Corpus linguistics – using computers to analyse texts – can spot patterns and nuances that might otherwise go unnoticed.
French, Spanish and Japanese are spoken faster than German, Vietnamese and Mandarin, with English somwhere in the middle.
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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.
Up for debate?
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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.
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.
Conditions in rural England around the turn of the 20th century offer a case study for cultural evolution researchers.
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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.
Ted Kaczynski was arrested after the longest and most expensive investigation in the FBI’s history.
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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.
Travel to Miami, and you might hear people say ‘get down from the car’ instead of ‘get out of the car.’
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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.’
Showing you’re listening is a critical part of fraught discussions.
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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.
Reading becomes faster when you don’t have to say each word out loud.
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