Language attrition can happen to people who live in a foreign context – and it can be embarrassing.
Academic rigour, journalistic flair
Linguistics – Analysis and Comment
Each discipline tells us only part of the story. And so the truest picture of prehistory comes from triangulating these independent lines of evidence.
Irish influence on Australian English is much like the influence of the Irish on Australians themselves — less than you’d expect on the surface, but everywhere once you start looking.
Spoken language evolves differently and faster than written language, and there are good reasons why this is the case.
The origin of around 300 of Australia’s Aboriginal languages lies in Queensland, about 6,000 years ago.
Software tools for South Africa’s Nguni languages may assist with redress and effective communication.
Sarcasm thrives in ambiguous situations, which makes it especially ripe for misinterpretation.
The word only appears 14 times in the UK’s parliamentary record between 1803 and 2005. Now it is everywhere.
New research suggests that hints left in Creole languages can identify where the original speakers came from – even hundreds of years after they migrated and mixed together.
Ursula le Guin gave us an anarchist society on another world; we brought it back to Earth.
The shithole countries comment was a landmark moment. This US president has given up even trying to hide his prejudice.
Spanish is not overtaking English in the US, despite political fearmongering. In fact, due to the ‘three-generation pattern,’ Spanish speaking in immigrant families tends to decline over time.
‘Milkshake duck’, a word created in 2016 on Twitter, is the Macquarie Dictionary Word of the Year. Efforts to coin new words have a long history and were particularly in vogue in the 1980s.
We underestimate the power of language to divide and to bring people closer together, scholars say.
The world is becoming increasingly connected, but local accents still define who we are.
Perception of truth and lies changes between languages for bilingual speakers.
A sociolinguist wonders if they’ll ever be able to interpret the waves, high beams and middle fingers of human drivers.
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.
We need to enter 2018 with a fresh set of expressions for the workplace.
In little more than a generation and a half we have become a more caring and inclusive society.
The Mississippi is characterised in America as male, while the Indians see the Ganges as female.
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.
Attempts to change French grammar to make it more gender-blind have aroused the wrath of many conservatives.
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?
French is no longer taught as a European language representative of “French” culture in South Africa. New modes of teaching, learning and research speak to an inclusive Africanist agenda.