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.
Rolf Quam, Binghamton University, State University of New York
Beyond the cool factor of figuring out hominin hearing capacities two million years ago, these findings could help answer the tantalizing question of when did human vocalized language first emerge.
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?
In Uganda, private schools are simply ignoring a policy that calls for pupils to learn in a mother tongue rather than in English for the first three years of their education.
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.
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.
Parental concerns that Minions given as toys in McDonald’s Happy Meals have been dropping the F-bomb raises an issue: how far – if at all – should we go to prevent children from exposure to “bad” language?