian. It seems that now the English version has improved.