Linguistics

Wine is a multi-billion-dollar business. But new research shows how expert ‘winespeak’ can exclude many wine drinkers worldwide.

The words used to describe this peppery green are a linguistic fossil record revealing the history of Italian migration.

Australians love a nickname, and certain jobs are no exceptions. So whether you’re a journo, brickie, shrink or cop, there’s a rich history behind the slang.

Words reflecting anger and swearing are more common in people with personality dysfunction.

Not all words are created equal – and those that sound more surprising are more likely to grab our attention and stick in our memory.

How not to get drawn in by rage bait.

If Danish speakers experience hygge, then they should have a word to talk about it; if English speakers don’t, then we won’t.

The different personalities of typefaces and how it affects our psychology.

Many Native American languages only have a few native speakers left.

The language and rhetoric of extremists helps fuel brutal, often deadly, violence. Spotting the strategies can help protect people from radicalisation.

The shape of a burger is reinforced in our mental linguistic definitions every time we see a burger but there isn’t a straight-forward definition.

Stephen ‘Shorty’ Jamieson has been behind bars since 1988. Fresh research critically examines the confession that put him there.

This now-extinct tongue was probably spoken somewhere in Eurasia as many as 8,000 years ago. But how do we know Proto-Indo-European must have existed?

How do we make a complex piece of tech easy to understand? An analogy helps – as long as it’s not misleading.

Once reviled as a ‘humiliating’ Russified form of the language, now Surzhyk is emerging as a tool for Russian speakers to identify as Ukrainians.

A study shows people with Rett syndrome, a rare genetic condition, can be bilingual, challenging long-held assumptions.

Consumers perceive some misspellings positively, but only if the unconventional spelling is relevant and not too extreme, according to a new study.

Have you ever wondered why Australian accents are so similar compared to the US and UK? There are some subtle differences between states, though.

It’s the first time the Arab League has called for Hamas to disarm and disband.

Unusual words or punctuation may serve as ‘tells’ that something has been written by a chatbot. But even with that knowledge, most people struggle to discern human writing from AI-generated text.

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.