Koldunova Anna/Shutterstock
Perception of truth and lies changes between languages for bilingual speakers.
Statues like these - here Paul Kruger at Pretoria’s Church Square - are a reminder of a time when Afrikaners were the ruling class in South Africa.
Mike Hutchings/Reuters
Afrikaners in post-apartheid South Africa struggle with a historical sense of inferiority that reinforces their whiteness.
In cities and countries around the world, drivers use a range of hand signals to communicate with other drivers.
Lightspring/Shutterstock.com
A sociolinguist wonders if they’ll ever be able to interpret the waves, high beams and middle fingers of human drivers.
Shutterstock/SinishaKarich
Child sexual abuse is rising but there is still ignorance around how to speak to and support children who are badly in need of help.
Pexels
What time looks like in different cultures.
The Roman weekday ‘dies Veneris’ was named after the planet Venus, which in turn took its name from Venus, goddess of love. Detail from Venus and Mars, Botticelli, tempera on panel (c1483).
Wikimedia Commons
The origins of our days of the week lie with the Romans. Three are named for planets, the other four gods.
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The best cracker jokes make us groan as much as laugh – and that’s deliberate.
Introducing rural and indigenous communities to science, through experiments and communication, is vital.
Felipe Figueira
The combination of knowledge and communication, along with a few other fundamental conditions such as liberty and respect , leads to social, cultural and technological development.
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It’s a multi-lingual effect.
The initial aim of political correctness, to establish non-hateful language was, and still is, admirable.
Nathan Anderson/Unsplash
In little more than a generation and a half we have become a more caring and inclusive society.
‘I want to be effluent’: malapropisms and mispronounced words were a regular gag in the TV comedy Kath and Kim and continue to peeve many people today.
AAP
Do you wince at a mispronounced ‘Moet’? Do you cringe at unintentional portmanteau words, like ‘misunderestimated’ or ‘insinuendo’? You are not alone.
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The Mississippi is characterised in America as male, while the Indians see the Ganges as female.
Automatic translation doesn’t mean you won’t benefit from learning languages.
Pathdoc via Shutterstock.com
Learning another language is more than just a boost to your CV. It makes you smarter, more decisive and even better at English.
Sergey Kamshylin via Shutterstock
Between them, Kazakhstan’s 18m people speak 117 languages but the country is opting for the Latin alphabet as it aims for wider global integration.
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Time to chuck out the phrase books?
Jacques-Louis David/The Conversation
Whether politicians refer to ‘assisted dying’, ‘assisted suicide’ or ‘euthanasia’ tells us a lot about how they feel about the issue, and the emotional response they aim to convey.
Svetlana Turchenick/Shutterstock.com
Throughout history, metaphors based around the testes and semen brought out very different sides of masculinity.
Navdeep Bains, Canada’s
innovation, science and economic development minister, takes part in a technology event in Ottawa in May 2017. The Canadian government has started up a $1.26-billion fund to support innovation-related business investments.
THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick
If leaders of educational institutions are concerned about the employability of graduates, they should avoid over-investing in STEM subjects and stop snubbing liberal arts.
Indonesia’s language policy makes the use of standard Indonesian a measure of nationalism.
Prodita Sabarini/The Conversation Indonesia
Indonesian, an engineered language made in the time of colonialism, is “the envy of the multilingual world”. But no one speaks standard Indonesian on the streets. Does anyone speak the language?
New census data gives insight into Canada’s immigrant population, including how English language proficiency can impact wages. Here, a group of new Canadians take part in a citizenship ceremony in Ottawa in September.
(THE CANADIAN PRESS/Sean Kilpatrick)
New census data provides a chance to understand why immigrants earn lower wages than Canadians who have been here for many generations. Whether immigrants speak English at home may be a clue.