How do we keep mother languages alive?
Governments, organisations, and the public are starting to recognise the importance of maintaining home languages as a way of preserving language diversity. But how do we do this? Where are we falling short?…
Category: language evolution (page 1 of 4)
Just how feasible is a pet translator?
A report from a futurologist is claiming that we’re only ten years away from having deep and meaningfuls with our puppers and kittehs. But there might be some technical hurdles — including the …
How do Creole languages arise?
A controversial new paper is rocking the linguistic world. Are Creole languages different from other languages? How do they start? And what does this all mean about the human language ability?
Daniel Midgley speaks with …
English used to look a lot different.
We used to use a lot of letters that no longer exist. They had names like eth, wynn, thorn, and ash. Ben, Kylie, and Daniel talk about …
The biggest idea in linguistics is back on the table.
Is there such a thing as the Universal Grammar? Do you have to have a human brain to learn language, or is learning a language just like learning anything else? …
Is there anything to the story of the Tower of Babel?
It’s a legend about why human languages are so different. So was there really only one human language a long time ago? Maybe — but how does this match …
Have you heard of eggcorns?
They’re off-quoted sayings that sometimes reel their ugly heads, and some might just leave you curled up in the feeble position.
Are they wrong? That might be a bit of a mute point. …
The human family got a new branch this week with the appearance of Homo naledi, a new species of human.
But did they have language? And how can we tell from a lot of old bones?
It’s early yet, but …
Is there anything that all human languages have in common?
With all the diversity in the world’s languages, a true universal is hard to find. But new research has unearthed a principle involving the distances between words, and this discovery …
What was the first language, and what was it like?
Does it still exist? And out of all the languages on earth today, which one is the oldest?
These are tricky questions, and linguists have tricky answers. Linguist Daniel Midgley…
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