Javanese still is used in art performance. Here is Javanese dance jathilan in Yogyakarta, Indonesia, March 2017.
Aditya_frzhm/Shutterstock
Young Javanese speakers in Indonesia are nervous about speaking High Javanese, for fear of making mistakes. But they are still eager to learn.
Inflammatory words can prime a mind.
Elijah O'Donnell/Unsplash
A new theory of language suggests that people understand words by unconsciously simulating what they describe. Repeated exposure – and the simulation that comes with it – makes it easier to act.
Afrikaner descendants representing Argentina, South Africa today and the country’s old flag.
Richard Finn Gregory / GOODWORK
A small community of Afrikaners has been living in Argentina since the early 1900s. Linguistic research has found they’re like a time capsule, reflecting pronunciation and syntax from an earlier era.
EPA/Will Oliver
What do you do when ‘no deal’ looks like a disaster? Stick another word in front of it. Problem solved.
Maningrida, a community on Australia’s remote north-central coast, is a language hotspot.
Jill Vaughan
At the Maningrida football Grand Final in 2015, commentary was recorded in nine languages. But elsewhere, the threat of language loss poses a serious risk to our nation’s cultural inheritance.
Sometimes the only way of telling similar medication apart is by name.
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Lookalike and soundalike medication names are causing dangerous problems.
TeaMeister
Changes in the way we pronounce certain sounds tell us a lot about our changing values.
Sports terms are no longer restricted to the playing field – many have become a part of our everyday parlance.
Richard Wainwright/AAP
Ever wonder where the words ‘sport’, ‘umpire’ and ‘drubbing’ come from? Here’s a short primer of sporting lingo ahead of the AFL and NRL Grand Finals.
EPA/Jason Szenes
No one is saying the tennis star wasn’t angry. But it’s worth asking whether you thought she was more angry because she is a woman.
Wikigraphists via Wikimedia.
Why our understanding of the relationship between ‘place’ and ‘language’ is crucial for social justice.
Home page of the BBC News Pidgin website.
BBC News Pidgin
West African pidgins are unique, showing that they have come to stay no matter what some say or feel about them.
Tugoluokf/Shutterstock
Analysing the words used to place blame or give evidence can change how we see a situation.
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Probably the most famous ‘Welsh’ word, ‘cwtch’ is the perfect example of a dialect term.
Mama_Po/Shutterstock.com
The difference between freedom and bananas helps explain.
Interpreter Marina Gross at work in Helsinki.
EPA/Alexey Nikolsky/Sputnik/Kremlin
Interpreters’ notes are used as a short-term memory aid, not a full record of a discussion.
Second-generation migrants are usually dominant in English, and third generation are usually monolingual in English.
Michael Crosling/AAP
Concerns about non-English-speaking migrant populations leading to “parallel communities” are not well founded. Third-generation migrants are typically monolingual in English.
ITV2
Viewers are taking to Twitter to display their prejudice about Islanders’ accents.
“Aitch” or “Haitch”? It’s long been a point of contestation among English speakers.
Felicity Burke/The Conversastion with apologies to Dr. Suess
An unspoken class war has long been waged around the pronounciation of the letter “h” - is it haitch or aitch? Despite a snobbish leaning to the latter, haitch makes more sense.
Australia and New Zealand are neighbours but our accents are quite different. We even have different words for things.
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The short answer is that the accent you have depends on the people you grew up with and the history of the place that you live in.
Kanok Sulaiman / shutterstock
I analysed 15 million words written by major oil companies and found their usage of ‘climate change’ peaked a decade ago.