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John Pennebacker, a University of Texas-Austin psychologist, found that language could successfully predict speed dating successes, as well as the relative longevity of such matches.. When the language style of two people matched, when they used pronouns, prepositions, articles and so forth in similar ways at similar rates, they were much more likely to end up on a date. "The more similar [they were] across all of these function words, the higher the probability that [they] would go on a date in a speed dating context," Pennebaker says. "And this is even cooler: We can even look at ... a young dating couple... [and] the more similar [they] are ... using this language style matching metric, the more likely [they] will still be dating three months from now." This is not because similar people are attracted to each other, Pennebaker says; people can be very different. It's that when we are around people that we have a genuine interest in, our language subtly shifts. "When two people are paying close attention, they use language in the same way," he says. "And it's one of these things that humans do automatically." Pennebacker also says that by analyzing language, you can easily tell who among two people has power in a relationship, and their relative social status. "It's amazingly simple," Pennebaker says, "Listen to the relative use of the word "I." What you find is completely different from what most people would think. The person with the higher status uses the word "I" less.

"Changes in word use are normal and not unique to any language. But English does enjoy a privileged status as the world's lingua franca. That began with the British, but has been maintained by the Americans. It's difficult to predict how English will next evolve, but the one certainty is it will."

Each year, more than 800,000 men, women, and children cross international borders seeking refuge from persecution. Under the United Nations Convention Relating to the Status of Refugees, 145 nations have agreed to protect those who are at risk in their own countries because of war or persecution. If asylum seekers can prove their claim is "well founded," they are granted refugee status. If they cannot prove they are fleeing legitimate persecution, they are deported. The challenge, says Associate Professor Fallou Ngom, is how to identify asylum seekers when "they do not have documents. They have only their mouths." "Every human has features in his or her voice that makes it unique"-a linguistic fingerprint. As a result, many governments have begun using "language analysis" to determine an asylum seeker's country of origin. The process entails an interview with the asylum seeker, which is then analyzed by a native speaker in his or her language.

The correlation of foreign accents with "bad" characters could have concerning implications for the way kids are being taught to engage with diversity in the United States. The most wicked foreign accent of all was British English, according to the study. From Scar to Aladdin's Jafar, the study found that British is the foreign accent most commonly used for villains. German and Slavic accents are also common for villain voices. Henchmen or assistants to villains often spoke in dialects associated with low socioeconomic status, including working-class Eastern European dialects or regional American dialects such as "Italian-American gangster" (like when Claude in Captain Planet says 'tuh-raining' instead of 'training.') None of the villains in the sample studied seemed to speak Standard American English; when they did speak with an American accent, it was always in regional dialects associated with low socioeconomic status.

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 post is about Korean language and the two main sections of speech styles in Korea. It will help you better understand the different speaking styles in Korean and when and how to use them. The two styles of speech, 존댓말 (Polite speech) and 반말 (Informal speech), are spoken based on hierarchy since Korean culture has strong Confucian influence due to the country's history. The hierarchy is mainly based on age and social status. For example, when speaking to a teacher in school, you would speak to them with polite speech because they are older than you and know more than you. Phrases and sentences can be said in different ways depending on the style of speech used, but will still have the same meaning.

That's the conclusion of new research from the UK's Cambridge University Press, which has looked at the way we talk about men and women in sport. Analyzing over 160 million words from decades of newspapers, academic papers, tweets and blogs, the study finds men are three times more likely than women to be mentioned in a sporting context, while women are disproportionately described in relation to their marital status, age or appearance.

"...for many Swedes, gender equality is not enough. Many are pushing for the Nordic nation to be not simply gender-equal but gender-neutral. ... Just days after International Women's Day a new pronoun, hen (pronounced like the bird in English), was added to the online version of the country's National Encyclopedia. ... critics believe it can be psychologically and socially damaging, especially for children ... toddlers cannot weigh arguments for and against linguistic interventions and they do not conceive of or analyze gender roles in the way that adults do ... One Swedish school got rid of its toy cars because boys 'gender-coded' them and ascribed the cars higher status than other toys."

In a nod to changing social norms and the rise of feminism, France expurgates "mademoiselle" from its list of acceptable social honorifics. One of my former students, a Francophile living in Europe, snarkily notes that while the French are at it, they should reinstate "mondemoiseau"--a title designating men who'd not reached "chevalier", or knightly status.

"For the past three years, Brendon Ayanbadejo, a backup linebacker and standout special-teams player for the [Baltimore] Ravens, has been advocating for same-sex marriage-writing about it, talking about it, appearing as one of the stars of a video campaign launched by backers of a measure to legalize it in Maryland. It's not his day job, but he's gotten enough attention for it that an anti-gay-marriage Maryland state legislator wrote to the owner of the Ravens and demanded that he shut Ayanbadejo up."

"These guys have worked out how to measure power differences between individuals using the patterns of words they speak or write. In other words, they say the style of language during a conversation reveals the pecking order of the people talking. ... The key to this is an idea called linguistic co-ordination, in which speakers naturally copy the style of their interlocutors. ... 'If you are communicating with someone who uses a lot of articles - or prepositions, orpersonal pronouns - then you will tend to increase your usage of these types of words as well, even if you don't consciously realize it,' say Kleinberg and co." Also, as the article mentions, Kleinberg (previously) developed the algorithm on which Google's PageRank (the algorithm used to rank pages in its search engine) is based. Link to the study (available in PDF): http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.3670

_Slate _ blogger Amanda Marcotte examines the decision of Marissa Mayer, Yahoo CEO, to disavow the term "feminist". Mayer suggested that she lacked "the militant drive" and "chip on the shoulder" often accompanying the term. Marcotte counters that "militant drive" and "chip on the shoulder" are code words for traits exhibited by those brave enough to challenge the sexist status quo, even at the risk of personal vilification.

With studies showing that one-third of married couples started their relationships online, finding romance via URLs is no longer as novel - and creepy - as it seemed when dating sites launched in the mid-1990s. But now the digital aisle to marriage is transforming, moving from dating sites to social networks, where couples say encounters are more revealing and, with witty tweets and thoughtful status updates, more like flirting in the analog world. And they're free.

What our speech reveals about us

"Remarkably, how people used pronouns was correlated with almost everything I studied. For example, use of first-person singular pronouns (I, me, my) was consistently related to gender, age, social class, honesty, status, personality, and much more. Although the findings were often robust, people in daily life were unable to pick them up when reading or listening to others... Higher GPAs were associated with admission essays that used high rates of nouns and low rates of verbs and pronouns. The effects were surprisingly strong and lasted across all years of college, no matter what the students' major."

An infant's mother tongue creates neural patterns that the unconscious brain retains years later, even if the child totally stops using the language, (as can happen in cases of international adoption) according to a new joint study by scientists at the Montreal Neurological Institute and Hospital. The study offers the first neural evidence that traces of the "lost" language remain in the brain and suggests that early-acquired information is not only maintained in the brain, but unconsciously influences brain processing for years, perhaps for life -- potentially indicating a special status for information acquired during optimal periods of development. This could counter arguments not only within the field of language acquisition, but across domains, that neural representations are overwritten or lost from the brain over time.

The English Proficiency Index ranks Swedes as the #1 non-native speakers of English. This Japanese study examines some factors that may've contributed to Swedesʻ successful language learning, including 1. Foreign language learning is compulsory and comprehensive in Sweden, and there are set minimum hours for instruction. Beginning in 1995, the Swedish educational system introduces English in Gr. 1, a second language in Gr. 6, and a third (yes, you read that right!) language in Gr. 8, 2) the perception that English= high status language (overall, in the EU, English is the most taught language and the most desirable for business and academic purposes), 3) Communicative Language Learning approach to teaching English: the foreign language class is taught in the target language 4)Higher expectations for teaching credentials; even elementary school teachers must have graduate school credits, 5) Linguistic similarities between L1= Swedish and target L2= English, as both share Proto-Norse as their linguistic ancestor, 6) High frequency of English terms absorbed into Swedish as a result of globalization, particularly pop culture, 7) Adoption of CLIL (Content and Language-Integrated Learning): in other words, English is the language of instruction for non-language disciplines.

Sherry Broder, local attorney, speaks about the legal status of Hawaiian as an official language and the 2018 arrest warrant issued for a Maui professor who spoke Hawaiian in court and the debate over using Hawaiian Language in court. Currently the state is not legally required to provide court interpreters for people who prefer to use `Ōlelo Hawai`i but who can also speak English.