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This article explains how dogs can interpret our speech. Not only are they able to understand the words we say but also how we say them. They can learn words on their own and even better when we use an appropriate tone. This means when we "vent" to our dogs, they might actually understand what we are saying.

Chinese characters have been an obstacle preventing the development of Chinese proficiency for learners of Chinese whose native language does not have characters. A substantial literature review identified linguistic, pedagogical, and political factors as causes of those difficulties. Tone changes represent different meanings of a word. Compound characters include the phonetic component radicals that do not always sound the same as the phonetic radicals. These unique linguistic features of the Chinese language add even more challenges for learning of Chinese as a foreign language (CFL).Technology integration has been found to facilitate the teaching and learning foreign languages in many efficient and effective ways.

This article talks about how coronavirus is changing our language. In this article, new lingo appropriate to the coronavirus. However, the new lingo takes more of a humorous tone that explores the new words as novelties rather than everyday slang. One funny exam was the word "covidiot" referring to someone who doesn't comply to coronavirus restrictions.

In many languages, pitch is as important as consonants and vowels for distinguishing one word from another. In English, "pay" and "bay" are different because they have different starting sounds. But imagine if "pay" said on a high pitch meant "to give money," while "pay" said on a low pitch meant "a broad inlet of the sea where the land curves inward." That's what it feels like to speak what linguists call a tonal language. At least a billion and a half people worldwide do it their entire lives and think nothing of it. The article goes on to talk about which areas of the world have the highest concentration of tonal languages and reasons why that might be, also some of the advantages of speaking a tonal language.

This article discusses the important impact emojis have had on digital communication. "Emoji help add context to our digital communication so we can distinguish the tone or mood of the message. They also act as flair, letting people show a bit of their personality and have some fun in the process."

If you're looking for the species that most closely matches our linguistic prowess, surprisingly, you won't find it in the apes, the primates, or even in the mammals. You have to travel to a far more distant relative, all the way to a family of birds known as the songbirds. The vocal life of a songbird is similar to ours in many ways. They learn songs by imitating their elders. Like human speech, these songs are passed down from one generation to the next. Songbirds are also best equipped to learn songs in their youth, and they have to practice to develop their ability. They can improvise and string together riffs into new songs, and over generations these modified songs can turn into new dialects. And like us, they come hard-wired with 'speech-centers' in their brain that are dedicated to language processing. An experiment from 2009 by Fehér and colleagues took newly hatched songbirds of the zebra finch species and raised them in sound proof chambers. They did this during their critical period of language development. Surprisingly, this culturally isolated generation of birds began to develop their own songs. These songs were less musical than your typical songbird song - they had irregular rhythms, they would stutter their notes, and the notes would sound more noisy. But the researchers were curious where this would lead. They listened to the songs of the next few generations of pupils, the offspring of these children of silence. What they found was quite amazing. In just two generations, the songs started to change in unexpected ways - they were becoming more musical. In fact, they started to converge upon the song of the wild songbirds, even though none of these birds had ever heard the wild songs. The Feher study suggests, but does not prove, that songbirds must have an innate understanding of the structures of their language. In other words, they seem to have a built-in intuition about grammar. Over time, they may be using these intuitions to develo

Despite claims that emoji are a universal lingua franca, emojis are neither "universal", nor a true "language". Instead, they are "at most a linguistic tool that is being used to complement our language". In other words, emojis do not and cannot by themselves constitute a meaningful code of communication between two parties. Rather, they are used as a way of enhancing texts and social media messages like a kind of additional punctuation. They help express nuance, tone and emotion in the written word. Emojis offer a chance for the average email writer, SMSer or social media poster to imply an emotional context to their messages, to express empathy. With emojis, they can do this as simply and naturally as using a facial expression or gesture when talking to somebody face-to-face. Yet relying too heavily on emojis to bridge that gap can cause problems of its own. We may all have access to more or less the same emojis through our smartphone keyboards, but what we mean when we use those emojis actually varies greatly, depending on culture, language, and generation.

Adopting the same gestures, posture or tone can enhance bonding and help with networking or negotiating. mirroring can help you create powerful connections with others. This behavior, often called "the chameleon effect," often causes others to like and trust you more. Professional networkers, negotiators and salespeople say they use mirroring to help them engage more deeply in a conversation and understand the person they're talking with. Retail salespeople who were told to mimic the nonverbal and verbal behavior of customers sold more products and left customers with a more positive opinion of the store, according to a 2011 study of 129 customers by French researchers. In another study, published in 2008 in the Journal of Experimental Social Psychology, 62 students were assigned to negotiate with other students. Those who mirrored others' posture and speech reached a settlement 67% of the time, while those who didn't reached a settlement 12.5% of the time.

This article explains Bill Nyeʻs perspective on how word use is extremely important when talking about climate change, as it can change how urgent people consider this issue. This shows the power of changing even just one word in a phrase or sentence, and how it can affect how language is perceived. One example they used was "phasing down coal" instead of "phasing out coal"; in reality, we want to eliminate the use of coal, but by using the word "down" instead of "out" it creates a different tone.

This article talked about how adults talk to babies and why we do it. When we talk to babies, we tend to raise our pitch a little and supposedly, it calms the baby down. They also talked about a research project where they recorded adults from different parts of the world, and noticed that those who come from western places raised their pitch the most, and in remote places didn't raise their pitch that much but everyone raised their pitch at least a little. The way we talk to babies is universal and we've evolved as humans to be able to communicate with infants.

The features of baby talk - softer tone, higher pitch, almost unintelligible vocabulary - are global. Researchers at Harvard's Music Lab documented over 1,500 recordings in 21 urban, rural and Indigenous communities - making their work possibly a first of its kind experiment. The article includes samples from different languages around the world. There are many reasons why baby talk might have evolved in humans and why it might serve beneficial purposes. Some theories suggest that the way we speak accentuates the vowels of the speech and helps babies learn speech. Other theories suggest that this kind of baby talk helps regulate the baby's emotions and helps structure the social interactions we have with babies, so it helps socialize them and control their behavior and mood. In prehistoric times, having ways to interact with babies and to care for them while still being able to keep your eyes up to look out for predators and use your voice to interact with babies, might have been an important reason why we may have evolved these kinds of behaviors.

This journal article discusses the prevalent use of emojis and how they are becoming more integrated into our language. It talks about the literal and metaphorical meanings of emojis, functions of emojis, and emoji interpretation across different cultures. It explains how pictography has been used in the past and what the future could hold for emojis.

The takeaway: one K is bad, two Ks are good and above all else, never, ever use three Ks. 1. "Okay" is obviously the most professional way to type the word, and I will vouch that it is also safe to casually use in text messages. Some disagree that "okay" can sound sarcastic or stern, especially when paired with a period. Which isn't wrong - sentences do invoke a more serious tone when there are periods involved. But the reason why okay is, well, okay, is because it's the longest form of the word. You took the time to type out those additional two letters, and that counts for something. 2. "Kk" is the closest to gotcha. It means message received, roger that. 3. The origins of the dreadful "k" can't exactly be pinpointed, though it's been a thing since iMessage looked like this, so basically the Stone Age. People voiced their disdain for short responses - "k, ok, lol" - on Facebook pages and through memes years ago. And everyone pretty much agreed that yeah, when you type out an extremely long, emotionally charged paragraph to someone and they respond with one letter, it's pretty infuriating. From then on we've been conditioned (or traumatized) to react in a similar manner to the single k. Even when it's just in response to a simple, harmless sentence, it can still feel like a dig.

This article discusses how baby talk can impact child development and explains how baby talk can aid babies/infants in emotional bonding. It talks about the belief that talking in simplified sentences and exaggerated tones helps babies grasp speech patterns and emotions.