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This article talks about how one's genetics and one's language could possibly be connected. This study took place in Cape Verde, where people speak Kriolu, a mixture of European and African languages that formed with the trans Atlantic slave trade. Researchers recorded multiple individual's speech and compared the recordings to the individual's DNA. They found that there was a significant correlation between one's ancestry and the words they use - for example, those with more African genetic ancestry used more African derived words. While this doesn't necessarily conclude that linguistic traits are passed on like genetic traits are, it is interesting that in a language that is a mix of other languages, individuals still use more words that are derived from their ethnic backgrounds.

This National Science Foundation Special Report provides a handy overview of many topics covered in Words R Us, including the physiology of speech, neuroscience and language, dialects, Creoles, sign language, L1 vs. L2 learning, endangered languages, and language evolution.

This source explains how language learning is involved in very basic learning systems that lots of animals have. Language learning falls into either declarative memory (memorize it once) or procedural memory (repeat it over and over until you get it). The research shows that you learn language in one of these two ways. The way that you end up learning in depends on when and how you learn the language.

In our mouths or in print, in villages or in cities, in buildings or in caves, a language doesn't sit still. It can't. Language change has preceded apace even in places known for preserving a language in amber. You may have heard that Icelanders can still read the ancient sagas written almost a thousand years ago in Old Norse.

shows how human migration patterns established by dna tests mirror the language-reconstruction efforts of linguists

Call me a traditionalist, but it doesn't look like a revolution to me. Instead, it looks like a simple decline in proper language skills, born out of a digitally literate culture that has grown too comfortable in an age of abbreviations and spellchecks.

This article talks about a face all humans make, the "not face." It combines the 3 emotions of anger, disgust, and contempt. It not only shows that we are able to express complex emotions, but also how the "not face" is closely tied to language. In ASL speakers, the sign for "not" is also replaced with the negative expression. This article also highlights how facial expression affects language and that there could be more facial expressions like grammatical markers.

This article explains the evolution of language and the influence AI has on modern language. Author Rob Toews gives his insight into the dangers of AI (bias and toxicity) and possible trends in AI linguistics.

University of Michigan professor Carmel O'Shannessy has discovered a language born just a few decades ago. "Light Warlpiri" is spoken in the aboriginal community of Lajamanu in the Northern Territory of Australia.

Long-term language change is inevitable. People need to convey a wide range of emotions or objects, and they will always need to find the words to do so. Technology may help to speed up this process, and it also allows people of all ages to be inventive and experimental, perhaps more than ever before. Only dead languages never change.

Darwin's theory of language developing from love songs

Few would argue the significance of language in the evolution of the human species. Language serves many critical functions within the human experience, from keeping us safe to social engagement. While communication certainly exists in other species, the depth and complexity of the human language is second to none.

This cool British Library link, enhanced with images, brief historical synopses, and transcripts, comes courtesy of Michelle Skinner: you can explore the evolution of the English Language by literary events, key works, and letters/newspapers/chronicles.

This article and video explains how recent research on bird brains could give us clues as to how human language evolved.

Linguist Victor Mair references Caleb Madison's article in the "The Good Word" column of The Atlantic (1/24/22): "Why We're All Shooketh: The term is online slang of Biblical proportions". The phrase I'm shooketh was first uttered by the comedian Christine Sydelko in a YouTube video uploaded to her account in 2017 (she was expressing her shock at having been recognized by a fan at Boston Market). The adjective shooketh took off as a way to lend biblical proportions to awestruck confusion. But the linguistic journey to its creation spans the evolution of the English language, connecting Early Modern English, turn-of-the-century adventure novels, and Twitter slang. In the original article, Madison noted that when we want to transform verbs like shake into adjectives, we typically use something called a participle, either present or past. The present participle of shake is shaking, as in "I'm shaking." The past participle would be "I'm shaken." But in the 19th century, the simple past tense, shook, took hold. As for the "eth" part, Mair notes that this suffix was used in Early Modern English (think Shakespeare and the King James Bible) to put verbs in the third-person present tense, e.g. "she loveth." Soon, -eth simplified to just -s, but we still use the form when we need to give our verbs a little extra ancient oomph. It just wouldn't be as momentous to say "The Lord gives and the Lord takes away!" And it certainly wouldn't be as cool to say "I'm shooks." But our distance from the Elizabethan era allows -eth to reappear with no tense tension. Instead, it simply adds a wry dramatic flourish to the feeling of being shook. If using shook dials the shock of shaken up a notch, adding -eth pushes the intensity to 11, expressing a holy and almost sublime desire in the face of inexplicable events. Shooketh yokes together a punchy modern verbal innovation with a dramatic formal relic of early English to communicate a shaking of biblical propor

This evolution of the Spanish-English hybrid known as "Spanglish" really hit home. Especially considering how migrant workers adapted to language differences here in the early 20th century in the form of Pidgin, similar events took place in the states bordering Mexico.

This is an excerpt of an article that details the evolution of the earliest writing systems. The most traceable writing system to date is the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which follows a trackable evolutionary pattern through history. The script evolved from tokens to 2D impressions, to logographs, and then finally into something similar in concept to the modern alphabet. The Mesopotamian cuneiform script would later become the foundation of many other written languages, including the current English alphabet.

Though newspaper style guides attempt to steer writers and editors through the trickier waters of the English language and try to confer consistency in grammar, punctuation and spelling, their well-intended prescriptivism may result in confusion and controversy. Take, for instance, the term "actor".