Pop, soda or coke? The fizzy history behind America’s favorite linguistic debate
An expert in American dialects explains how a ‘health drink’ from the early 1800s spawned so many names and variations.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Linguistics could make language learning more relevant – and attractive – for school pupils
A languages curriculum enriched with linguistics is appealing to students and teachers.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Do Inuit languages really have many words for snow? The most interesting finds from our study of 616 languages
Can you guess which languages score the highest for terms relating to ‘love’, ‘death’, ‘canoe’ or ‘sheep’? We made a tool to help you explore our extensive dataset.
The Conversation > Linguistics
‘It’s not a vaccine, it’s a shot’: uncovering a new trend in vaccine scepticism
The COVID pandemic triggered a new kind of vaccine scepticism shared by people who normally take up vaccines – here’s why that’s a problem.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Making English the official US language can’t erase the fact that the US has millions of Spanish speakers and a long multilingual history
Trump’s campaign produced campaign materials in Spanish to reach more voters. Now that he’s president, his White House is going English-only.
The Conversation > Linguistics
How Oscar-nominated screenwriters attempt to craft authentic dialogue, dialects and accents
Most screenwriters need to be able to craft characters outside their own backgrounds and experiences. But it isn’t easy and often requires collaboration – with AI able to offer a helping hand.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Whalesong patterns follow a universal law of human language, new research finds
Researchers identified statistically coherent patterns in whale song that may be a signature of cultural learning.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Most ‘words of the year’ don’t actually tell us about the state of the world – here’s what I’d pick instead
Words of the year do not have to be new coinages, but may be existing words that seem to have become particularly apposite or resonant.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Multilingual people may be more likely to take a vaccine if they read about it in English – new research
Previous research has shown that people tend to approach hypothetical problems in a more rational and less intuitive fashion when these are presented in a language that is not their native one.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Love it or hate it, nonliteral ‘literally’ is here to stay: Here’s why English will survive
Language changes because of how it finds itself most gainfully employed by speakers through time. So it’s OK to say “The movie literally blew my mind” and not mean it … literally.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Noam Chomsky at 96: The linguist, educator, philosopher and public thinker has had a massive intellectual and moral influence
Noam Chomsky’s notion of the human instinct for freedom ties together his many intellectual pursuits, from educating creative, independent citizens to rejecting social and economic hierarchies.
The Conversation > Linguistics
The unspoken rule of conversation that explains why AI chatbots feel so human
When we interact with a chatbot, deeply ingrained habits make us behave as if it’s a person.
The Conversation > Linguistics
Research shows our understanding of ‘posh’ words is all wrong
We found that the usage of supposedly upper-class words varied, but not in a way that correlated with social class.
The Conversation > Linguistics