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This article discusses how a romantic relationship in college is molded by texting, sexting, and the physical attachment towards each other.

The Beijing dialect is disappearing, with a decreasing number of people speaking it, said Wan Jianzhong, a scholar at Beijing Normal University and municipal CPPCC member. "With an increasing number of migrants, the city is becoming less Beijing-like. Original residents are relocated and fewer people speak the dialect and live the old lifestyle," he said. Wan believes that to bring back Beijingers' memories and sentimental attachments to their old life and culture, the dialect should be promoted. The number of migrants reached 7.04 million by 2010, 35.9 percent of the city's population, according to the Beijing Municipal Bureau of Statistics. "Beijingers are being non-localized by migrants. They talk to people who speak different dialects and forget to use their own," said Wan. While Putonghua should be advocated among the greater public, local dialects should not be sacrificed, he noted.

Fascinating article on language learning using an app called Memrise. The company's goal: to take all of cognitive science's knowhow about what makes information memorable, and combine it with all the knowhow from social gaming about what makes an activity fun and addictive, and develop a web app that can help anyone memorise anything. Two takeaways for language learning, and acquiring and retaining any subject matter: 1. Elaborative encoding. The more context and meaning you can attach to a piece of information, the likelier it is that you'll be able to fish it out of your memory at some point in the future. And the more effort you put into creating the memory, the more durable it will be. One of the best ways to elaborate a memory is to try visually to imagine it in your mind's eye. If you can link the sound of a word to a picture representing its meaning, it'll be far more memorable than simply learning the word by rote. Create mnemonics for vocabulary. 2. "Spaced repetition". Cognitive scientists have known for more than a century that the best way to secure memories for the long term is to impart them in repeated sessions, distributed across time, with other material interleaved in between. If you want to make information stick, it's best to learn it, go away from it for a while, come back to it later, leave it behind again, and once again return to it - to engage with it deeply across time. Our memories naturally degrade, but each time you return to a memory, you reactivate its neural network and help to lock it in. One study found that students studying foreign language vocabulary can get just as good long-term retention from having learning sessions spaced out every two months as from having twice as many learning sessions spaced every two weeks. To put that another way: you can learn the same material in half the total time if you don't try to cram.

Does the Turkish word küçük (pronounced coo-chook) mean "big" or "small"? If you guessed the latter without knowing the language, you're right-and there may be a cognitive explanation for your instinct. In a study published in Cognition earlier this year, researchers tested people's ability to guess at the meanings of words based on their sounds. The lead researcher of the study, Kaitlyn Bankieris, a cognitive scientist from the University of Rochester, noted, "Our study provides a potential neural grounding for sound symbolism." In linguistics, the idea of "sound symbolism" is that there's an underlying relationship between how words sound and what they mean-and it is sometimes used to support the theory that there's some underlying cross-language meaning that humans are hardwired to attach to certain sounds.

Briefly explores the difference of "swear" words and their severity across the globe.

For curses to have impact, they need a dominating societal power and control structure attached to them. Strong language often involves naming things you desire but aren't supposed to desire; at the very least, it aims to upset power structures that may seem a bit too arbitrary. We tend to think of swear words as one entity, but they actually serve several distinct functions. Linguist Steven Pinker, in The Stuff of Thought, lists five different ways we can swear: descriptively, idiomatically, abusively, emphatically, and cathartically. Worldwide, words for genitalia are the most common focus of preferred strong language, the kind used by default for Pinker's five functions.

We often think of "bad" language as something universal to everyone around the world. But swearing is special to each and every language. Depending on the type of language, there are different ways to express anger. For example, in Bikol (a type of language in the phillipines) they have a whole different vocabulary to use when conveying the emotion of anger. In Luganda (an african language) they can convey anger by just changing the noun class prefix. As we can see different cultures convey their emotions differently and there is no "one way" to swear or show anger.

Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabet are collectively called "Ajami." Much as the Latin-based alphabet is used to write many languages, including English, Ajami is not a language itself, but the alphabetic script used to write a language: Arabic-derived letters to write a non-Arabic-in this case, African-language. "Ajami" derives from the Arabic a'jamiy, which means "foreigner" or, more specifically, "non-Arab." Historically, Arabs used the word to refer to all things Persian or non-Arab, a usage they borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Yet over the last few centuries, across Islamic Africa, "Ajami" came to mean an African language written in Arabic script that was often adapted phonetically to facilitate local usages and pronunciations across the continent, from the Ethiopian highlands in the east to the lush jungles of Sierra Leone in the west. The use of Ajami is tied to the religious spread of Islam. From its beginning, Islam was a literate religion. Iqra' ("read") is the first word of God's revelations to Muhammad that became the Qur'an. Knowledge of Islam meant knowledge of the revealed word of God: the Qur'an. Consequently, wherever Islam went, it established centers of learning, usually attached to mosques, where children learned to read and write Arabic in much the same way that European and American children have often been taught literacy by using the Bible. For members of African societies where oral tradition predominated, Arabic was the first written language to which they had been exposed.

Primates, birds, cetaceans, dogs and other species have proven able, through extensive training, to understand human words and simple sentences. And as Ed Yong explained, in some exceptional cases, such as Kanzi and Alex, they've even been able to engage in two-way communication with humans. However, language is more than a process through which meaning is attached to words or short sentences. Language might be described as the ability to take a finite set of elements (such as words), and using a set of rules (grammar and syntax) to create infinite combinations, each of which is comprehensible. In addition, as far as we can tell, humans are the only species who can create and comprehend understandable silliness, like "Colourless green ideas sleep furiously".

Language Log is an applied linguistics blog founded by U.Penn's Mark Liberman. This blog post concerns the phenomenon of character amnesia, which is becoming more prevalent in E. Asian countries like China and Japan, which have character-based languages. Basically, character amnesia is the phenomenon of forgetting how to write words, due to the increase in keyboard input of characters, word processing, online correspondence and composition, predictive text technology, and the decline of handwritten documents. This particular article focuses on Japanese kanji amnesia. The bottom of the article contains links to previous discussions of this topic.

This article highlights three "conflict blueprints" and associated strategies to help constructively manage conflict around unsolvable problems. Although the advice geared for married couples, you can easily extrapolate the information and strategies to other close relationships you have. Conflict Blueprint #1: Current Conflicts -Share perspective in a calm way, and take turns speaking. Use "I" statements. Use repair attempts. Take a 20 minute break to deactivate the fight/flight response. Conflict Blueprint #2: Attachment Injuries -Genuinely apologize to your partner, regardless of your agreement or disagreement with their perspective. Focus only on the fact that you hurt your partner and that you need to take responsibility. Verbalize what you can take responsibility for, as well as any other factors that played into you getting caught up in the fight. Ask your partner what he or she needs from you to heal and move forward, and follow through. Conflict Blueprint #3: Gridlock and Dialogue Take turns speaking and listening. Communicate clearly and honestly. Where does your perspective or position on the issue come from, and what does it symbolize for you? What kinds of lifelong dreams or core issues are at stake for you? As a listener, create a safe space for the speaker. No judging, arguing, giving advice, or trying to solve the problem. Show genuine interest in what your partner is telling you; allow them time and space to fully communicate their concerns. Ask questions so that you can both fully explore the issue and its related meaning. Find ways to create small compromises that can pave the way to larger plans. If your dreams differ, try to find overlapping areas, or try to make plans to give each partner's dreams a chance to grow and become reality.