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Euskara is Europe's oldest language, yet is teetering on the brink of extinction. Spoken in the autonomous communities of Navarre in northern Spain and the Basque Country across northern Spain and south-western France, Euskara is a linguistic mystery: it has no known origin or relation to any other language, an anomaly that has stumped linguistic experts for ages. The distinct language is a point of pride for Basques. An estimated 700,000 of them, or 35% of the Basque population, speak it today. Euskara has been shaped over time by the Basques' close contact with nature. The language contains varied vocabulary for landscapes, animals, the wind, the sea ‒ and about 100 ways to say 'butterfly'. The language may still be around, in part, because its early speakers were geographically secluded from the rest of the world by the Pyrenees.

What's up with Trump's language? Kathleen Hall Jamieson says that Trump has captivated mass audiences because he does not sound like other presidents who carefully rehearse and perfect their speeches. Instead, Trump says whatever is on his mind. The format of Trump's speeches aren't so rigid either: he will switch to unrelated topics and unnecessarily repeat sentences he just said. In fact, Trump famously repeats words like "very, very" or "many, many". David Beaver points out that Trump speaks like a teleprompter, a business person rather than a politician.

This article provided a great amount of information based on the negative affects texting has on us. Although there were not much on the statistics, the ideas were all there and supported by authors opinions. The author brought up a lot of valid points within the article.

This discusses how and why humans would rather text each other than have an actual conversation. They discuss a few positive and negative points within the article. This talks about how technology is shaping the way we communicate with each other

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.

This article really perplexed me at first. We always talk about how we have to save Hawaiian, and yet, according to this article by the Honolulu Magazine, there are much more keiki speaking 'Olelo Hawaii than in the 1980's. We have made a great leap forward regarding the spread of Hawaiian language and culture, but this article delves into whether this spread is enough.

While more people do speak Hawaiian now than 30 years ago, thanks to revitalization efforts, the question is whether formal language training alone can help truly revitalize a language, especially since the native speaker population is dying out. As you know, for a language to truly live, it should not just be surviving in academic contexts, but be utilized in normal, everyday contexts. Weʻre a long way from that point--but thereʻs hope. :-) E ola mau ka `Ōlelo Hawai`i!

I would be lying if I told you that this was a really good article. This is actually a badass article about how we use swear words and strong language to emphasize a point in daily conversation. If I were to say, "Wow! That is a really big car!" it does not carry much weight as if I were to say, "Damn! That's a big-ass car!" This article explains how using this kind of language adds a pop of color and richness to our day to day conversations.

There are many ways that what you do with your body can translate into a language to show what you are feeling. Words are not neccesary for others to know the type of person you are. By reading actions, people can know if you are fit for a job or your characteristics.

Body language is extremely important when in a leadership position. You may not think what you're doing with your head or hands is important, but studies show that everything from a head tilt, to walking on stage gives people a certain impression. For people to see you as a good leader, you need to be confident and aware of your actions. If you are on stage talking to a bunch of people, and you are playing with your hair or touching your neck, people pick up on this and make the assumption that you are nervous. It may not be intentional but subconsciously they think you are intimated even though a leader should be calm and controlled. This article explores other ways leaders and speakers can use body language to more powerfully convey their point.

This article talks about why people swear, and when it could be acceptable. It's interesting how swearing has become such a big part of our language when only a few years ago it was considered extremely bad. This article also goes into how swearing can be used in speeches to further convey a point. Swearing is seen to portray more passion.

In recent studies, Professor Gabrielle S. Adams, of the London Business School, found that misunderstandings often exist between the victims of harm and the people who committed the harm. In many cases, the transgressors did not intend a negative effect, whereas the victims tended to think that the damage was intentional. In addition, transgressors frequently felt guilty and wanted to be forgiven much more than their victims realized. When someone feels wronged, it can help to actively empathize with the person who is perceived as the wrongdoer, according to a study that Professor Adams conducted along with M. Ena Inesi, also of the London Business School. That can enable the victim to realize that the transgressor may well wish to be forgiven, their study found. By making it a point to resolve conflicts by encouraging empathy and forgiveness, workers and managers can improve workplace conditions.

How is a language born? What are its essential elements? Linguists are gaining new insights into these age-old conundrums from a language created in a small village in Israel's Negev Desert. The Al-Sayyid Bedouin Sign Language (ABSL), which serves as an alternative language of a community of about 3,500 deaf and hearing people, has developed a distinct grammatical structure early in its evolution, researchers report, and the structure favors a particular word order: verbs after objects. The study - the first linguistic analysis of a language arising naturally with no outside influence - was published online in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the week of Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, 2005.

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.

Research from Concordia University in Montreal reveals a new perk visible in the problem-solving skills of bilingual toddlers. The study assessed the vocabularies of 39 bilingual children and 43 monolinguals when they were aged 24 months, and then again at 31 months. During the second assessment, the researchers also had the young participants perform a battery of tasks to test their cognitive flexibility and memory skills. While overall, there was little difference between the bilingual and monolingual toddlers, bilingual children performed significantly better on the conflict inhibition tasks than did their monolingual counterparts. Conflict inhibition refers to the mental process of overriding a well-learned rule that you would normally pay attention to. These were the two tasks: 1. Reverse categorization -- participants were told to put a set of little blocks into a little bucket and big blocks into a big bucket. Then the instructions were switched -- big blocks in the little bucket and little blocks in the big bucket. 2. Shape conflict -- participants were shown pictures of different sized fruit and asked to name them. Then a new series of images was shown, with a small fruit embedded inside a large one. Toddlers were asked to point to the little fruit. Crivello, one of the lead researchers, commented that "Language switching underlies the bilingual advantage on conflict tasks. In conflict inhibition, the child has to ignore certain information -- the size of a block relative to a bucket, or the fact that one fruit is inside another. That mirrors the experience of having to switch between languages, using a second language, even though the word from a first language might be more easily accessible."

Censorship has been a long-standing issue in China, but its citizens continue to fight for self-expression through clever linguistic circumvention of Internet restrictions. Much of Chinese Internet lingo involves codewords, and the corpus of codewords is constantly changing to accommodate new topics and avoid smarter, stricter censors. It has reached the point where a simple understanding of Chinese vocabulary, syntax, and grammar is no longer enough to fully understand Chinese Internet discourse. On today's Chinese Internet, fully comprehending the language requires a thorough knowledge of current events, a deep respect for historical implications, an agile mastery of cultural conventions, and more often than not, a healthy appreciation of topical humor.

What more can be said about Donald Trump's reported remark about "shithole countries"? Media outlets have by and large decided it was newsworthy enough to report without censoring, so we've been seeing and hearing the word shithole everywhere. More important than the word itself, of course, is the hateful sentiment behind it, as many commentators have pointed out. Trump's use of the word was in the service of a disparaging slur on countries, including Haiti and African nations, from which he thinks the U.S. should be limiting immigration. (Despite his vague protestations on Twitter, the White House pointedly did not deny that he dropped the S-bomb in front of a room full of lawmakers.) But shithole doesn't have to be used in such a vile way. In fact, despite its scatological origins, the word has something of a literary pedigree, which is worth appreciating as an antidote to the enervating news cycle.

Over the last 70 years, researchers have tried to gauge the effect on an individual of having an unusual name. It is thought that our identity is partly shaped by the way we are treated by other people - a concept psychologists call the "looking-glass self" - and our name has the potential to colour our interactions with society. Early studies found that men with uncommon first names were more likely to drop out of school and be lonely later in life. One study found that psychiatric patients with more unusual names tended to be more disturbed. But more recent work has presented a mixed picture. Richard Zweigenhaft, a psychologist at Guilford College in the US, pointed out that wealthy, oddly-named Americans are more likely to find themselves in Who's Who. He found no consistent bad effects of having a strange name, but noted that both common and unusual names are sometimes deemed desirable. Conley, who is a sociologist at New York University, says that children with unusual names may learn impulse control because they may be teased or get used to people asking about their names. "They actually benefit from that experience by learning to control their emotions or their impulses, which is of course a great skill for success."

The hallmark of President Trump's Twitter feed is that it sounds like him - grammatical miscues and all. But it's not always Trump tapping out a Tweet, even when it sounds like his voice. West Wing employees who draft proposed tweets intentionally employ suspect grammar and staccato syntax in order to mimic the president's style, according to two people familiar with the process. They overuse the exclamation point! They Capitalize random words for emphasis. Fragments. Loosely connected ideas. Trump's staff has become so adept at replicating the President's tone that people who follow his feed closely say it is getting harder to discern which tweets were actually crafted by Trump sitting in his bathrobe and watching "Fox & Friends" and which were concocted by his communications team. Staff-written tweets do go through a West Wing process of sorts. When a White House employee wants the president to tweet about a topic, the official writes a memo to the president that includes three or four sample tweets, according to those familiar with the process. Those familiar with the process wouldn't fess up to which tweets were staff-written. But an algorithm crafted by a writer at The Atlantic to determine real versus staff-written tweets suggested several were not written by the president, despite the unusual use of the language.

For the study, conducted by Dr. John Hutton, a researcher and pediatrician at Cincinnati Children's Hospital, and someone with an interest in emergent literacy, 27 children around age 4 went into an FMRI machine. They were presented with the same story in three conditions: audio only; the illustrated pages of a storybook with an audio voiceover; and an animated cartoon. While the children paid attention to the stories, the MRI, the machine scanned for activation within certain brain networks, and connectivity between the networks. Here's what researchers found: In the audio-only condition (too cold): language networks were activated, but there was less connectivity overall. "There was more evidence the children were straining to understand." In the animation condition (too hot): there was a lot of activity in the audio and visual perception networks, but not a lot of connectivity among the various brain networks. "The language network was working to keep up with the story," says Hutton. "Our interpretation was that the animation was doing all the work for the child. They were expending the most energy just figuring out what it means." The children's comprehension of the story was the worst in this condition. The illustration condition was what Hutton called "just right".When children could see illustrations, language-network activity dropped a bit compared to the audio condition. Instead of only paying attention to the words, Hutton says, the children's understanding of the story was "scaffolded" by having the images as clues. Most importantly, in the illustrated book condition, researchers saw increased connectivity between - and among - all the networks they were looking at: visual perception, imagery, default mode and language. One interesting note is that, because of the constraints of an MRI machine, which encloses and immobilizes your body, the story-with-illustrations condition wasn't actually as good as reading on Mom or Dad's lap. The emotional bon

This article by Molly Young discusses the preponderance of corporate jargon or "garbage language." Why the metaphor? According to Garbage is what we produce mindlessly in the course of our days and because it smells horrible and looks ugly and we don't think about it except when we're saying that it's bad. But unlike garbage, which we contain in wastebaskets and landfills, the hideous nature of these words - their facility to warp and impede communication - is also their purpose. Garbage language permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers. It is obvious that the point is concealment; it is less obvious what so many of us are trying to hide.

Rhett and Link go through an entire day basically only saying one word. I find this to be pretty interesting for the first few minutes, but it gets boring afterwards. This is due to the fact that they end up using gestures (like pointing or mimicking) to convey what they mean. While it gets boring, there are some moments where they seem to understand each other perfectly. Other people also catch on, so that is pretty interesting too.