Linguistics

An expert in American dialects explains how a ‘health drink’ from the early 1800s spawned so many names and variations.

Many Russian-speakers in the war-torn country are opting to speak Ukrainian instead.

Australians are outdone by Americans and Brits, both in how often they swear, and in how many users swear online.

A languages curriculum enriched with linguistics is appealing to students and teachers.

Sorry really can be the hardest word.

AI models too often produce a monolithic version of English that erases variation.

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 way we feel about an accent tells us less about its integral properties and much more about the stereotypes of the people who speak it.

‘Lore’ was shortlisted for the Oxford word of the year.

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.

Chinese is one of the world’s oldest languages and spoken by over one billion people. Its pronoun system may be on the cusp of significant change.

The climate pledges that countries submit to the UN may or may not detail policy and regulatory measures, making it difficult for researchers.

Trump’s campaign produced campaign materials in Spanish to reach more voters. Now that he’s president, his White House is going English-only.

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.

Between the 10th and 15th centuries, the gold market boomed, especially in Egypt, Persia, India and China. Southern Africa played a crucial role in meeting demand.

Researchers identified statistically coherent patterns in whale song that may be a signature of cultural learning.

Standard rates of diversification predict there should be many unrelated Indigenous languages on the mainland. But this is not the case.

Growing up with more than one language has obvious advantages for children.

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.

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 winners offer a window into the spirit of the times.

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.

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.

From “ouch” to “ay”, human expressions of pain are similar across the globe, hinting at something fundamental about how humans form language.

When we interact with a chatbot, deeply ingrained habits make us behave as if it’s a person.

Decoding emergent languages in AI can have many behefits.

An embarrassing health condition is not a good place to start a conversation with the spouse of a workmate you’ve just met at a Christmas party. Here’s another approach …

We found that the usage of supposedly upper-class words varied, but not in a way that correlated with social class.

What the iconic musical tells us about accent prejudice and class.

Politicians have long used the phrase ‘I misspoke’ when backpedaling for verbal inaccuracies or blunders. Now it’s used as a euphemistic recasting of lying as an inadvertent mistake.