Language is adaptive, self-balancing and evolves with environmental change. Understanding this may be the key to developing more nuanced climate change discourse.
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Articles on Language
Displaying 61 - 80 of 736 articles
How did the letter x get its enduring role as a symbol of the unknown? A mathematician explains why it’s hard to say for sure.
By the 1950s a standard version of the language emerged, today spoken by an estimated 200 million people.
The US is home to more international migrants than any other country. But even though immigration is an actively debated topic, immigrants are poorly understood.
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.
Around half of toddlers who aren’t chattering by age two will catch up later, but we can’t predict which ones.
Similar techniques used to identify criminals have been employed to unmask anonymous authors. But they aren’t foolproof.
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.’
Glioblastoma is the most aggressive type of brain cancer, causing significant decline in cognitive function. New research suggests a common anti-seizure drug could help control tumor growth.
Although the spelling “ñ” only exists in Spanish and Galician, it is true that the sound is not the exclusive heritage of Romance languages; it even exists in languages that do not come from Latin.
The road to becoming a champion speller is made easier with support from family and friends, but ultimately it depends on an individual student’s commitment to learning, a scholar writes.
The Warlpiri Dictionary has been 60 years in the making – and it’s shortlisted for the 2023 Australian Book Industry Awards, a rarity for a dictionary.
More Indigenous sports stars are speaking their mother tongues in TV interviews and elsewhere. The challenge now is to develop truly bilingual commentary teams to keep the ball alive.
Although English to speakers of other languages (Esol) is treated like any other subject, it can offer far more to those learners.
Despite the association of ‘Luddite’ with a naïve rejection of technology, the term and its origins are far richer and more complex than you might think.
Called your ‘inner voice,’ it develops along with your reading skills.
The number of students studying languages in UK universities has plummeted in recent years but some creative thinking may help to reverse that trend.
As ‘The Jerry Springer Show’ climbed the ratings ladder, the censorship bleep, which masked the slew of insults lobbed by warring guests, became a star of the show.
American scientists have used brain scans and machine learning to reconstruct the meaning of stories that people hear, see, or even imagine.
A new, extensive database of language grammars from around the world indicates an alarming trend of global language loss.
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 Linguistics, University of York
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Professor of English Language and Literature, University of Oxford
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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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Postdoctoral research fellow (Forensic Linguistics/ Language and Law), University of the Western Cape
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Professor of African Language Studies, University of the Western Cape
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Professor of Linguistics and English, Florida International University
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Director, Office of Scholarly Communication and Publishing, University of Pittsburgh
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Director of Slang and New Language Archive, Faculty of Arts and Humanities, King's College London
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Professor, Charles Darwin University
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Professor of Communication and Journalism, Texas A&M University
