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This researcher has a summary of parallels between songbird songs and human language; also links to his many published papers.

English has invaded the german language over the past 6 decades. Words such as sorry provide quicker more effective alternatives to their german counterparts. This assimilation of the english language can be seen in all levels of German society from common everyday interactions to even being used in the government. Some Germans see this as a bad thing and believe the problem stems from Nazi germany and a lack of appreciation for the German language following WW2. Other Germans see it as not a big deal because compared to a language like english the percentage of words borrowed from other languages is minimal.

Languages a world apart have a similar habit of borrowing elevated vocabulary from other languages. In 1066, because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets-Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)-depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we'd proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It's amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English. The article also discusses a similar historical phenomenon in India, where much of southern India, just like Norman England, was diglossic between Sanskrit (an Indo-European language used ritually and formally by Hindu elites) and vernacular Dravidian languages. Today, that diglossia is gone, but Sanskrit-derived vocabulary still forms an upper crust, mostly pulled out for formal speech or writing.

Author Karel McIntosh, a "Trini Creole" (Trinidad Creole English, a.k.a. TCE) and standard English code-switcher, reflects on how TCE is stigmatized in her homeland, arguing that the language has a rightful and valuable place. Readers may find parallels between the linguistic situation in Hawaii and that in Trinidad.

Exploring the difference and similarities between Language and Music, this article explores how some things are similar, such as local variants of music (creoles in a way), and how some things are different, such as the ecological functions in human life.

Nineb Lamassu, a researcher at England's Cambridge University, travels among the Assyrian diaspora, recording the traditional epic poetry of the Assyrian ethnic minority and capturing at least the memory of an ancient people whose presence in their homeland is gradually fading.

This article focuses on "tricolon", or list of threes. It's a powerful tool to use in papers and speeches because it's catchy and rhythmic. Resource for my research paper.

"Sorry" is one of more than 10,000 American words Germans have borrowed since 1990. Language experts here say English is the main foreign language that has influenced German over the past six decades. This cultural infusion is pervasive, with English used by journalists, by scientists and even at the highest levels of government. To some language experts, like Holger Klatte, the widespread Americanization of German is problematic. Klatte is the spokesman for the German Language Society, which has 36,000 members worldwide. "Languages do tend to affect one another, but the influence of English in Germany is so strong that Germans are having a hard time advancing their own vocabulary," he says.

For both English and Mandarin speakers, the major formants in vowel sounds paralleled the intervals for the most commonly used intervals in music worldwide, namely the octave, the fifth, the fourth, the major third, and the major sixth. To Purves, the upshot is a simple truth: "There's a biological basis for music, and that biological basis is the similarity between music and speech," he says. "That's the reason that we like music." "Whenever we've heard happy speech, we've tended to hear major-scale tonal ratios," Purves says. "Whenever we've heard sad speech, minor tones tend to be involved."

A traveling journalist in Beijing utilizes both Baidu (China's version of Google) and Google voice-translation apps with mixed results. You speak into the apps, they listen and then translate into the language you choose. They do it in writing, by displaying text on the screen as you talk; and out loud, by using your phone's speaker to narrate what you've said once you're done talking. Typically exchanges are brief: 3-4 turns on average for Google, 7-8 for Baidu's translate app. Both Google and Baidu use machine learning to power their translation technology. While a human linguist could dictate all the rules for going from one language to another, that would be tedious, and yield poor results because a lot of languages aren't structured in parallel form. So instead, both companies have moved to pattern recognition through "neural machine translation." They take a mountain of data - really good translations - and load it into their computers. Algorithms then mine through the data to look for patterns. The end product is translation that's not just phrase-by-phrase, but entire thoughts and sentences at a time. Not surprisingly, sometimes translations are successes, and other times, epic fails. Why? As Macduff Hughes, a Google executive, notes, "there's a lot more to translation than mapping one word to another. The cultural understanding is something that's hard to fully capture just in translation."

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.

It's not often that a broadcast interview by a diplomat wows listeners, but a recent conversation involving the American ambassador to Nigeria, James F. Entwistle, is causing a buzz - and winning applause. The praise is not so much for the content of the interview or the pressing issues the ambassador discusses. It's more for the language in which he chose to express himself: pidgin English.

A team of researchers from Rice University and University of Maryland, College Park argue that it is more productive from a developmental perspective to describe spoken language as a special type of music. A review of existing studies presents a compelling case that musical hearing and ability is essential to language acquisition. In addition, we challenge the prevailing view that music cognition matures more slowly than language and is more difficult; instead, the researchers argue that music learning matches the speed and effort of language acquisition, and indeed, that "it is our innate musical intelligence that makes us capable of mastering speech." They conclude that music merits a central place in our understanding of human development.

The researchers of this study advance the idea that spoken language is introduced to the child as a vocal performance, and children attend to its musical features first. Without the ability to hear musically, it would be impossible to learn to speak. In addition, they question the view that music is acquired more slowly than language (Wilson, 2012) and demonstrate that language and music are deeply entangled in early life and develop along parallel tracks. Rather than describing music as a "universal language," they find it more productive from a developmental perspective to describe language as a special type of music in which referential discourse is bootstrapped onto a musical framework. Newborn infants' extensive abilities in different aspects of speech perception have often been cited as evidence that language is innate (e.g., Vouloumanos and Werker, 2007). However, these abilities are dependent on their discrimination of the sounds of language, the most musical aspects of speech. Music has a privileged status that enables us to acquire not only the musical conventions of our native culture, but also enables us to learn our native language. Without the ability to hear musically, we would be unable to learn language.

There are many laws of linguistics that exist in human communication. Laws such as Zipf's law of abbreviation, which predicts commonly used words to be short, and Menzerath's law, which predicts that large linguistic structures are made of shorter ones. This article talks about a study conducted by a team of researchers from the University of Roehampton, which explores the parallels of these linguistic laws in chimpanzee gestural communication. They measured the length of over 2000 gestures, and found that they indeed used shorter gestures if they were using it more frequently and long gestures were composed of the shorter ones.