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How TV shows, more specifically Peppa Pig, affect language development in young children. This study looked at the language lexicons within episodes and evaluated whether or not it was appropriate for young language learners.

謝謝, Michael Chang ʻ22, for discovering this fun Mandarin Chinese weekly column, which examines various pop culture elements of Mandarin Chinese and teaches vernacular, vocabulary, and other linguistics aspects that Chinese learners are unlikely to learn in a classroom setting. A sampling: Chinese Internet slang, Chinese gastronomic terms, sarcastic phrases, traditional Chinese children's games, poetic terms for snow, anti-COVID virus health propaganda slogans.

Lera Boroditsky, cognitive science professor at UC San Diego notes, "...a growing body of research is documenting how experience with language radically restructures the brain. People who were deprived of access to language as children (e.g., deaf individuals without access to speakers of sign languages) show patterns of neural connectivity that are radically different from those with early language exposure and are cognitively different from peers who had early language access. The later in life that first exposure to language occurs, the more pronounced and cemented the consequences. Further, speakers of different languages develop different cognitive skills and predispositions, as shaped by the structures and patterns of their languages. Experience with languages in different modalities (e.g., spoken versus signed) also develops predictable differences in cognitive abilities outside the boundaries of language. For example, speakers of sign languages develop different visuospatial attention skills than those who only use spoken language. Exposure to written language also restructures the brain, even when acquired late in life. Even seemingly surface properties, such as writing direction (left-to-right or right-to-left), have profound consequences for how people attend to, imagine, and organize information. The normal human brain that is the subject of study in neuroscience is a "languaged" brain. It has come to be the way it is through a personal history of language use within an individual's lifetime. It also actively and dynamically uses linguistic resources (the categories, constructions, and distinctions available in language) as it processes incoming information from across the senses.

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.

English as She Is Spoke is a charming 19th century (1884) phrasebook created by a Portuguese gentleman, Pedro Carolino, who only wanted to help teach the English language to his peers, but instead created a literary disaster that became a linguistic phenomenon. Check out the digital scan of the book here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884

slang captures elements of humanity that are not recorded elsewhere. "What slang really does is show us at our most human," says Jonathon Green, a scholar of slang. It is the linguistic equivalent of our "unfettered Freudian id," proof of how deeply we desire social affirmation, how subversive we can be and, in some ways, how unchanging humans are. After all, while the words may change, the thematic areas (sex, drugs, crime, insults, etc.) have remained unwavering for half a millennium. So has slang's primary purpose: to playfully disguise true meaning in a way that determines who is in the know and who is out.

Forcing language isn't possible, it just happens on its own. Many people have looked down and wanted to get rid of these speech features but surprisingly using filler words says a few things about a person. Saying "um" doesn't just fill in pauses but also signals a new topic/idea wanting to be mentioned in the conversation. Whenever someone says filler words, they are working hard in a conversation. The article also goes into how women adopted vocal fry, which is where a person goes into their lowest register and usually sound very raspy and creaky. Many people complain about it but it's all cultural bias. The bias that people have on women's voice affects how people view speech feature that they have contributed to the English language.

This article talks about emojis and how their meaning depends on the reader's interpretation. Researchers are building more understanding of the role emoji play in human communication, by studying the linguistic properties of emoji in comparison with languages like English.

This article talks about how diverse languages are around the world and how thousands of languages are becoming extinct. It talked about how every language has different forms of grammar and linguists are not necessarily interested in "correct grammar" because we know that grammar changes throughout time and places. This can help us understand our history and how our minds work. I found it interesting that many indigenous languages will become extinct in the near future. For example, South America and Australia are expected to lose all indigenous languages.

Jonah DeChants, a research scientist at the Trevor Project, an LGBTQ mental health nonprofit notes an "explosion of language that we're seeing around how young people express their gender." A 2001research study of 34,700+ US youth released Monday by the LGBTQ mental health nonprofit the Trevor Project found that over one in four (26%) LGBTQ youth identified as nonbinary. An additional 20% said they are not sure or are questioning whether they identify as nonbinary. The term "nonbinary" refers to people whose gender does not fit within the traditional binary construction of male or female. Drawing from an online survey conducted between October and December of 2020 of over 34,700 LGBTQ youth in the U.S., the Trevor Project found that while the term "nonbinary" has often been associated with a trans or transitioning person, only half of the respondents who identified as nonbinary also identified as transgender. (An additional 20% said they were not sure or questioning whether they are transgender). While 72% of respondents who identified as nonbinary said they use the term to describe their gender identity, other terms were also cited, including queer (used by 29% of respondents), gender non-confirming (27%), genderfluid (24%), genderqueer (23%), androgynous (23%), agender (15%), demigirl (10%), demiboy (8%), genderflux (4%), and bigender (4%). (Queer is also a term people can use to identify their sexuality, which is separate from gender identity. Most the nonbinary youth sampled reported being multisexual or attracted to multiple genders.) "More and more young people are taking control over their gender identity, and finding language and terms that resonate with them," DeChants continues. "And expressing that in the world in [ways] that we haven't necessarily seen in the past." The majority of nonbinary respondents said they use pronouns outside the gender binary-such as "they/them" or "xe/xem." Here, DeChants notes an "emp

This post (a 2021 update of a 2018 post) contains several useful infographics and charts, including a visualization of the top 23 most-spoken languages in the world, distribution of those languages by country, a family tree of Indo-European languages.

This website highlights a 5-part documentary series which explores the most controversial and misunderstood language variety in the United States: African American Language (AAL). With the perspectives of everyday people and the guidance of historians, linguists, and educators, the series showcases the history of the language, the symbolic role it plays in the lives of African Americans, and the tremendous impact on the language and culture of the United States. Contains video clips, educational resources.

Language Log is an applied linguistics blog founded by U.Penn's Mark Liberman. This blog post concerns the phenomenon of character amnesia, which is becoming more prevalent in E. Asian countries like China and Japan, which have character-based languages. Basically, character amnesia is the phenomenon of forgetting how to write words, due to the increase in keyboard input of characters, word processing, online correspondence and composition, predictive text technology, and the decline of handwritten documents. This particular article focuses on Japanese kanji amnesia. The bottom of the article contains links to previous discussions of this topic.

In the last half century, much effort has been placed into teaching animals, primarily apes, a basic language. However, successes have been limited: animals using signs to obtain things in which they were interested, for instance. But no animal has yet acquired the linguistic capability that children have already in their third year of life. Here are some things that differentiate humans from animals: 1. The fact that animals don't ask "why?" shows they don't aspire to knowledge and are incapable of justification. 2. The inability of animals to use negation shows they lack basic logical abilities. 3. Another essential characteristic of human language is its normativity-namely, the fact that there are right and wrong uses of a word or phrase. Animals lack this capacity.

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

Interesting article about researchers who are looking at geometry as its own language that might be unique to humans. Combines information about mathematics, linguistics, and AI, and how language might have developed to represent things as well as communicate.

This article features an interview with linguist Gretchen McCulloch about how the Internet has changed our language. McCulloch provides insight that disputes the idea that the Internet is killing or destroying our language. The article covers topics such as language usage amongst different age groups, emojis, the use of punctuation and capitalization, text speak, and more.

While this video has been posted here on the Diigo page before, the bookmark is from 2011 and has very few relevant tags. This short film has many different voices from our community, and it provides the most authentic sounding pidgin that I've been able to find on Youtube, as it shows ordinary people just talking and expressing their relationship with the language, and as it is not performative. I personally discovered it when trying to explain pidgin to a friend from the mainland, and it seems to be a very good tool for providing a solid foundation of understanding about pidgin. Notable speakers within the video include linguist Kent Sakoda, who discusses the formation of pidgins as a whole, the formation of HCE as a result of plantations here in Hawaii, the formation of a few particular common phrases that arose as a combination of various languages, and how HCE is something that binds people together as a community here in Hawaii as well as Pastor Earl Morihara, who speaks on the importance of pidgin to him in a personal sense, elaborating that it's "da language of my heart," and that it comes naturally to him when speaking with others in the Hawaii community.

Due to the increase in language-learning technology, learners of second languages can get exposure to the new language that weren't possible before, making it easier to learn a new language.