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This article talks about how the new "Spanglish" invention provides an example of how language evolves. It gives examples of Spanglish phrases as well as explains how racism and language discrimination have caused people to perceive "Spanglish" as an incorrect use of language.

This article discusses hundreds of the world's endangered & threatened languages in New York. Linguist Ross Perlin introduces the work he has done to document language extinction in NY for over 11 years. It introduces/provides an interview of the people who speak languages that are going extinct.

Two graduate economics students from Washington State University used Twitter to analyze how sports pundits' reputation was affected by their confidence and accuracy at predicting the outcomes to sporting events. They analysed tweets in which professional pundits and fans made predictions about the winners of a series of high-profile baseball and American Football matches. Each tweet was given a "confidence" rating depending on its language, with words like "destroy" and "annihilate" scoring higher than "beat", for example. Both the pundits and fans' predictions were worse than chance, with the professional analysts only proving correct 47 per cent of the time and amateurs 45 per cent of the time. Yet pundits' confidence was measured as 50 per cent higher than amateurs, and they gained more followers on the networking website as a result, the researchers said. Presenting their findings at the Annual Meeting of the Academy of Economics and Finance earlier this year, the researchers explained that being confident could increase a pundit's following by 17 per cent, while predicting every game correctly only raised it by 3.4 per cent.There was a similar pattern among amateurs, with brash people increasing their following by 20 per cent but correct guesses only raising it by 7.3 per cent. In general, pundits are better served by being brash and making people excited, they claimed.

The BBC is helping English learners understand the news. Each article is in a "mad lib" format where people learn idioms and difficult vocab by matching up the words in a sentence.

From a charred Hebrew scroll, researchers resurrected one of the earliest known versions of the Old Testament using a new digital reconstruction technique that may prove invaluable in revealing words from other previously unreadable finds, said scientists who plan to make the imaging software freely available.

This article talks about a study of the effect of language used during debates and its effect on the polls. It was written right before the last of the 2016 presidential debates. "Linguist style matching" is a trick that linguists have studied, and it focuses on how candidates state their points, not what their points are.

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.

This is about how text messaging has been affecting a student's way of writing in the classroom.

Slang and other text-talk terms have been making their way into student's academic essays and even their college essays. Students have stopped capitalizing words and stopped using punctuation altogether. While the future is unclear, it may be possible for academic writings to learn to accept this new way of writing.

The Beijing dialect of Mandarin Chinese is a victim of language standardization in schools and offices, urban redevelopment and migration. To the untutored ear, the Beijing dialect can sound like someone talking with a mouthful of marbles, inspiring numerous parodies and viral videos. The dialect is a testament to the city's tumultuous history of invasion and foreign rule. The Mongol Empire ruled China in the 13th and 14th centuries. The Manchus, an ethnic group from northeast Asia, ruled from the mid-17th century into the 20th. As a result, the Beijing dialect contains words derived from both Mongolian and Manchurian. The intervening Ming dynasty, which maintained its first capital in Nanjing for several decades before moving to Beijing, introduced southern speech elements.

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian. I just read this book, and it was extremely interesting since I read the book in conjunction with our discussions about bilingualism in class. I highly recommend this book called In Other Words.

Why do writers abandon their native language? IN 2012, Jhumpa Lahiri moved to Rome and began a period of self-imposed linguistic exile from English. She stopped speaking, reading, and writing the language entirely, the better to learn Italian.

It has become a tradition for writers to completely abandon their native language and continue their writings in a new language. In this article Jhumpa Lahiri goes over the improvements to her writing brought about by this transition.

"At the highest levels [of playing Scrabble] it can also be an advantage not to speak English at all." Article mentioned in http://www.bbc.com/news/blogs-magazine-monitor-24810762

A new Northwestern University study shows the power of language in infants' ability to understand the intentions of others. The results, based on two experiments, show that introducing a novel word for the impending novel event had a powerful effect on the infants' tendency to imitate the behavior. Infants were more likely to imitate behavior, however unconventional, if it had been named, than if it remained unnamed, the study shows. Sandra Waxman, co-author of the study, states, "This is the first demonstration of how infants' keen observational skills, when augmented by human language, heighten their acuity for 'reading' the underlying intentions of their 'tutors' (adults) and foster infants' imitation of adults' actions."

An interesting story--my students, you might recall Sheryl Turkle of MIT referencing robot therapists in her TED talk. USC has developed a robot therapist, Ellie, designed to talk to people who are struggling emotionally, and to take their measure in a way no human can. Originally developed to work with military PTSD patients, Ellie's purpose: to gather information and provide real human therapists detailed analysis of patients' movements and vocal features, in order to give new insights into people struggling with emotional issues. The body, face and voice express things that words sometimes obscure. Ellie's makers believe that her ability to do this will ultimately revolutionize American mental health care.

can't access full article, but this describes how they set up research experiments to answer their questions about the relationship between speech and gesture

Much of our recent reporting, especially from New Orleans, has focused on young people who are neither in school, nor working. There are an estimated five and a half million of them, ages 16 to 24, in the United States. But what do we call them? The nomenclature has fluctuated widely over the decades. And each generation's preferred term is packed with assumptions- economic, social, cultural, and educational - about the best way to frame the issue. Essentially, each name contains an argument about who's at fault, and where to find solutions.

Dana Suskind, a University of Chicago pediatric otolaryngologist, states our exposure to rich language in the first three years of our lives is critical not just for our ability to pronounce long words but for our overall development and success. The 4 Ts are key points for parents and caretakers of small children: 1. Tune in: be interested in what your child is interested in 2. Talk more: talking more, using richer language, narrating your child's day. 3. Take turns: viewing your child as a conversational partner from day one. Babies are born to learn. 4. Turn off the technology: there is no substitute for real live human interaction.

Interactive timeline of the history of English (spread across 10 different "acts") - includes sound clips (including Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales prologue), English language history, etc.

Adding on to Ryan's commentary: For each era, you can click on the different icons and do the following: 1. Read and hear a famous document 2. Get a brief historical overview 3. Linguistic developments 4. New words entering the language 5. A fast fact 6. A pun or riddle