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This campaign, a part of Speak to The Future, aims to urge people to learn at least 1,000 new foreign words because of a decrease in multilingualism throughout the UK. These 1,000 words would allow for simple conversations and are believed to help improve social diversity and increase economic opportunities.

Here's how to be more emotionally intelligent: 1. Emotions are concepts: They're not hardwired or universal. They're learned. 2. Emotional intelligence starts with emotional granularity: If your doctor came back with a diagnosis of "you're sick", you'd sue the quack for malpractice. Doctors need to be able to distinguish between "chancre" and "cancer." And you need to know the difference between "sad" and "lonely." 3. Emotional intelligence is in the dictionary: You can't feel Fremdschämen if you don't know what it is. So learn new emotion words so you can feel new emotions and increase your emotional granularity, that is, the ability to distinguish the emotions you feel and recognize them as distinct and different. 4. Create new emotions: We could all use a little more "passion-o-rama" in our lives. Name those unnamed feelings you have and share them with others to make them real. In sum, finding specific words to describe the particularities of what you're feeling can lead to greater mental health. The article also discusses the differences that cultures/languages have in re: feelings and emotions we might've previously assumed were universal.

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!

Study shows that children taught words then tested on the next day score better than those tested the same day Nothing beats a good night's sleep for helping youngsters learn new words, new research has revealed. A study suggests that even the brightest children remember words best when they're given a chance to sleep on it.

This article talks about when the cutoff age to learn a new language is. Studies show that youth are proficient in learning a new language until the age of 18 but if they want to understand and learn the fluency of a native speaker it is best to start by the age of 10.

This article discusses how we might alter the language we use to discuss climate change in order to instill urgency and encourage meaningful action. It describes Matthew Schneider-Mayerson and Brent Ryan Bellamy's publication "An Ecotopian Lexicon," a book of words to better convey the crisis of climate change. In the spirits of science fiction writers who often create new vocabulary for their imagined worlds, the two professors assembled a committee of writers, scholars, and artists to compile loan words that would more adequately communicate the reality of the climate crisis. These words were taken from languages such as Thai, Gaeilge, Norwegian, and Luganda. They hope that intentionally influencing the language we treat climate change with will help influence the action and imagination we apply to it. As written, "our inability to imagine another path forward reflects a limited vocabulary. "

The Maori language has been in decline for the past few decades in New Zealand. In an attempt to help revive the language, New Zealand's Prime Minister will have her daughter learn the Maori.

This article gives simple, key steps to learning a new language. Many people are learning a new language right now. Nearly 1.2 billion people in this world are in the process of developing a second language. The study shows that the most efficient way to learn a language is not in the amount of hours you put in, but how often you practice. Cramming in massive amounts of hours one day each week is not an efficient way of learning something new. You need to be immersed in the language as frequently possible. You also need to review what you have studied before. Learning it once and then forgetting is not helpful in the long run. Reviewing will help turn your learning into muscle memory. This article helps and motivates new language learners and helps them seek their end goal of speaking fluently.

The British Broadcasting System (BBC) World Service recently began producing digital news content in Naijá (Nigerian Pidgin). Though Naijá originated as a pidgin, trade communication between Portuguese and English speakers and natives of the Niger Delta, linguistically-speaking, its modern incarnation is actually a creole exhibiting systematic grammar and syntax. The service will bring language diversity to the news and current affairs that West and Central Africa audiences receive, where Pidgin is one of the most widely-spoken languages. The decision to make the service digital only was based on the fact that African people prefer to read content on their mobile phones. Itʻs also interesting to note the transformation of Pidgin, once solely an oral language, into standardized text-based language.

For 30 years, Robert Siegel has pretty much been the voice of All Things Considered. He steps down from the host chair on Jan. 5, 2018. During his career, one of the recurrent themes of his reporting has been language - and how we speak. This article documents several of Robert Siegel's language-related stories, including a 1993 article on "uptalk," an interview with a voice coach who teaches rock stars to scream without shredding their vocal cords, an interview with sociolinguist William Labov on New York accents, and Donald Trump's vocabulary and language.

"Research suggests that bilingual people can hold Alzheimer's disease at bay for longer, and that bilingual children are better at prioritising tasks and multitasking." See also: http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2011/02/100218-bilingual-brains-alzheimers-dementia-science-aging/

Ryan, you're the best!

This article talks about the different arguments for the linguistic status of hashtags. One of the arguments is that they are like compound words. Compound words are words that are a combination of two existing words which were formed into one word (ex. notebook, living room or long-term). Another suggestion is that hashtagging is a less formal and completely new process of forming words. It suggests that there are no rules in hashtagging other than that there can be no spaces in between the parts. The authors argue that their research goes against both arguments by saying that they shouldn't be considered as words at all, but that they are still very interesting linguistically because they function in many different roles in language use on social media.

This article argues that hashtags are artificial words based on their research of a collection of millions of New Zealand English tweets. Hashtags are a widespread feature of social media posts and used widely in search engines. Anything with the intent of attracting attention comes with a memorable hashtag like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #COVID19. There are two main theories regarding the linguistic status of hashtags. One claims hashbrowns are like compound words. This is a way of making new words by gluing two or more words together. Another claims that hashtags are words that arise from a completely different process. Hashtagging is a much looser word-formation process with fewer restrictions. However, these researchers argue against both these conjectures. They suggest hashtags are written to look orthographically like words but their function is much broader and similar to keywords in a library catalogue or search engine. The researchers also created their own term, hybrid hashtags, meaning hashtags comprising one or more words from two distinct languages. Their example of hybrid hashtags included #kiaora4that and #letssharegoodtereostories which combined English and Maori, the indigenous language of New Zealand.

This article talks about how new meanings for words have been created by women such as "spring cleaning"

This article serves as an update in the new year of 2024 on which states require their public schools to teach kids how to read and write in cursive. New to the 27 state list are California and New Hampshire, as they now all require some form of cursive education for the youth in school.

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

New ways to grab dinner, the trick to using a tool, and learning the local dialect. These are behaviors that animals pick up from each other. K iller whales, chimpanzees, and birds seem to have a cultural component to their lives. Now a new study suggests that sperm whales should be added to that list.

Some adults learn a second language better than others, and their secret may involve the rhythms of activity in their brains. New findings by scientists at the University of Washington demonstrate that a five-minute measurement of resting-state brain activity predicted how quickly adults learned a second language.

A linguistics researcher at the Macquarie University in Australia has discovered that the language, known as Burushaski, which is spoken by about 90,000 people who reside in a remote area of Pakistan, is Indo-European in origin. Prof Ilija Casule's discovery, which has now been verified by a number of the world's top linguists, has excited linguistics experts around the world.

Clearly I am in a judgmental phase. When I saw this year's list of words that Merriam-Webster Unabridged has added to its pages, I groaned with dismay a few times. Normally I love learning new words, and I hadn't known a lot of these words, but some seemed pointless.