Tags: Japanese

Nashville native Nakita Barakadyn's journey into the world of linguistics began with her curiosity about the origins of Japanese. “I became a linguist in the first place because I heard the tantalizing statement ‘Nobody knows where Japanese came from,’” she says. “I was a kid at the time, but now I understand they just meant that Japanese is a language isolate—it has no known relatives.” Encountering this linguistic mystery imbued with her a…