Tower Hamlets’ recognition of Cockney as a “community language” celebrates the role that all English dialects play in shaping individual and community identities.
Address terms can prove to be a headache in the workplace.
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Sociolinguists suggest that within the next century, 90% of the world’s languages will disappear, due largely to colonial languages dominating economies, education and governance.
Travel to Miami, and you might hear people say ‘get down from the car’ instead of ‘get out of the car.’
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It came about through sustained contact with native Spanish speakers who directly translated phrases from Spanish into English, a form of linguistic borrowing called ‘calques.’
Mural with a portrait of Taras Shevchenko, Kharkiv, Ukraine, 2012.
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The language question in Ukraine goes back centuries. It is deeply rooted in the history of old empires and Ukraine’s position as the borderland between the West and the East.
A new study of Australian media has found important cultural and social factors are omitted in reports about domestic violence. More must be done to improve understanding by journalists and audiences.
In Australia, the discussion around gendered violence is increasingly focused on diversity. However, policy and services continue to be based mostly on the experiences of white, Anglo-settler women.
Words can have a powerful effect on people, even when they’re generated by an unthinking machine.
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Kyle Mahowald, The University of Texas at Austin and Anna A. Ivanova, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT)
Fluent expression is not always evidence of a mind at work, but the human brain is primed to believe so. A pair of cognitive linguistics experts explain why language is not a good test of sentience.
A view of the Watergate complex in Washington, D.C.
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Many of the coinages fail to differentiate the mundane from the momentous. Has the suffix’s overuse rendered it essentially meaningless?
A woman holds a placard with the words ‘language is a weapon’ written in Ukrainian during a 2020 protest of a bill that sought to widen the use of Russian in Ukrainian public education.
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To Russian nationalists, if the Ukrainian language is classified as a derivative of the Russian language, the invasion looks less like an act of aggression and more like reintegration.
A ‘Let’s Go Brandon’ flag waves near the U.S. Capitol ahead of a House vote on the infrastructure bill.
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Bothered by ‘expresso’? An expert on speech and language explains why you shouldn’t correct mispronunciations.
Playing with syntax, capitalization and punctuation marks can upend narratives put forth by the mainstream media.
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Accusing a person or company of ‘virtue signalling’ has become a common putdown. But slurs like these are not new.
The coronavirus forced the editors of the Oxford English Dictionary to break with tradition.
Illustration by Anurag Papolu/The Conversation; dictionary photo by Spauln via Getty Images and model of COVID-19 by fpm/iStock via Getty Images
Updates to the Oxford English Dictionary provide a fascinating glimpse into how language changes in the face of rapid and unprecedented social and economic disruption.
Academic staff are often unaware of the socio-linguistic barriers students from rural backgrounds face.
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Distinguished University Professor | Canada Research Chair in Linguistics | Founding Director of the Sociolinguistics Laboratory, L’Université d’Ottawa/University of Ottawa