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Michel Martin, NPR journalist, discusses code-switching, the practice of altering communication style to more closely identify with one's audience or setting at any given moment. Guests: Ta-Nehisi Coates, a writer for The Atlantic, and Marc Lamont Hill, a syndicated columnist and professor of education and African-American studies at Columbia University.

Straddling the imaginary border between the Balkans and Central Europe, Slovenia is home to two million citizens united by a common language. But this wasn't always the case. For about six hundred years, the Slovene lands were the domain of the Habsburgs, with the occasional appearance by the French, Italians, Hungarians, and Serbs. The Slovene language-and with it the core of Slovene identity-should by all rights have disappeared long ago, subsumed by the much stronger languages and political powers surrounding it. The language survived thanks to the efforts of many people, from the 16th-century protestants who first wrote it down to the 18th- and 19th-century intellectuals who coaxed it out of the church and spread it among the people. Among their arsenal of weapons: a cookbook, wielded by one relentlessly determined priest, Valentin Vodnik. Vodnik was a man of boundless energy, curiosity, and drive: Besides his work as a priest and later a high-school teacher and headmaster, he was fluent in half a dozen languages, wrote some of the first Slovene poetry, published the first Slovene newspaper, and began corresponding with intellectuals in Slovene. Vodnik's mission was popularizing and elevating the reputation of the language at a time when educated Slovenes mostly spoke German, considering their native tongue to be the vernacular of poor illiterate farmers, unfit for polite society and incapable of expressing complex ideas.

This New York Times article was very interesting. It talked about the effect that the corona virus has on our language, and how the stay at home order is causing a plateau in the English dictionary.

謝謝, Michael Chang ʻ22, for discovering this fun Mandarin Chinese weekly column, which examines various pop culture elements of Mandarin Chinese and teaches vernacular, vocabulary, and other linguistics aspects that Chinese learners are unlikely to learn in a classroom setting. A sampling: Chinese Internet slang, Chinese gastronomic terms, sarcastic phrases, traditional Chinese children's games, poetic terms for snow, anti-COVID virus health propaganda slogans.

Black Americans have long contributed to the ways in which the English language is used, and now a new research project aims to compile the first Oxford Dictionary of African American English. The research project is a collaboration between Harvard University's Hutchins Center for African and African American Research and Oxford University Press.

This article discusses the differences between speech and written language and the interplay between the two. It discusses how speech and written language can and have been separate from each other, like how written language has evolved to convey certain things that speech doesn't. The article then goes on to discuss the internet and texting language, or "Live internet vernacular English" as they call it, focusing on specific aspects, such as emojis, reduplication, and purposeful typos, and making a connection between internet language and speech.

This article discusses how "trendy slangs" are becoming more appealing to foreigners wanting to learn english. In the UK a survey was conducted to determine the type of slang these foreigners are hearing amongst social media platforms. This article relates how many slangs have a root in Multicultural London English (MLE) or African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). This article informs those learning english the type of slangs to use and when appropriate to do so. The slangs range from an older generation to current-ish slangs.

This book chapter discusses two research projects that examine how teachers/instructors view slang terms and how those views affect young people. It explains how young people have their own vernacular and how older generations who don't understand it may see "youth speak" as a threat to "standard" English.