Recent research on Danish shows that not only is it hard for Danish children to learn their mother tongue, but adult Danes use their native language differently than speakers of other languages.
Mzilikazi Khumalo was a brilliant linguist with a stellar career in music. These achievements are extraordinary considering the obstacles he faced throughout his career.
With so much recent focus on how women are treated, we need to look first at how we use language. And for a long time, it has been used to belittle and silence women.
Australian Indigenous languages use a fascinating array of expressions drawing on body parts to describe emotions. Here is a guide to some of the most intriguing ones.
Rhyming means something different in ASL than it does in spoken language.
Zed Sevcikova Sehyr
In American Sign Language, some words rhyme, some look like what they mean and some are used more often than others. A new database of these features paves a pathway for ASL research.
Humans are constantly changing our languages in terms of sounds, words, meanings, and grammar, so much so that it becomes increasingly difficult to understand our own distant relatives across time and space.
(Unsplash/Lucrezia Carnelos)
Psycholinguistic researchers analyzed more than 1 million Reddit posts a year before and a year after users posted about their breakup.
Communication between people would be very difficult, if not impossible, without discursive memory. Our memories allow us to understand each other or to experience irreconcilable differences.
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Because of context and history, some words and phrases carry a heavy burden with them. Their mere mention can bring back painful memories and problematic situations.
Children begin to learn grammar well before they start school, when they craft their first short sentences.
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Grammar isn’t a way to bully people for making mistakes, says a longtime English instructor. It is a way to understand how our language operates, in all its many written and spoken varieties.
Barbara Windsor as Peggy Mitchel in the BBC soap opera Eastenders.
BBC
While some adults see implicit meaning in sentences, children can miss it. Two linguists explain how this can happen, and why it matters in communication.
Accusing a person or company of ‘virtue signalling’ has become a common putdown. But slurs like these are not new.
The coronavirus forced the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to break with tradition.
Illustration by Anurag Papolu/The Conversation; dictionary photo by Spauln via Getty Images and model of COVID-19 by fpm/iStock via Getty Images
Updates to the Oxford English Dictionary provide a fascinating glimpse into how language changes in the face of rapid and unprecedented social and economic disruption.