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This article states that humans judge people by their voices. It is something that we all do because we cannot help it. The author touches upon Shakespearean plays to elaborate his argument for why tone of voice does in fact matter.

Stephen Porges, psychiatry professor and Distinguished University Scientist at Indiana University, where he directs the Trauma Research Center within the Kinsey Institute, speaks about the importance of safety in relationships. Porges' Polyvagal Theory describes how our autonomic nervous system mediates safety, trust, and intimacy through a subsystem he calls the social engagement system. Our brain is constantly detecting through our senses whether we are in a situation that is safe, dangerous, or life threatening. People's autonomic nervous system are designed to perceive threat: a protective, defensive survival mechanism, but a response that can also get us into trouble if we sense that our safety is at risk, causing us to misread the situation. However, humans also have a mammalian mechanism that mediates those gut-level ANS responses. This social engagement system enables us to interpret linguistic, facial, tonal, intonation, and gestural cues, and the intentionality of others. When our body and mind experience safety, our social engagement system enables us to collaborate, listen, empathize, and connect, as well as be creative, innovative, and bold in our thinking and ideas. This has positive benefits for our relationships as well as our lives in general. The takeaways: 1. Safety is paramount in crucial conversations and conflict-resolution. 2. Learning to deploy cues that display love, trust, and engagement in the midst of conflict can help disarm defensive, threat response mechanisms in other people, help restore safety in our social interactions, and reaffirm bonds.

The Académie française, established in 1635, is the official authority on the French language, establishing the standards for proper French. One of the aims of the Académie, whose 40 members include writers, linguists, historians and philosophers, is to protect French from foreign, notably "Anglo-Saxon" invasions. To that end, it comes up with French equivalents to pesky Anglicisms that slip into French, for example changing email into courriel.

"My husband's family couldn't believe he spoke French as if he were living in France," Raphael's mother, Raquel Jegouzo, said. At home, Raquel speaks to Raphael in English and French. His father, Erwan Jegouzo, a native French speaker, speaks to Raphael exclusively in French. The Jegouzos might be doing something right.

According to this article, bilingualism in children is correlated with tissue density in part of the brain responsible for language, memory and attention. This article confronts concerns that teaching a child two languages causes confusion, stating that such barriers are untrue and that bilingualism actually improves linguistic learning.

Great find, Kai!

Just in case you were under the misimpression that artificial intelligence will be taking over the world shortly, this article suggests that digital assistants really can't even handle the sort of everyday linguistic interaction that humans take for granted. Still, it is interesting to find out how product engineers are designing the assistants to become "smarter" at comprehending your words and requests. Machine learning algorithms can help devices deal with turn-by-turn exchanges. But each verbal exchange is limited to a simple, three- or four-turn conversation.

Linguists' analysis of Trump's Inaugural Address as the POTUS confirms that he actually did the writing! The speech matches his usual style of debates, interviews, etc. His style, as described by Kayla N Jordan, is intuitive, rather than analytical. Trump goes with his heart rather than his head. His Address also shows he is authentic (which doesn't necessarily mean he is true), because he uses personal words like I and me. This article includes graphs comparing Trump to all(?) past presidents in different categories.

Taiwanese-American writer Esme Wang reflects on the untranslated use of other languages in literature which is otherwise written in English. By making the linguistic choice to use untranslated Chinese in a novel geared for an English-reading audience, she hopes her readers will be able to relate to characters, yet also experience the nuances and complexities of inhabiting a space where difficulty in communication is its own kind of trauma.

Love comes in all different shapes, sizes and languages. Helena Halmari, English and Linguistics professor, held a forum on Friday that examined love letters between Finnish composer Jean Sibelius and his wife, Aino. Halmari has been studying the letters through which the couple corresponded. What Halmari has found to be so interesting is that Jean wrote mostly in Swedish, while Aino wrote in Finnish. She talked about the different ways she studied the languages. "I wanted to get a general idea of how the languages were divided," said Halmari. "I knew that it could be very simple because Sibelius uses Swedish and Aino uses Finnish, but it wasn't always simple because they sometimes mixed each other's languages together. Most of the time, though, they stick to their own languages, which didn't make it hard for them at all because they were both bilingual." One would expect the use of two different languages to affect communication in some way, especially negatively. However, Jean and Aino were able to clearly understand each other, and even appreciated the other's use of their first language. Halmarin discussed the relationship between the two. "I don't think their use of two different languages impeded their communication because they both knew each other's languages," said Halmari. "For Jean, Swedish was the preferred written language, because he always worried that he would make mistakes when writing in Finnish." While she has examined forms of bilingual audio communication, such as medieval sermons and recordings, the letters are the first written form of bilingual communication that Halmari has come across. "I haven't looked at letters that were like this before," Halmari said. "In my research, I've looked at bilingual spoken language like recordings, and even email correspondence. They tend to follow the same patterns, though it's not as clear, because some people mix the languages sometimes within the same senten

Linguist are trying to document and record quickly dying languages. They try writing down and making dictionaries of these endangered languages. Documentation can be the key to revitalization. But if no one is interested in revitalization then there it is just like keeping museum artifacts.

What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them? Part of the problem is that there is more involved than just language and thought; there is also culture. Your culture-the traditions, lifestyle, habits, and so on that you pick up from the people you live and interact with-shapes the way you think, and also shapes the way you talk.

Have you ever had trouble describing one of your experiences? This article explores how language can restrict us. For example, color is fluid, but language isn't; at one point the color is going to change from red to orange when yellow is slowly added to it. Moreover, the environment in which we live has an influence on the words we use and the ones even in our language. Guugu Yimithirr doesn't have words for the English equivalent of "left", "right", "up", or "down". Instead, directional words (North, South, East, and West) are used. Languages have a great way of affecting how we think and offering new insights.

Article discusses the findings of researchers who've documented and categorized the utterances of the dying (morbid, but true!) Author Michael Erard notes that more research should be done in this area, because "Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people's fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients."

In this article addressed to teachers, author Julia Csillag cites research on the use of wordless texts to teach students with autism spectrum disorder. Wordless texts can be used to address a variety of skills that autistic students typically struggle with, including diverse literacy skills, cognitive flexibility, and nonverbal communication. Removing words and auditory information also supports autistic students since integrating information from multiple senses can take longer in autistic individuals, particularly if this information is linguistic. Removing words can therefore positively influence processing. Using wordless books or movies can build diverse literacy skills in terms of making inferences, understanding narrative structure, and using evidence to support a claim. All wordless "texts" support individuals' ability to make inferences, which is helpful since research shows that "students with Asperger syndrome…had challenges in making inferences from the text" (Knight & Sartrini, 2014). Moreover, researchers have found that "similar processes contribute to comprehension of narratives across different media" (Kendeou, P. et al, 2009), meaning that addressing visual inferences can transfer to inferences made during reading. Images and silent books or movies necessarily require students to infer what is happening, who the characters are, etc.

Linguist David Crystal opines that one of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying. The period - the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages - is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the digital age. The conspicuous omission of the period in text messages and in instant messaging on social media, Crystal says, is a product of the punctuation-free staccato sentences favored by millennials - and increasingly their elders - a trend fueled by the freewheeling style of Facebook, WhatsApp and Twitter.

LONDON - One of the oldest forms of punctuation may be dying The period - the full-stop signal we all learn as children, whose use stretches back at least to the Middle Ages - is gradually being felled in the barrage of instant messaging that has become synonymous with the

Jez Burrows is the author of Dictionary Stories: more than 150 short fiction pieces, composed entirely from example sentences taken from 12 different dictionaries. Describing his writing process, Burrows comments: "It was only a few weeks into writing Dictionary Stories that I realized the dictionary is something of a Trojan horse. Trundling up to the perimeter of your bookshelves, it presents itself as a harmless book of reference-but look inside and you'll find it crawling with thousands upon thousands of microscopic pieces of fiction, all in the form of example sentences. Fiction is perhaps a slightly misleading word to use in this context. Lexicographers do not write these examples from scratch in the service of whimsical narrative; they query huge corpora of texts that could include novels, news broadcasts, articles and essays, and select an example that demonstrates the most probable usage of a word. But surrounded by the neutral, instructive language of dictionary definitions, example sentences feel vital and full of personality. The New Oxford American Dictionary contains over 80,000 examples, but it was just one ("He perched on the edge of the bed, a study in confusion and misery," an example of the word "study") that set me on the journey of collaging these sentences together to create very short stories. Should you wish to try writing stories of your own in this vein, I give you this list of some of the most versatile words the New Oxford American has to offer-or at least, words with the highest number of example sentences, any of which would make a fine start to a story." So, if you want to try emulating Burrows' style, here're the 6 words: 1. go, 2. run, 3. take, 4. set, 5. cut, and 6. stand. These words illustrate the linguistic concept of polysemy: words that possess many meanings. Try creating a story using one--or collaging several example sentences. Have fun!

These charts will help you choose the language you should focus on today.

To some extent, Americans have an advantage over much of the world's population: The country's two most widely spoken languages - English and Spanish - are among the most widely spoken worldwide. So, are Americans still willing to take language classes?

It's well established that people express different aspects of their personalities when speaking different languages. Now, researchers are suggesting that a much subtler linguistic shift can have a meaningful impact on the way we interpret the world: Just listening to a voice with a foreign accent can prime people to see a situation according to the values of the foreign culture, if they have ties to it-or it can reinforce the standards of their own culture, if they're "monocultural."

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.

Languages have to compete with technology. Digital media is becoming an integral part of Chickasaw life, just as it is in nearly every corner of the globe. But rather than pointing to technology as contributing to language loss, as some linguists have done for decades, Hinson decided to embrace technology as an opportunity. As someone who relies on the internet, he saw it as a potential route to success, not a barrier.