‘Everything Everywhere All at Once’ and other Oscars 2023 films show a trend towards linguistic realism in Hollywood

At the 95th Academy Awards, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan’s Everything Everywhere All at Once took home wins in acting, editing and directing categories, and also won the coveted best picture award. The quirky and expansive sci-fi action film is famed for its absurdist take on the idea of a multiverse, yet it is still grounded in realness and humanity: In one masterfully choreographed scene in Everything Everywhere, three languages are spoken by three generations of one chaotic immigrant family over dinner. As a linguist, I am interested in how screenwriters and directors use language in film to do much more than just convey dialogue: Language and subtitles also provide characterization, establish the tone of a scene and ground fictional stories in reality.

GPT-4 Is Exciting and Scary

Today, the new language model from OpenAI may not seem all that dangerous. But the worst risks are the ones we cannot anticipate.

The self-taught vocabulary of homesigning deaf children supports universal constraints on language

The thousands of languages spoken throughout the world draw on many of the same fundamental linguistic abilities and reflect universal aspects of how humans categorize events. Some aspects of language may also be universal to people who create their own sign languages, according to new research.

How linguistic diversity in English-language fiction reveals resistance and tension