Linguistics

"Stranger churches"—Protestant congregations that welcomed speakers of certain languages other than English—in early modern London had "eyes everywhere" to hear, spread and dispel gossip in multiple languages, according ...

An analysis of the choice of words by American presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump in their recent debate reveals five insights into their personalities.

Islands drive language change and generate language diversity in similar ways to how they drive species diversity, according to research from The Australian National University (ANU) that analyzed languages from over 13,000 ...

Since at least Aristotle, writers and scholars have debated what makes for a great story. One of them is Samsun Knight, a novelist who is also an economist and assistant professor of marketing at the University of Toronto's ...

If you pay a visit to the Singapore Stone, displayed at the National Museum of Singapore, you might be disappointed. That's because the inscription—carrying an unknown writing system transcribing an unknown language—is ...

Human bodies have similar designs. However, languages differ in the way they divide the body into parts and name them. For example, English speakers have two words for foot and leg, whereas other languages express the concepts ...

Signs written in Spanish are becoming less common along North Philadelphia's Golden Block, or El Bloque de Oro—which runs along North Fifth Street from Lehigh Avenue to Allegheny Avenue and is considered the cultural center ...

Johanna Nichols, a linguist at the University of California, Berkeley, has used her pioneering work in the field of language history to learn more about language development in North America. She has found that it can be ...

It is often remarked that Spanish should be more widely spoken or understood in the scientific community given its number of speakers around the world, a figure the Instituto Cervantes places at almost 600 million.

A group of Tallinn University researchers has published an innovative study that sheds light on the intricate dynamics of the global film festival circuit, revealing insights into diversity and public value creation within ...

The English language is famous for the large number of words that express the idea of being drunk in a humorous way—so-called drunkonyms like "pissed," "hammered" or "wasted." British comedian Michael McIntyre even argues ...

The higher CEOs score on measures of paranoia, the more likely they are to avoid lobbying government, according to new research of 925 CEOs across 774 firms.

Language is the foundation of human interaction. It plays a central role in facilitating effective communication by allowing people to express their thoughts, share essential information and establish connections with one ...

Language has the power to shape our perceptions and interactions with the world. Different languages can coexist, but their dynamics are shaped by the communities that speak them—and how those communities interact with ...

Cockney and received pronunciation (Queen's English) were once spoken by people of all ages, but they are no longer commonly spoken among young people in the south-east of England.

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.

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 ...