This year, the 2024 Merrie Monarch Hula Festival is paying tribute to the 40th anniversary of the Hawaiian language revitalization movement. All the hula [dances] and songs [mele] selected for Wednesday's Hōʻike Night performances were either choreographed or composed for the Hawaiian language revitalization movement over its 40-year history. Mele provides a conduit for language proliferation and perpetuation.

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.

Japanese onomatopoeia is one of the language's most intriguing features. This article categorizes onomatopoetic words by sounds and states, animal noises, bewildering flexibility (e.g., "goro goro" can refer to the sound of thunder or a couch potato lazing around the house), and pain.

It's commonly said that the Japanese language wields more food-describing onomatopoeia than any other. These adjectives capture the perceived sounds different foods make when we eat them. Saku saku! Fuwa fuwa! According to estimates, there are 445 such words in the Japanese language. "English has only slightly more than 130 words to describe the way foods feel in our mouths," reports Kendra Pierre-Louis in Popular Science's exploration of food texture in its latest issue themed around taste.

Thanks to Gabby Gonzales '24 for this site! Programmer Thomas Dimson, author of Instagram's original content-ranking algorithms, created this website which uses GPT-2 algorithm to generate words that sound like they should exist, but don't, along with definitions and examples. Example: downage (verb) dow·nage obtain or retain (something) at a reduced price "the team had to downage contracts after a series of sellout losses"

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.

This website comprehensively lists events associated with Mahina ʻŌlelo Hawaiʻi (Hawaiian Language Month). Feel free to participate and attend!

Psycholinguist Steven Pinker examines the emotional impact of swearing and the evolution of words considered taboo, also reflects on several issues surrounding the issue of what language is offensive and about guidelines that might inform our personal and institutional judgments about when to discourage, tolerate, and even welcome profanity?

From the Zippys.com website: Did you know that Hawaiʻi is the only US state to have two official state languages - English and Hawaiian ('Ōlelo Hawaiʻi)? The month of February is designated as "Mahina 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi" (Hawaiian language month) by the Hawaiʻi State legislature, various county councils around Hawaiʻi, and by other organizations. The purpose for the month is to celebrate and normalize the use of 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi in everyday life, as well as to perpetuate the Hawaiian culture. Zippy's is proud to celebrate all of the cultures in Hawai'i that make our home a special place in the world. For the month of February, Zippy's is supporting Mahina 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi Month by giving you an opportunity to learn a little bit of the language and to see what the Zippy's menu looks like in 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi! Check out the Papa Kuhikuhi Mea`ai o ka Hale `Aina `o Zippy's in PDF form here. (Makemake `o Kumu Cowell i ka Pā Zip!)

There's evidence deaf Hawaiians had been communicating with a homegrown sign language for generations, predating the arrival of missionaries, sugar plantations and the Americans who would overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. But linguists didn't officially document the language until 2013, when research by the University of Hawaii found HSL to be a language isolate: born and bred on the Hawaiian Islands with no outside influence. More than 80 percent of its vocabulary bears no similarity to ASL. The findings launched a three-year project to document what remained of HSL, led by Lambrecht and linguistics professor James "Woody" Woodward, who has spent the last 30 years studying and documenting sign languages throughout Asia. By 2016, the team had built a video archive and developed a manuscript for an introductory HSL handbook and dictionary, featuring illustrations of Lambrecht demonstrating signs.

Hawaii Sign Language (HSL) was once believed to be similar to American Sign Language (ASL), used in the majority of deaf communities in the U.S. However, the work of Woodward and his team revealed they're not similar at all. In 2013, the language was recognized as its own distinct language. "Everything is different," Woodward says. "The vocabulary has less than 10% correlation to ASL, which is typical of languages that don't have a relationship to each other and were developed independently." HSL also uses much more body movement and facial expression than ASL.

The notion of a "gay lisp"-an offensive stereotype to many people-has been a confusing phenomenon for linguists. For decades, popular depictions of gay men have sometimes portrayed them pronouncing the letter "s" as more of a "th" sound-even though studies have failed to find "lispier" speech in gay men than in straight men. Now, however, preliminary data from a small study presented here last week at the biannual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) show that young boys who don't identify with their assigned gender use "th"-like pronunciation at slightly higher rates than their peers who do, although they seem to grow out of that tendency. The authors speculate that stereotypes of gay adults may be rooted in the speech of boys who go on to identify as gay.

Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it, we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood. Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona Science Park, have studied these differences. By comparing people who are able to perceive a second language as if they were native speakers of that language with people who find it very difficult to do so, they have observed that the former group is also better at distinguishing the sounds of their own native language. The study results show that there is a positive correlation between specific speech discrimination abilities and the ability to learn a second language, which means that the individual ability to distinguish the specific phonemes of the language, both in the case of the mother tongue and in the case of other languages, is, without a doubt, a decisive factor in the learning process, and the ability to speak and master other languages."

The Times asked several couples to share how they navigate the heart-shaped expectations of their multilingual relationships. Here are the accounts of five couples, talking about their chosen language(s) of love and affection and the reasons behind why they communicate in those ways;

A coded lexicon mostly spoken by gay men, Swardspeak draws from English and Tagalog, as well as Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. It's what might be referred to as an "anti-language," the lingua franca of an "anti-society"-in this case, the Philippines' gay subculture.

The term 'eye dialect' was first coined in 1925 by George P. Krapp in The English Language in America (McArthur 1998). The term was used to describe the phenomenon of unconventional spelling used to reproduce colloquial usage. When one encounters such spellings "the convention violated is one of the eyes, and not of the ear". Furthermore, eye dialect would be used by writers "not to indicate a genuine difference in pronunciation, but the spelling is a friendly nudge to the reader, a knowing look which establishes a sympathetic sense of superiority between the author and reader as contrasted with the humble speaker of dialect". Mrs. Cowell's note: Contemporary writers of color now employ eye dialect to show disdain for the word that's misspelled, e.g. Cherokee writer Qwo-Li Driskill uses "AmeriKKKan" to underscore the racism and cultural genocide happening in a country that pays lip service to justice and equity.

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter opines on the impact AI translation might have on second language learning. We already know that Americans and UK folx are the most monolingual populations in the world; fewer than one in 100 American students currently become proficient in a language they learned in school. McWhorter argues that AI might offer utilitarian practicality for casual users, e.g. translating useful phrases on the fly while traveling: "With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did." Yet McWhorter also says, "I don't think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity." He also suggests that genuinely acquiring a language will still beckon a few select people, e.g. those relocating to a new country, those who'd like to engage with literature or media in the original language, as well as those of us who find pleasure in mastering these new codes: that language learning will become "an artisanal pursuit" of sorts.

Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext - for those, at least, who can read them. Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker's meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice. In a text-only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online? Enter tone indicators. Tone indicators are paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks. Put simply, they are written shorthand for the poster's intent and emotion. One might use "/srs," short for "serious," to express sincere affection for a pop culture crush.

That's because lol and lmao have evolved, and are now predominantly used as tone indicators, explains John Kelly, the Associate Director of Content and Education at Dictionary.com. As we increasingly spend our lives online and communicate largely through digital messages, the paralinguistic functions we use IRL to convey emotion, tone and nuance - i.e. body language, gesturing, facial expressions - gets lost in our texts, emails, Slack messages and tweets. So we have to rely on different things to do that, like emojis and text acronyms. So what are we trying to communicate when we sign off our text messages with a lol? It's not because we're literally laughing out loud; rather, we're using this lowly little acronym to try and soften the tone of our messages.

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.