Group items tagged

This article talks about different dialects in America and how American dialects are continuing to diverge, primarily with their vowel sounds. In particular, cities in the Great Lakes have been observed as revolutionizing the sound of English. Linguists have observed what's called a "chain shift," where by changing one sound, such as the short "a" sound, would have an effect in changing multiple sounds and therefore altering the Northern Cities dialects. This article goes on to outline the history behind these changes, the unawareness factor people from these cities experience, the racial aspect of how this dialect is diverging, and other points.

This article discusses a recent branding trend in which companies drop vowels from their names with the intent of appearing more modern. Following companies like Flickr, Scribd, Grindr, and Tumblr, Standard Life Aberdeen recently announced a name change to Abrdn. This move has been met with criticism by the public and linguists alike who've deemed it a failed attempt to be use youth language and appear "edgier." Linguists have brought up that dropping vowels can only be effective with certain words. Since Abrdn drops two vowels, it makes it much more difficult to pronounce, which could lead to brand unfamiliarity. On the other hand, other linguists argue that it simply feeds off a modern language trend, and could indeed be accomplishing its goal.

This study shows that language doesn't only consist of words, but can also consist of sounds. People have different styles of language and understand people in different ways from different countries around the world.

With five distinct kinds of clicks, multiple tones and strident vowels - vocalized with a quick choking sound - the Taa language, spoken by a few thousand people in Botswana and Namibia, is believed by most linguists to have the largest sound inventory of any tongue in the world.

"American audiences will hear an accent and style surprisingly like their own in its informality and strong r-colored vowels... Meier said audiences will hear word play and rhymes that "haven't worked for several hundred years (love/prove, eyes/qualities, etc.)" Plus a sample video.

each consonant and vowel sound from proto-Indo-European (links from each letter take you to all the traceable words)

good for looking at specific vowel sounds and what they look like on a spectrogram

"Your question is really asking, "What is a syllable?" For the most part, our original grammar school understanding that "A syllable is a part of a word with a single vowel sound" is essentially correct, but there's more to it than that. Let's look at a linguistic defintion of "syllable":..."

Changes by the French language council, Académie Française, will simplify the spelling of about 2,400 words, coinciding with the start of the new school year in September. The hat-shaped circumflex accent will disappear above the "i" and "u" in many words. You'll also see fewer hyphens and some vanishing vowels.

New research suggests it's how parents talk to their infants, not just how often, that makes a difference for language development. Infants whose mothers had shown "sensitive" responses--verbally replied to or imitated the babies' sounds--showed increased rates of consonant-vowel vocalizations, meaning that their babbling more closely resembled something like real syllables, paving the way for real words. The same babies were also more likely to direct their noises at their mothers, indicating that they were "speaking" to them rather than simply babbling for babbling's sake. "The infants were using vocalizations in a communicative way, in a sense, because they learned they are communicative," study author Julie Gros-Louis, a psychology professor at the University of Iowa, said in a statement. In other words, by acting like they understood what their babies were saying and responding accordingly, the mothers were helping to introduce the concept that voices, more than just instruments for making fun noises, could also be tools for social interaction.

Researchers at the University of Washington and University of Connecticut examined thousands of 30-second snippets of verbal exchanges between parents and babies. They measured parents' use of a regular speaking voice versus an exaggerated, animated baby talk style, and whether speech occurred one-on-one between parent and child or in group settings. "What our analysis shows is that the prevalence of baby talk in one-on-one conversations with children is linked to better language development, both concurrent and future," said Patricia Kuhl, co-author and co-director of UW's Institute for Learning & Brain Sciences. The more parents exaggerated vowels -- for example "How are youuuuu?" -- and raised the pitch of their voices, the more the 1-year olds babbled, which is a forerunner of word production. Baby talk was most effective when a parent spoke with a child individually, without other adults or children around. "The fact that the infant's babbling itself plays a role in future language development shows how important the interchange between parent and child is," Kuhl said.

It appears the queen's English ain't wot it used to be. A scientific study of Queen Elizabeth II's accent has found her vowels moving steadily downmarket. The study published in Nature magazine found there was a drift in the queen's accent toward one "characteristic of speakers who are...

"Researchers have demonstrated a striking method to reconstruct words, based on the brain waves of patients thinking of those words. ... In a 2011 study, participants with electrodes in direct brain contact were able to move a cursor on a screen by simply thinking of vowel sounds. ... With the help of that model, when patients were presented with words to think about, the team was able to guess which word the participants had chosen. They were even able to reconstruct some of the words, turning the brain waves they saw back into sound on the basis of what the computer model suggested those waves meant. ... The authors caution that the thought-translation idea is still to be vastly improved before such prosthetics become a reality." Full study: http://www.plosbiology.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pbio.1001251

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."

"This website is part of a research project looking into the way in which people associate different vowel sounds with different colours, and whether accent has any influence on this association. In order to investigate this, we need as many people as possible to help us by completing a task online."

Language is not static but dynamic, constantly evolving to suit the fashions of the time and this results in shifts in pronunciation and pitch. In the UK, for instance, far fewer people talk with "received pronunciation" these days - and even Queen Elizabeth II's voice has lost some of the cut-glass vowels of her youth. This is thought to reflect a more general shake-up in Britain's social hierarchies, leading to a kind of linguistic cross-pollination between the classes that has even reached Her Majesty. Women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.