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Writing Systems as Cultural Archives: What Egyptian Hieroglyphs Teach Us About Language

When we study writing systems, it’s tempting to focus on classification: logographic, syllabic, alphabetic. These labels are useful, but they can also flatten what writing systems really are. In a recent Language & Heritage Institute class, we explored logographic writing through the example of Egyptian hieroglyphs . What quickly became clear is that writing systems are not just methods for recording speech. They are cultural archives —systems that encode how a society organ

Small Words, Big Meanings: What Pronouns Reveal About Language and Culture

Pronouns are some of the smallest words in a language, but they often carry some of the heaviest cultural and grammatical information. In a recent Linguistics Club session at the Language & Heritage Institute, we explored pronoun systems across languages to see how communities encode meaning, social relationships, and history into these seemingly simple forms. We worked with real data from three very different linguistic contexts: Torres Strait Creole , the Jungiau dialect o

What Writing Systems Reveal About Language, Culture, and Human Thought

When we study writing systems, it’s tempting to focus on how they represent sounds on the page. But writing systems are much more than technical tools. They are cultural artifacts.