The difference between a language and dialect is just as much about politics as it is linguistics.
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Articles on Spoken language
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The schools inspectorate’s policies about language are harmful to the most marginalised members of society.
Vocal imitation is a key part of how humans learn to speak. New research shows that bats babble to learn and use baby talk to teach, just like people do.
Do chimpanzee talk to each other? Scientists follow and record chimpanzees in the wild to find out – and to fill in details about how human language might have evolved.
A linguistics scholar explains why the loss of Arabic in Israel would be a loss of history, culture and possibly human rights.
With the taboo on swearing loosening over the past few decades, will profanity lose its effectiveness in spoken language?
Humans have invented many technologies to survive better – spears, pots, calculators, even language. With language, however, the raw material used to fashion the technology is the human body itself.
A clever proces similar to Google’s image search is helping to preserve some of the world’s 7,000 languages that are at risk of disappearing.
There are hundreds of different languages spoken in the Pacific region that could be lost. So it’s important to safeguard what recordings we have in a digital archive available to all.
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.
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.
Top contributors
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Professor, Charles Darwin University
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Associate Professor of Ecology, Evolution and Behavior, University of Minnesota
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Nick Thieberger is a Friend of The Conversation.
Associate Professor in Linguistics and a Chief Investigator in the Centre of Excellence for the Dynamics of Language, The University of Melbourne
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Professor and Chair of Linguistics, University of Sydney
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Postdoctoral Research Associate in Psychology, University of Wisconsin-Madison
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Professor of English, Indiana University
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The Frank J. McLoraine Distinguished Service Professor of Linguistics and the College, University of Chicago
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Associate Professor of Anthropology, Binghamton University, State University of New York
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Assistant Professor, Arabic Studies, Linguistics, Michigan State University
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Associate Professor of Political Science, Westminster College
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Postdoctoral Researcher in Behavioral Ecology and Bioacoustics, Museum für Naturkunde, Berlin
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Senior Lecturer in Critical Applied Linguistics, Manchester Metropolitan University
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Associate Professor of English Language, University of Leeds
