Accents are not inherently easy or difficult to comprehend. Rather, the lack of exposure people have to a variety of accents causes communication difficulties.
Young Latinos in the US often navigate a contradictory landscape: Their parents see them as not Latino enough, while teachers and peers view them as not American enough.
Language, geography, age and other factors can all affect how fast a person talks. But sometimes, these perceived differences are only in the listener’s head.
Long treated as a sign of anxiety or a delaying tactic, ‘filled pauses’ are a linguistic trick to signal that what you are about to say might be complicated.
Sam Passmore, Australian National University; Olena Shcherbakova, Max Planck Institute for Evolutionary Anthropology, and Simon Greenhill, University of Auckland, Waipapa Taumata Rau
The idea a language should grow simpler if people need to learn it as adults has an intuitive appeal. But an analysis of more than 1,200 languages shows this doesn’t quite stack up.
Jumping in too quickly with ‘Oh yes, that happened to me’ can end up saturating conversation and make your friend feel they were never heard in the first place.
People with a common history – often due to significant geographic or social barriers – often share genetics and language. New research finds that even a dialect can act as a barrier within a group.
We humans like to think that our language is original, but we absorb large amounts of it from others and liberally repeat and remix what we hear – just as language AIs do.
It came about through sustained contact with native Spanish speakers who directly translated phrases from Spanish into English, a form of linguistic borrowing called ‘calques.’
Diasporic placemaking is often a story of connections and hidden stories. It is also a complicated story about who owns public spaces and who decides who gets to use it.