Studying diverse languages gives us invaluable insights into human cognition but more become endangered every month.
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Articles on Language
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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.
The Oxford Dictionaries’ word of the year is causing a bit of a stir – probably because it’s not a word at all.
Phonics programs can be helpful for students with very particular learning needs - but it’s not a one-size-fits-all literacy solution. Here are some things you should be wary of.
A linguist explains how words get co-opted from one language to another.
The future is one of multiple Englishes.
The stories of and attitudes to three particular languages – English, Swahili and Luganda – provide an interesting starting point for a debate around Uganda’s language policy.
People growing up with two or more languages have social and cognitive advantages.
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?
A satirical manga cartoon of a Syrian refugee child has had the internet up in arms – but there’s plenty more tone-deafness where that came from.
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.
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.
The language survived against the odds and is now a central part of Catalan identity.
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?
Al-Jazeera has changed its style guide, while others continue to debate the issue.
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.
Long before ‘sup’ and ‘hwu’ there was ‘Hw r u ts mng?’
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.
Unless young children are totally immersed in a foreign language, they actually learn it better when they’re a bit older.
Did your child just drop the F-bomb? What can you do?
Top contributors
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Senior Lecturer in Linguistics, Monash University
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Kate Burridge is a Friend of The Conversation.
Professor of Linguistics, Monash University
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Course coordinator, The University of Queensland
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Associate Dean and Professor of Psychology, University of Memphis
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Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
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Professor of Linguistics, University of York
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Associate Professor in Linguistics, Macquarie University
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Associate Professor in Language, Literacy and TESL, University of Canberra
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Professor of Linguistics and English, Florida International University
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Professor of African Language Studies, University of the Western Cape
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Postdoctoral research fellow (Forensic Linguistics/ Language and Law), University of the Western Cape
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Professor, Charles Darwin University
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Professor of Communication and Journalism, Texas A&M University
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Director, Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, University of Pittsburgh
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Professor of Linguistics
