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Award-winning, Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, has created _Book From the Ground_, a text that speakers of any language can "read." His interest in pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon-a series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This became Xu's inspiration for _Book from the Ground_. Xu's book reflects cultural literacy and modern tools and technologies, rather than traditional literacy. The author predicts that the younger generation is likely to find his icon language easier to "read" because they've been exposed to these images for as long as they can remember on the Internet. "I think it can be seen two ways," says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu's work. "It's great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world." But at the same time, with the "flattening and evening out in communication so much is lost," especially when it comes to tense or nuance. "The real surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he makes you ask yourself: What is writing?" adds Harrist, who describes Xu as "the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is profoundly thoughtful."

Currently, one-quarter of American children don't learn to read. This not only endangers them socially and intellectually, but cognitively handicaps them for life. One 2009 study of 72 children ages eight to ten discovered that reading creates new white matter in the brain, which improves system-wide communication. White matter carries information between regions of grey matter, where any information is processed. Not only does reading increase white matter, it helps information be processed more efficiently. Reading in one language has enormous benefits. Add a foreign language and not only do communication skills improve-you can talk to more people in wider circles-but the regions of your brain involved in spatial navigation and learning new information increase in size. Finally, research shows that reading not only helps with fluid intelligence, but with reading comprehension and emotional intelligence as well.

This article explains how emojis are used globally because they can be understood by anyone regardless of what language they speak. Everyone knows what emojis mean because the things they express are universal. This article also says that emojis can be used to add clarity and nuance to text messages, not just emotion. However, emojis cannot currently be considered a language because they don't have grammar and can't be combined to mean something more complex, although this might happen someday, as novels such as Alice in Wonderland have been translated into emojis.

I would be lying if I told you that this was a really good article. This is actually a badass article about how we use swear words and strong language to emphasize a point in daily conversation. If I were to say, "Wow! That is a really big car!" it does not carry much weight as if I were to say, "Damn! That's a big-ass car!" This article explains how using this kind of language adds a pop of color and richness to our day to day conversations.

Singing is a form of communication that uses language and adds a beat. There are countless people who advocate that the power of music helped them get through rough times because if helped them verbalize their emotions. Music and singing can evoke such strong feelings in humans. By contrast, gesturing also seems quite natural. After all, before we can convey our thoughts to other fluent speakers, we rely on gesturing. This article explores how singing and signing have influenced our speaking. Moreover, which one came first?!

An International Year is an important cooperation mechanism dedicated to raising awareness of a particular topic or theme of global interest or concern, and mobilizing different players for coordinated action around the world. In 2016, the United Nations General Assembly adopted a resolution proclaiming 2019 as the International Year of Indigenous Languages, based on a recommendation by the Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues. At the time, the Forum said that 40 per cent of the estimated 6,700 languages spoken around the world were in danger of disappearing. The fact that most of these are indigenous languages puts the cultures and knowledge systems to which they belong at risk. In addition, indigenous peoples are often isolated both politically and socially in the countries they live in, by the geographical location of their communities, their separate histories, cultures, languages and traditions. And yet, they are not only leaders in protecting the environment, but their languages represent complex systems of knowledge and communication and should be recognized as a strategic national resource for development, peace building and reconciliation. They also foster and promote unique local cultures, customs and values which have endured for thousands of years. Indigenous languages add to the rich tapestry of global cultural diversity. Without them, the world would be a poorer place.

Because text messaging is a conversation that involves a lot of back-and-forth, people add fillers as a way to mimic spoken language. We see this with the increased use of ellipses, which can invite the recipient to continue the conversation. The period is the opposite of that - a definitive stop that signals, as linguistics professor Mark Liberman has explained, "This is final, this is the end of the discussion." For some, this can appear angry or standoffish--but why? The use of the period is an example of what linguist John Gumperz termed situational code-switching: when we change how we talk depending on where we are, who we're talking to or how we're communicating. Using a period in a text message is perceived as overly formal, making the writer come across as insincere or awkward, just like using formal spoken language in a casual setting, like a bar.

Languages often adapt naturally to the world around them. Speakers create new words to communicate new concepts. But when a language isn't spoken widely enough to adapt on its own - as with Hawaiian - it may need help to move things along. The Hawaiian language has nearly 30,000 words. But up until the late 1980s, the language didn't have words for subjects like soccer, computer or recycling. So a group of linguists and language advocates formed a lexicon committee in 1987 to invent new words. The committee has created at least 7,500 new words since its inception. Many of the committee's entries have been published in a modern Hawaiian language dictionary called Māmāka Kaiao. Much of the group's work helped to make Hawaiian teachable in language immersion schools. But some are skeptical of the committee's work. One interviewee noted that there is a small group creating words that we "need" now, but it's unclear why that word was chosen or how. Even the pronunciation of new words can be confusing, she adds. Disagreements among Hawaiian speakers may seem like bad news for spreading the language. But Larry Kimura, UH-Hilo Hawaiian language professor, says it's a sign that the language is growing. He said the lexicon committee helps speed up what would have been an otherwise natural process of ʻōlelo Hawaiʻi adapting to the world around it.

Chinese characters have been an obstacle preventing the development of Chinese proficiency for learners of Chinese whose native language does not have characters. A substantial literature review identified linguistic, pedagogical, and political factors as causes of those difficulties. Tone changes represent different meanings of a word. Compound characters include the phonetic component radicals that do not always sound the same as the phonetic radicals. These unique linguistic features of the Chinese language add even more challenges for learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL).Technology integration has been found to facilitate the teaching and learning foreign languages in many efficient and effective ways.

A spoken language is more than just words and sounds. Speakers use changes in pitch and rhythm, known as prosody, to provide emphasis, show emotion, and otherwise add meaning to what they say. But a language does not need to be spoken to have prosody: sign languages, such as American Sign Language (ASL), use movements, pauses and facial expressions to achieve the same goals. In a study appearing in the September 2015 issue of Language, three linguists look at intonation (a key part of prosody) in ASL and find that native ASL signers learn intonation in much the same way that users of spoken languages do. Children learning ASL acquired prosodic features in three stages of "appearance, reorganization, and mastery": accurately replicating their use in simpler contexts, attempting unsuccessfully at first to use them in more challenging contexts, then using them accurately in all contexts as they fully learn the rules of prosody. Previous research has shown that native learners of spoken languages acquire intonation following a similar pattern.

Northwestern University researchers, led by Dr Nina Kraus, found that poor readers had reduced neural response (auditory brainstem activity) to rhythmic rather than random sounds compared to good readers. In fact the level of neural enhancement to acoustic regularities correlated with reading ability as well as musical aptitude. The musical ability test, specifically the rhythm aspect, was also related to reading ability. Similarly a good score on the auditory working memory related to better reading and to the rhythm aspect of musical ability. Dr Kraus explained, "Both musical ability and literacy correlated with enhanced electrical signals within the auditory brainstem. Structural equation modeling of the data revealed that music skill, together with how the nervous system responds to regularities in auditory input and auditory memory/attention accounts for about 40% of the difference in reading ability between children. These results add weight to the argument that music and reading are related via common neural and cognitive mechanisms and suggests a mechanism for the improvements in literacy seen with musical training."

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

TechRadar spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK's University of Warwick, to find out the science behind the struggle to deduce Wordle Puzzle #256. "[In your live blog] you've already talked about _ATCH as a kind of trap. This is an example of an n-gram, i.e. a group of letters of a length (n) that commonly cluster together. So this is an n-gram with a length of four letters: a quadrigram," Professor Voice tells us. "Using [this] Project Gutenberg data, it's interesting to note that _ATCH isn't listed as one of the most common quadrigrams in English overall, but the [same] data considers words of all lengths, rather than just the five letters Wordle is limited to. I don't know of any corpus exclusively composed of common 5 letter words, but it might be the case that _ATCH happens to be particularly productive for that length." "The other thing to mention," Professor Voice adds, "would be that the quadrigram _ATCH is made up of smaller n-grams, like the bigram AT, which is extremely common in English. So we're seeing a lot of common building blocks in one word, which means that sorting individual letters might not be narrowing down people's guesses as much as it would with other words."

Article looks at the linguistic shift away from the older generation "you're welcome" to "no problem" or "no worries." The article notes that formal language is unquestionably falling by the wayside, likely due to the increasing use of digital technology. Instant messaging and texting have compelled many young people to forgo punctuation altogether, since receiving a message with a period or question mark at the end of it can induce anxiety for some. This is because punctuation is now considered "formal," which roughly translates to "serious."The same is true for "you're welcome," according to linguists, and it might explain why younger generations are using less formal phrases when someone thanks them. While some people might mistakenly think that doing so suggests that the service was irksome or inconvenient, the linguists cited in the article contribute this phenomenon largely to linguistic mirroring. This basically means if the people you interact with on a day-to-day basis often say "you're welcome" or "no problem," then you'll likely mirror whatever phrase is more frequently being used around you. "I believe that this is just part of the evolution of language," adds Saccardi. "The majority of speakers will not intellectualize the connotative meanings of their utterances. Rather, they are more likely to just use particular phrases instead of others because that's what they have grown into." Interestingly, the phrase "you're welcome" has acquired a new meaning for younger generations, as many use it sarcastically to point out that another person forgot to thank them, as in Maui's song in _Moana_.

David Moser, of the University of Michigan Center for Chinese Studies and a L1= English speaker, reflects on his adult language learning struggles with Chinese, his L2. His takeaways as to why the language is so difficult, even for L1= Chinese speakers: 1. Because the writing system is ridiculous: need to recognize a whole lot of characters to be literate, specifically 7-8 years to recognize and write 3000 characters. 2. Because the language doesn't have the common sense to use an alphabet, which would make learning the components of words more simple. 3. Because the writing system just ain't very phonetic. 4. Because you can't cheat by using cognates. 5. Because even looking up a word in the dictionary is complicated. 6. Then there's classical Chinese (wenyanwen 文言文). 7. Because there are too many romanization methods and they all suck. 8. Because tonal languages are weird. 9. Because east is east and west is west, and the twain have only recently met. When you consider all the above-mentioned things a learner of Chinese has to acquire -- ability to use a dictionary, familiarity with two or three romanization methods, a grasp of principles involved in writing characters (both simplified and traditional) -- it adds up to an awful lot of down time while one is "learning to learn" Chinese.

This article discusses the important impact emojis have had on digital communication. "Emoji help add context to our digital communication so we can distinguish the tone or mood of the message. They also act as flair, letting people show a bit of their personality and have some fun in the process."

Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ mental health nonprofit notes an "explosion of language that we're seeing around how young people express their gender." A 2001research study of 34,700+ US youth released Monday by the LGBTQ mental health nonprofit the Trevor Project found that over one in four (26%) LGBTQ youth identified as nonbinary. An additional 20% said they are not sure or are questioning whether they identify as nonbinary. The term "nonbinary" refers to people whose gender does not fit within the traditional binary construction of male or female. Drawing from an online survey conducted between October and December of 2020 of over 34,700 LGBTQ youth in the U.S., the Trevor Project found that while the term "nonbinary" has often been associated with a trans or transitioning person, only half of the respondents who identified as nonbinary also identified as transgender. (An additional 20% said they were not sure or questioning whether they are transgender). While 72% of respondents who identified as nonbinary said they use the term to describe their gender identity, other terms were also cited, including queer (used by 29% of respondents), gender non-confirming (27%), genderfluid (24%), genderqueer (23%), androgynous (23%), agender (15%), demigirl (10%), demiboy (8%), genderflux (4%), and bigender (4%). (Queer is also a term people can use to identify their sexuality, which is separate from gender identity. Most the nonbinary youth sampled reported being multisexual or attracted to multiple genders.) "More and more young people are taking control over their gender identity, and finding language and terms that resonate with them," DeChants continues. "And expressing that in the world in [ways] that we haven't necessarily seen in the past." The majority of nonbinary respondents said they use pronouns outside the gender binary-such as "they/them" or "xe/xem." Here, DeChants notes an "emp

When a human baby is born, its first cry is a normal sign of good health. Having never taken a breath before, the baby signals its first inhalation and exhalation-in the form of a screech. How do babies know to create a sound they've never made before? And is their first yelp truly the start of speech development? As it turns out, human babies may be practicing how to cry long before they ever make a sound. That is, if they're anything like marmosets, humans' primate cousins. A study of marmosets by Daniel Takahashi, a co-author of the study and an animal behaviorist at the Brain Institute at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Norte in Brazil. shows fetal monkeys practicing crying in the womb. Takahashi notes, "marmosets are monkeys that we know vocalize a lot, and they share a lot of features with humans." For instance, both male and female parents raise their offspring together, and unlike other primates, marmoset babies are relatively helpless when they're born, like human infants. Takahashi says the central finding will help illuminate when speech development begins, and that studying pre-birth-rather than the moment of birth-may help identify speech or motor development problems earlier. "There are a lot of things going on in the womb that might be relevant to what's going on afterwards," he says.

In this vibrant borough of Queens, NY, a street called Roosevelt Avenue cuts a cross-section through some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods on Earth. Spanish, Bengali, Punjabi, Mixtec, Seke, and Kuranko are among the hundreds of languages spoken here.