Linguistics

Today it would seem odd to describe a flower with the word "bastard"—why apply a term of personal abuse to a flower? But in Shakespeare's time, "bastard" was a technical term describing certain plants.

A new Charles Darwin University (CDU) study on the writings of two of the world's most infamous terrorists could help authorities to identify how topics, schemas and strategies of hate speech are used to incite violence.

Pupils with special educational needs and disabilities should be given equal opportunities to learn languages, a new report argues.

There are more than 7,000 languages in the world, and their grammar can vary a lot. Linguists are interested in these differences because of what they tell us about our history, our cognitive abilities and what it means to ...

A team of biologists and linguists from the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics, City University of New York, the State University of New York and the University of Seville has found evidence suggesting that wild African ...

Linguistic diversity, like other types of diversity, can enrich life. It's a truism that languages and cultures are closely allied. Some believe that language imposes its own unique perceptual grid on its users.

Incel activity online is evolving to become more extreme as some of the online spaces hosting its violent and misogynistic content are shut down and new ones emerge, a new study shows.

Half of the world's languages are endangered and more than a thousand are expected to be lost in coming decades. A team at UCL is using animation software to preserve these languages in an entirely new way.

More than 7,000 languages are spoken in the world. This linguistic diversity is passed on from one generation to the next, similarly to biological traits. But have language and genes evolved in parallel over the past few ...

The discovery of five words inscribed on a 2,000-year-old bronze hand may help rewrite the history of the Basque language, one of Europe's most mysterious tongues.

A new study shows that American Sign Language (ASL) is more linguistically complex than previously understood. In particular, research appearing in the June 2022 issue of the journal Language, authored by Tory Sampson (UC ...

Everyone has an accent. But the intelligibility of speech doesn't just depend on that accent; it also depends on the listener. Visual cues and the diversity of the listener's social network can impact their ability to understand ...

The discovery of pottery from the ancient Lapita culture by researchers at The Australian National University (ANU) has shed new light on how Papua New Guinea (PNG) served as a launching pad for the colonization of the Pacific—one ...