As genders blur, language is rapidly adapting. Look no further than the American Dialect Society’s 2015 Word of the Year.
The great potato cake/scallop/fritter divide.
Rosey Billington, Lauren Gawne, Kathleen Jepson, and Jill Vaughan 'Mapping words around Australia' (bit.ly/AusWordsMaps)
In his new book, Randall Munroe of xkcd fame takes the principles of clear communication to what feels like their furthest extent, but there’s a place for dense grammar in our theories and ideas.
During the 20th century, English accents began to pick up traits from the capital. In the west of Scotland, though, something different has been going on.
A Spanish street performer dressed as a cowboy. Europeans have long been fascinated with the American West.
Juanedc.com/flickr
Much has been written about vocal fry in recent years, with the focus on what it is, where it comes from and what it means … at least when it comes to females who fry. What’s really going on here?
At what point does a wildly speculative idea become worthy of national and international press coverage?
Brian Tomlinson
The idea that the Australian accent may be the product of drunkenness in early European settlers is wildly speculative. And yet it has gained international attention in the past week. Why?
The discovery that “Huh?” crops up in many languages may have won the researchers an Ig Nobel Prize. But they found much more than that in their search for the universals in language.
A rose by any other name might smell as sweet, but it just doesn’t feel right.
Mark A Neal
What’s in a name? Many words are arbitrary – there’s no reason a dog must be called a dog or a table must be called a table. Why do we tend to assume there’s a reason any object has its specific name?
To communicate is human – but how did language originally get started?
Scott Johnson
What can a bunch of people grunting in a lab teach us about our capacity to create language systems? A lot about the gesture- or vocalization-based origins of language.
Amid the debate about what languages should dominate at African schools, we’re missing an important point: why do we learn language in the first place?
From www.shutterstock.com
There are two functions of language: communication and access to knowledge. Each must be pursued as an objective in its own right rather than being lumped together.
Members of the Chitimacha language team (from left to right) Sam Boutte, Kim Walden and Rachel Vilcan use the new language software for the first time.