"'Lexical Warfare' is a phrase that I like to use for battles over how a term is to be understood. ... Over the past few years we've watched a lexical warfare battle slowly unfold in the treatment of the term 'hacktivism.' ... We are not passive observers in this dispute. The meaning of words is determined by those of us who use language, and it has consequences."

"'Even in late gestation, babies are doing what they'll be doing throughout infancy and childhood - learning about language,' said the lead author." This reminds me of the study that showed that babies' crying melodies reflect their native languages. (http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/health/8346058.stm)

"Sporting metaphors always overrun the language of politics in the English-speaking world at election time - and perhaps most of all in the US. We have now reached the point in the race for the White House when it helps to keep a glossary of American sporting terms ever close at hand."

"Ancient Egyptians did not speak to posterity only through hieroglyphs. ... people in everyday life spoke a different language and wrote a different script, a simpler one that evolved from the earliest hieroglyphs. ... Now, scholars at the Oriental Institute of the University of Chicago have completed almost 40 years of research and published online the final entries of a 2,000-page dictionary that more than doubles the thousands of known Demotic words."

"... I picked up a Nature's Promise product called Organic Raspberry Fruit Spread. Why did I not see the obvious syntactic danger? Some grammarian, I thought to myself later, when I saw what I'd missed."

"The informal version of "you" in the French language - "tu" - seems to be taking over on social media, at the expense of the formal "vous". As in many countries, online modes of address in French are more relaxed than in face-to-face encounters. But will this have a permanent effect on the French language?"

For example: "English is essentially bad Dutch with outrageously pronounced French and Latin vocabulary." "Hawaiian is a cousin of Indonesian with a fear of consonants." "Spanish is essentially Italian spoken by Arabs."

"Biologists using tools developed for drawing evolutionary family trees say that they have solved a longstanding problem in archaeology: the origin of the Indo-European family of languages. ... Dr. Atkinson's work has integrated a large amount of information with a computational method that has proved successful in evolutionary studies. But his results may not sway supporters of the rival theory, who believe the Indo-European languages were spread some 5,000 years later by warlike pastoralists who conquered Europe and India from the Black Sea steppe."

"Evidence for a forgotten ancient language which dates back more than 2,500 years, to the time of the Assyrian Empire, has been found by archaeologists working in Turkey. ... His analysis systematically rules out not only common languages from within the Assyrian Empire, but also other languages of the time -- including Egyptian, Elamite, Urartian or West Semitic. Even at its most generous, his assessment suggests that only 15 of the legible names belong to a language previously known to historians. ... More convincing is the theory that the language in question may have been spoken by a people from somewhere else in the Assyrian Empire who were forcibly moved by the administration." More coverage: http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/archaeology/ancient-language-discovered-on-clay-tablets-found-amid-ruins-of-2800-year-old-middle-eastern-palace-7728894.html Link to the study: http://www.jstor.org/discover/10.1086/664450?uid=3738032&uid=2132&uid=2&uid=70&uid=4&sid=56160246193

"The researchers first looked at hot spots-locations with an exceptionally high number of unique species that also has a loss of habitat of 70 percent or more. ... In these 35 hotspots-spread throughout the world's continents with the exception of Antarctica-the researchers found 3,202 languages-nearly half of all languages spoken on Earth. ... It's unclear why areas of endangered species concentration and endangered languages coexist. ... The study is a starting point to explore the relationship between biological and linguistic-cultural diversity."

A really interesting study combining linguistics and behavioral economics. "To judge a risk more clearly, it may help to consider it in a foreign language: A series of experiments on more than 300 people from the U.S. and Korea found that thinking in a second language reduced deep-seated, misleading biases that unduly influence how risks and benefits are perceived."

"Did Neanderthals sing? Is there a 'music gene'? Two scientists debate whether our capacity to make and enjoy songs comes from biological evolution or from the advent of civilization. Music is everywhere, but it remains an evolutionary enigma."

"The pure traditionalist and pure revisionist positions are both oblivious to what is at stake in arguments over language. The traditionalists claim they are just asking us to play by the rules of the game; revisionists say they are just asking us to accept the fact that language is always changing. But both sides ignore the profound consequences of how we speak."

"...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."

"...when the exact same material is presented in both media, there is no measurable difference in student performance. ... However, there are some subtle distinctions that favor print, which may matter in the long run. ... First, more repetition was required with computer reading to impart the same information. "Second, the book readers seemed to digest the material more fully. ... seemingly irrelevant factors like remembering whether you read something at the top or the bottom of page - or whether it was on the right or left hand side of a two-page spread or near a graphic - can help cement material in mind. ... spatial context may be particularly important because evolution may have shaped the mind to easily recall location cues so we can find our way around ... E-books, however, provide fewer spatial landmarks than print."

"Learning a foreign language is never easy, but contrary to common wisdom, it is possible for adults to process a language the same way a native speaker does. And over time, the processing improves even when the skill goes unused, researchers are reporting. ... the immersion group displayed the full brain patterns of a native speaker." Full study: http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0032974

"According to a paper delivered at the annual meeting of the American Dialect Society in January by Brice Russ, a graduate student at Ohio State University, the 200 million or so messages posted each day in the supposedly placeless world of Twitter may end up being a rich source of information about regional difference. ... it may allow them to track linguistic patterns on a vast scale and in something close to real time, identifying phenomena that can then be investigated more deeply by traditional fieldwork."

"Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like "bitchin' " and "ridic," or the incessant use of "like" as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity. ... But linguists - many of whom once promoted theories consistent with that attitude - now say such thinking is outmoded. Girls and women in their teens and 20s deserve credit for pioneering vocal trends and popular slang ... the idea that vocal fads initiated by young women eventually make their way into the general vernacular is well established."

"A council in France has abolished the word 'Mademoiselle' from all official documents because it is 'condescending and sexist'. The Paris suburb of Fontenay-sous-Bois said the term - the French equivalent of 'miss' - discriminates against women by asking them to reveal if they are married. ... Julie Muret of campaign group Osez Le Feminisme, meaning Dare Feminism, said in September that the equivalent word for men of 'Damoiseau' - meaning squire - was abolished decades ago."

"Facebook, YouTube and even texting will be the salvation of many of the world's endangered languages, scientists believe. Of the 7,000 or so languages spoken on Earth today, about half are expected to be extinct by the century's end. ... Tuvan, an indigenous tongue spoken by nomadic peoples in Siberia and Mongolia, even has an iPhone app to teach the pronunciation of words to new students. 'It's what I like to call the flipside of globalisation' [said K David Harrison] ... 'Everything that people know about the planet, about plants, animals, about how to live sustainably, the polar ice caps, the different ecosystems that humans have survived in - all this knowledge is encoded in human cultures and languages, whereas only a tiny fraction of it is encoded in the scientific literature.'"