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Some of the "2016 is awful" rhetoric might be about the way we all consumed the headlines this year. Amy Mitchell, director of Journalism Research at the Pew Research Center, says what we've been witnessing in news consumption trends over the last few years has changed us. "A lot of the shift to digital is presenting a news experience that is more mixed in with other kinds of activities," she says. "You don't necessarily go online looking for news each and every time. Somebody shares it, somebody emails it to you, somebody texts a link. And so many Americans are bumping into the news throughout the course of the day." Nikki Usher, a professor of media and public affairs at George Washington University, calls this recent phenomenon "ambient journalism," or "when you're constantly plugged in through social media and you're constantly online and engaged in some way." And that - that constant bumping into news and online discord, that constant engagement - over time, it becomes an assault. And, Usher says, besides that aggression of immediacy, a lot of the headlines we consumed this year, particularly about the election, pushed a certain narrative: a nation, and even a world, completely and disastrously divided, perhaps beyond repair. "Lots of crappy, bad things happen every year," she says, "but you aren't told over and over again that this just shows us how bad everything is."

Singular "they," the gender-neutral pronoun, has been named the Word of the Year by a crowd of over 200 linguists at the American Dialect Society's annual meeting in Washington, D.C. on Friday evening. In a landslide vote, the language experts chose singular they over "thanks, Obama," ammosexual, "on fleek," and other contenders for this annual award given to the most significant term or word in the past year. Singular they, which The Washington Post officially adopted in its Style guide in 2015, is already a common habit in American speech. An example: "Everyone wants their cat to succeed." Earlier, the so-called proper way to say it would have been, "Everyone wants his or her cat to succeed."But what gave this word new prominence was its usefulness as a way to refer to people who don't want to be called "he" or "she." "We know about singular they already - we use it everyday without thinking about it, so this is bringing it to the fore in a more conscious way, and also playing into emerging ideas about gender identity," said linguist Ben Zimmer, language columnist for the Wall Street Journal, who presided over the voting this Friday afternoon.

The Spelling Society speculates that English may just be the world's most irregularly spelled language. Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society and author of the book Understanding English Spelling, analyzed the 7,000 most common English words and found that 60 percent of them had one or more unpredictably used letters. As there's no systematic way to learn to read or write modern English-people have to memorize the spelling of thousands of individual words, file them away in their mental databases, and retrieve them when needed--English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. Moreover, English-speaking children then spend years progressing through different reading levels and mastering the spelling of more and more words. That means it typically takes English-speaking children at least 10 years to become moderately proficient spellers-memorizing about 400 new words per year-and because they forget and have to revise many of the spellings they've previously learned, "learning to spell is a never-ending chore."

Similar to `ōlelo Hawai`i in Hawaii, the indigenous Maori language [te reo Maori] was banned in New Zealand schools for much of the 20th century. At the same time, many rural Maori were moving into the cities where they had to speak English. That meant that by the 1980s, only 20 percent of indigenous New Zealanders were fluent in the Maori language.That number was virtually unchanged by 2013. Government data that year showed that just 21.3 percent of the Maori population could have a conversation in te reo. An official government report published in 2010 warned the language was nearing extinction. Fortunately, in 2018, Maori is enjoying increased popularity among New Zealanders, Maori or otherwise, taking pride in their South Pacific nation's indigenous culture. Te reo Maori courses are booked out at community colleges, while bands, poets and rappers perform using the language. Te reo Maori words have entered people's everyday language. Examples include "kai" meaning food, "ka pai" meaning congratulations, and "whanau" meaning family. Even the way New Zealanders define themselves has taken on a te reo tone. An increasing number prefer to call their country "Aotearoa" rather than New Zealand.

"Falsehood flies, and the Truth comes limping after it," Jonathan Swift once wrote. It was hyperbole three centuries ago. But it is a factual description of social media, according to an ambitious and first-of-its-kind study produced by MIT and published Thursday in Science. The massive new study analyzes every major contested news story in English across the span of Twitter's existence-some 126,000 stories, tweeted by 3 million users, over more than 10 years-and finds that the truth simply cannot compete with hoax and rumor. By every common metric, falsehood consistently dominates the truth on Twitter, the study finds: Fake news and false rumors reach more people, penetrate deeper into the social network, and spread much faster than accurate stories. "It seems to be pretty clear [from our study] that false information outperforms true information," said Soroush Vosoughi, a data scientist at MIT who has studied fake news since 2013 and who led this study. "And that is not just because of bots. It might have something to do with human nature."

The year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin's wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film.

Emoji are already butting their heads with traditional words, but could they take over completely? The year 2015 could be called the year of the emoji. They have landed a teenage boy in a police cell and prompted Vladimir Putin's wrath in Russia, and the loveable smiley faces are even set to come to life in their own Hollywood film.

An interview with Ellen Bialystok, a cognitive neuroscientist, about the advantages of being bilingual.

A cognitive neuroscientist, Ellen Bialystok has spent almost 40 years learning about how bilingualism sharpens the mind. Her good news: Among other benefits, the regular use of two languages appears to delay the onset of Alzheimer's disease symptoms. Dr. Bialystok, 62, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, was awarded a $100,000 Killam Prize last year for her contributions to social science.

"In our next studies , we looked at the medical records of 400 Alzheimer's patients. On average, the bilinguals showed Alzheimer's symptoms five or six years later than those who spoke only one language. This didn't mean that the bilinguals didn't have Alzheimer's. It meant that as the disease took root in their brains, they were able to continue functioning at a higher level. They could cope with the disease for longer." No other website I have found has so comprehensively covered the various benefits of being bilingual. This is a concise interview that displays that bilingual people are not only better at multitasking but can also delay the onset of Alzheimer's by up to 5 years.

In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.

Hawaii put forward a plan Tuesday, 1/17/2023, to make preschool available to all 3- and 4-year-olds by 2032, which if successful would put the state in a rarified group of states managing to provide pre-kindergarten education to most of its children. Hawaii's leaders have aspired to universal pre-K for decades but have found it elusive. A recent analysis found the state was moving so slowly toward that goal that it would take 47 years to build all the public preschool capacity Hawaii needed. The state expects it will need 465 new classrooms to serve the additional students. Lt. Gov. Sylvia Luke, who has been tasked by Gov. Josh Green to lead the state's efforts, said only half of Hawaii's 35,000 3- and 4-year-olds attend preschool, either by paying expensive tuition for private schools or obtaining one of the few spots in publicly-funded pre-K programs. The state estimates there are about 9,200 children whose parents want to send them to preschool but aren't able. It's targeting its plans at this group.

Just in time to celebrate the Year of the Dragon, a comprehensive listing of lucky foods to eat for Chinese New Year. Generally, these foods fall into two categories: they either physically resemble lucky objects (e.g. dumplings look like gold ingots, carrot rounds look like coins) or are homophonic with auspicious phrases (e.g. "ye zi"= coconut, sounds like the words for "father/son", conveying the idea of harmonious parent-child relations). Food for thought.

An interesting article about the difference in language between Western languages and Chinese. While Western languages differentiate between sheep and goats and rams, Chinese do not distinguish this within their language. The article discusses how this has caused interest ad debate in what to call this Lunar Year.

Chinese New Year, known in China as Spring Festival, has an abundance of unique traditions associated with it. Some of these traditions are more widespread than others. Among the many New Year's customs are a few whose meaning is derived from puns of Mandarin words.

After Great Britain left the European Union this year, its said that it would try to trade more with China. However, Mandarin Chinese education in Britain is not very extensive, and both the government private industries are taking a new approach - immersion and bilingual schools - to try to teach young children Mandarin. The UK hopes for 5000 fluent students by 2020.

Charting linguistic change was once a painstakingly slow task, but a new analysis of nearly one billion Tweets - presented on 17 April 2018 at the Evolang International Conference on Language Evolution in Torun, Poland - now offers us an unprecedented glimpse of this process in action. According to this new research, most of the more recent coinages will have originated in one of five distinct hotspots that are driving American English through continual change. More than 20% of Americans were using Twitter at the time of the study - and each Tweet is timestamped and geocoded, offering precise information on the time and place that particular terms entered conversations. The researcher behind the study, Jack Grieve at the University of Birmingham, UK, analysed more than 980 million Tweets in total - consisting of 8.9 billion words - posted between October 2013 and November 2014, and spanning 3,075 of the 3,108 US counties. From this huge dataset, Grieve first identified any terms that were rare at the beginning of the study (occurring less than once per billion words in the last quarter of 2013) but which had then steadily risen in popularity over the course of the following year. He then filtered the subsequent list for proper nouns (such as Timehop) and those appearing in commercial adverts, and he also removed any words that were already in Merriam-Webster Dictionary. Acronyms, however, were included. The result was a list of 54 terms, which covered everything from sex and relationships (such as "baeless" - a synonym for single), people's appearance ("gainz" to describe the increased muscle mass from bulking up at the gym), and technology ("celfie" - an alternative spelling of selfie). Others reflected the infiltration of Japanese culture (such as "senpai", which means teacher or master). They also described general feelings, like "litt" (or "litty" - which means impressive or good - or affirmations such as "yaaaas

"Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey. ... His analysis systematically rules out not only common languages from within the Assyrian Empire, but also other languages of the time -- including Egyptian, Elamite, Urartian or West Semitic. Even at its most generous, his assessment suggests that only 15 of the legible names belong to a language previously known to historians. ... More convincing is the theory that the language in question may have been spoken by a people from somewhere else in the Assyrian Empire who were forcibly moved by the administration." More coverage: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/ancient-language-discovered-on-clay-tablets-found-amid-ruins-of-2800-year-old-middle-eastern-palace-7728894.html Link to the study: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/664450?uid=3738032&uid=2132&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=56160246193

Donald Trump is probably known as one of the most interesting presidents and speakers we know. His common short phrases of, "Believe me", "Not good", and "Build a wall" are some of his most known. This article explains how a linguistic professor studied Trump's speech for two years to try and understand what makes Trump so intriguing to listen to. It also goes on to explain how his speech compares to normal everyday Americans and commonly known politicians.

According to two new World Health Organization reports, about 1.7 million children under the age of 5 die each year because of environmental hazards. It's the first such estimate of the child death toll from environmental causes.

For 30 years, Robert Siegel has pretty much been the voice of All Things Considered. He steps down from the host chair on Jan. 5, 2018. During his career, one of the recurrent themes of his reporting has been language - and how we speak. This article documents several of Robert Siegel's language-related stories, including a 1993 article on "uptalk," an interview with a voice coach who teaches rock stars to scream without shredding their vocal cords, an interview with sociolinguist William Labov on New York accents, and Donald Trump's vocabulary and language.

This article serves as an update in the new year of 2024 on which states require their public schools to teach kids how to read and write in cursive. New to the 27 state list are California and New Hampshire, as they now all require some form of cursive education for the youth in school.