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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.

Speech must be decoded by systems for semantic memory and syntax. Speech is open, inventive, improvised; it is rich in ambiguity and meaning. There is a huge freedom in this, making spoken language almost infinitely flexible and adaptable - but also vulnerable to mishearing.

Without understanding the 'referential function' of language (words as 'verbal labels', symbolizing other things) it is impossible to learn a language. Is this implicit knowledge already present early in infants? Marno, Nespor, and Mehler of the International School of Advanced Studies conducted experiments with infants (4 months old). Babies watched a series of videos where a person might (or might not) utter an (invented) name of an object, while directing (or not directing) their gaze towards the position on the screen where a picture of the object would appear. By monitoring the infants' gaze, Marno and colleagues observed that, in response to speech cues, the infant's gaze would look faster for the visual object, indicating that she is ready to find a potential referent of the speech. However, this effect did not occur if the person in the video remained silent or if the sound was a non-speech sound. "The mere fact of hearing verbal stimuli placed the infants in a condition to expect the appearance, somewhere, of an object to be associated with the word, whereas this didn't happen when there was no speech, even when the person in the video directed the infant's gaze to where the object would appear, concludes Marno. "This suggests that infants at this early age already have some knowledge that language implies a relation between words and the surrounding physical world. Moreover, they are also ready to find out these relations, even if they don't know anything about the meanings of the words yet. Thus, a good advice to mothers is to speak to their infants, because infants might understand much more than they would show, and in this way their attention can be efficiently guided by their caregivers."

Has a list of entries on the word "like"

This is an article about a village in Northern Australia whose original founders of their language are still living there.

Last summer, Apple surprised almost everyone at WWDC with the announcement of Swift, a new programming language for iOS and Mac development. The language feels like something Apple would invent. Like several of the languages currently popular in web development, it has a concise, readable syntax that's easier to pick up than Apple's older language, Objective-C.

Well, music is not a coincidence. Its a basic feature of life itself. Humans didn't essentially invent music. We just re-discovered it and formulated it acco...

The invention of new ways of speaking is one surprising consequence of migration to Europe. The story of languages is, by and large, one of extinction.

In a few years, an estimated hundred+ languages could go extinct due to immigration.

1. What do you say to embarrass a polar bear? 2. How might an underwater society write? 3. Can a creature without teeth say "tooth"? 4. How many verbs for "to pray" does an angel need? These are some of the questions students have pondered in "Invented Languages" at Stephen F.

This article describes the birth of an entirely new language, by an isolated village in Australia. The language is extremely new, with many of its first speakers still living today.

Deaf children are able to develop a language-like gesture system by making up hand signs and using homemade systems to increase their communication as they grow, just as children with conventional spoken language.

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.

This article discusses how numbers are not innately known and must be taught, thus as such our language and "defining" them cannot be exact. Through research and monitoring children as well as isolated people like the Piraha, one see's it is difficult to differenciate numbers such as 4 and 5 and 7. While telling the difference between big and small or 1 and 2 are easy.

Numbers are tools people invented a long time ago, and we know how to use them only because we find ourselves in a society in which that knowledge has been preserved and transmitted. Without these symbols, we, like the Pirahã, could not "see" divisions between most quantities. Anthropologist Caleb Everett asserts that when our ancestors learned to count, they "radically transformed the human condition," making possible such number-dependent developments as complex agriculture.

Ubiquitous video technology and social media have given deaf people a new way to communicate. They're using it to transform American Sign Language. For more than a century, the telephone has helped shape how people communicate. But it had a less profound impact on American Sign Language, which relies on both hand movements and facial expressions to convey meaning. Until, that is, phones started to come with video screens. Over the past decade or so, smartphones and social media have allowed ASL users to connect with one another as never before. Face-to-face interaction, once a prerequisite for most sign language conversations, is no longer required. Video has also given users the opportunity to teach more people the language - there are thriving ASL communities on YouTube and TikTok - and the ability to quickly invent and spread new signs, to reflect either the demands of the technology or new ways of thinking.

This article talks about how the new "Spanglish" invention provides an example of how language evolves. It gives examples of Spanglish phrases as well as explains how racism and language discrimination have caused people to perceive "Spanglish" as an incorrect use of language.

While the invention of emojis was fairly recent, researchers have found that instead of creating a new type of communication, emojis call back to ancient proto-languages and cuneiform-type scripts. Emojis can be helpful in communicating online across cultures, due to the ease of interpretation across all language systems.

This is a thesis paper exploring the various theories regarding the evolution of Chinese characters. It is highly unlikely that the Chinese took inspiration from the Mesopotamian cuneiform script, which may have formed at around the same period in time. The author makes the claim that while it is true that Chinese characters may have started off as drawings or pictographs, in the most ancient form of the script, the characters are far from any recognizable images of items. It is very likely that the Chinese script went through a similar evolution process as to the Mesopotamian cuneiform, but no such archeological evidence for this theory has been found.

This article discusses the AI company Sanas' invention of technology that can mask "non-preferred" accents, intended for use in call centers. Controversy has erupted over the consequences of this technology, namely white-washing and the erasure of the culture and identity that is tied to accents.