Some parts of the world are packed with languages. Others not so much.
Is there a reason that some places are linguistically dense? Researchers are turning up connections between biological ecology and language ecology.
Xia Hua studies language diversity, and …
Why are some languages more systematic than others?
We often hear about the irregularities in English, and other languages have them as well. But new work shows that systematicity in a language is influenced by the number of speakers in …
When homosexuality was illegal, a secret language brought people together.
In 1960s England, Polari was a creative blend of Romani, Italian, rhyming slang, and backslang, used among the LGBT community. It could be used to communicate, or to identify someone …
We’re opening up the Mailbag for another episode.
The rules are changing. Here’s the manual.
Gretchen McCulloch’s book Because Internet is a look at how people use language on the net to communicate and to show identity. How do people laugh online? How is emoji like gesture?
It’s …
Take a tornado. Add some sharks. You’ve got a sharknado.
But it’s not just sharks that can leap out of their normal context. It looks like –nado is jumping free and becoming a combining form — a part …
Names are what they are, and as long as they work, they work.
But sometimes in the history of naming, people name things in a manner inapt to their nature or origin. So what’s the story behind words like atom…
If you’re at a park in New York City, you may see someone at a table offering free grammar advice.
That person is writer Ellen Jovin, and she dispenses wisdom from her Grammar Table. What motivates her to do …
Poetry isn’t (just) enjoyable, it can be useful.
It can help us with language learning and memorisation, and help us in historical linguistics. And even computers are getting into poetry generation, probably because they want to learn the secret of …
We got together with Ryan Paulsen and Amy Hanlon from etymology podcast Lexitecture, and asked them about their love of language, their techniques for doing etymology, and …
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