Group items tagged

Douglas Quenqua reports on crowdsourcing projects in both American Sign Language and British Sign Language are under way at several universities, and how those projects standardize signs for commonly used science terms.

Immigrant groups from every part of the world have routinely brought their languages to the United States, save one: African Americans. John Baugh explains how the African slave trade impacted this unique variety of American, and how the term "Ebonics" came into being.

A CEO of a company that runs about 32 charter schools around New York is cutting foreign language from the curriculum because "Americans don't learn foreign languages well".

Eva Moskowitz is the CEO and founder of Success Academy Charter Schools, responsible for about 9,000 students in 32 charter schools around New York City. Moskowitz sat down for an interview with the American Enterprise Institute this week, and talked about how to fit everything she deems important for students-coding, recess, science five days a week-into...

This article explores the revival of Wampanoag (Wôpanâak)--an Algonquian language spoken by Native Americans living in Southeastern Massachusetts when the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock. The story of the linguistic reclaimation's told in Anne Makepeace's documentary, _We Still Live Here_.

Wow!

An article about Congress's predilection for making bill titles into acronyms, e.g.: - SOPA (Stop Online Piracy Act) - PROTECT-IP (Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property) - E-PARASITE (Enforcing and Protecting American Rights Against Sites Intent on Theft and Exploitation) - REPEAL (Revoke Excessive Policies that Encroach on American Liberties) - BOSS ACT (Better Oversight of Secondary Sales and Accountability in Concert Ticketing)

If any of you like History Channel, this would be an interesting video to watch. This film explains why American citizens have different accents and how their take on the American language has affected the shapes of our states. Note: This video does not contain great quality in terms of sound or picture but is still a cool video to watch if you have time :)

It's a very thorough map of North American English dialects, based on pronunciation patterns.

Interesting NPR story on the use of "ax"--apparently not simply the oft-maligned African-American Vernacular English version of "ask". That particular pronunciation of the word has a more distinguished pedigree, dating back to Chaucer.

ASL dictionary Browse thousands of words in the ASL dictionary online. May 2012: There are linguistic and educational benefits of learning both American Sign Language and spoken/written English. Deaf children can acquire two languages ... An interview with Francois Grosjean by Nataly Kelly, Chief Research Offier, Common Sense Advisory. Not only does this site act as a dictionary for ASL, but it teachers baby signing and finger signing too! It also highlights benefits of knowing sign.

Joshua Katz, of North Carolina State University, has developed a program that maps your dialect of American English, based on your responses to 25 questions. Take the quiz and find out yours.

Has American English become homogenized? Have our regional ways of saying particular things - sometimes in very particular ways - receded into the past? Or do we talk as funny as ever?

The experts weigh in on the American penchant for creating new words, expressions and distinctive ways of speaking. Have we become too informal? Are we lowering our standards? Can we control language change? The answers may surprise you. The Truth About Change Language sows its own seeds of change; social context gives it the fertile ground to grow and spread.

"American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels... Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that "haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.)" Plus a sample video.

Including corpora of historical and contemporary American English, British English, Spanish, and Portuguese.

"According to Rosemary Feal, executive director of the MLA, [the American style] was instituted in the early days of the Republic in order 'to improve the appearance of the text. A comma or period that follows a closing quotation mark appears to hang off by itself and creates a gap in the line (since the space over the mark combines with the following word space).'" Ironically, though, this article only uses the "logical punctuation" style once - in the title.

I love it when punctuation marks fit neatly within the quotation. The opposite makes me feel strangely queasy...

NPR's Jasmine Garsd, cohost of Alt.Latino, NPR's weekly music podcast, speaks re: indigenous lyrics and music sung in indigenous languages, fused to Western idioms like hip-hop and electronica. The show itself, featuring artists who showcase their musical talents in indigenous languages from Mapuche to Tzotzil, Guarani and Quechua, can be found at this link: http://www.npr.org/blogs/altlatino/2015/03/05/390934624/hear-6-latin-american-artists-who-rock-in-indigenous-languages