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Ronen and co-authors from MIT, Harvard University, Northeastern University, and Aix-Marseille University created worldwide maps of how multilingual people transmit information and ideas. These maps depict three global language networks based on bilingual tweeters, book translations, and multilingual Wikipedia edits. The networks potentially offer guidance to governments and other language communities that want to change their international role. "If I want my national language to be more prominent, then I should invest in translating more documents, encouraging more people to tweet in their national language," Ronen says. "On the other side, if I want our ideas to spread, we should pick a second language that's very well connected."

Like Facebook or Twitter, Yik Yak is a social media network, only without user profiles. It does not sort messages according to friends or followers but by geographic location or, in many cases, by university. Only posts within a 1.5-mile radius appear, making Yik Yak well suited to college campuses. Think of it as a virtual community bulletin board - or maybe a virtual bathroom wall at the student union. It has become the go-to social feed for college students across the country to commiserate about finals, to find a party or to crack a joke about a rival school. Much of the chatter is harmless. Some of it is not. "Yik Yak is the Wild West of anonymous social apps," said Danielle Keats Citron, a law professor at University of Maryland and the author of "Hate Crimes in Cyberspace." "It is being increasingly used by young people in a really intimidating and destructive way."

The Spelling Society speculates that English may just be the world's most irregularly spelled language. Masha Bell, the vice chair of the English Spelling Society and author of the book Understanding English Spelling, analyzed the 7,000 most common English words and found that 60 percent of them had one or more unpredictably used letters. As there's no systematic way to learn to read or write modern English-people have to memorize the spelling of thousands of individual words, file them away in their mental databases, and retrieve them when needed--English-speaking children typically needed about three years to master the basics of reading and writing, whereas their counterparts in most European countries needed a year or less. Moreover, English-speaking children then spend years progressing through different reading levels and mastering the spelling of more and more words. That means it typically takes English-speaking children at least 10 years to become moderately proficient spellers-memorizing about 400 new words per year-and because they forget and have to revise many of the spellings they've previously learned, "learning to spell is a never-ending chore."

Infants can make sense of complex social situations, taking into account who knows what about whom, according to research published in Psychological Science, a journal of the Association for Psychological Science. "Our findings show that 13-month-olds can make sense of social situations using their understanding about others' minds and social evaluation skills," says psychological scientists and study authors You-jung Choi and Yuyan Luo of the University of Missouri.

When it comes to language, many people distinguish between "prescriptivism" (the idea that correct usage should be defined by authorities) and "descriptivism" (the idea that any way a lot of people use the language is correct).

Article shares 23 maps and charts that can hopefully illuminate small aspects of how we manage to communicate with one another. In the mix: linguistic diversity around the world, where the plurality of Wikipedia articles are authored, endangered languages, which countries boast the most languages...

New research in a Princeton University and the Free University of Berlin report shows that taste-related words actually engage the emotional centers of the brain more than literal words with the same meaning. sentences containing words that invoked taste activated areas known to be associated with emotional processing, such as the amygdala, as well as the areas known as the gustatory cortices that allow for the physical act of tasting. Interestingly, the metaphorical and literal words only resulted in brain activity related to emotion when part of a sentence, but stimulated the gustatory cortices both in sentences and as stand-alone words. Metaphorical sentences may spark increased brain activity in emotion-related regions because they allude to physical experiences, said co-author Adele Goldberg, a Princeton professor of linguistics in the Council of the Humanities. Human language frequently uses physical sensations or objects to refer to abstract domains such as time, understanding or emotion, Goldberg said. "You begin to realize when you look at metaphors how common they are in helping us understand abstract domains," Goldberg said. "It could be that we are more engaged with abstract concepts when we use metaphorical language that ties into physical experiences."

East Africa's elephants face few threats in their savanna home, aside from humans and lions. But the behemoths are terrified of African bees, and with good reason. An angry swarm can sting elephants around their eyes and inside their trunks and pierce the skin of young calves. Now, a new study shows that the pachyderms utter a distinctive rumble in response to the sound of bees, the first time an alarm call has been identified in elephants. … [T]he study suggests that this alarm call isn't just a generalized vocalization but means specifically, "Bees!" says Lucy King, a postgraduate zoologist at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom and the study's lead author. When they hear buzzing bees, the pachyderms turn and run away, shaking their heads while making a call that King terms the "bee rumble."

A new study by Joseph Grenny and David Maxfield, authors of the New York Times bestseller Crucial Conversations, shows nearly everyone has either seen or suffered from a catastrophic comment. Specifically, 83 percent have witnessed their colleagues say something that has had catastrophic results on their careers, reputations and businesses. Here are the top 5 blunders: 1) SUICIDE BY FEEDBACK: You thought others could handle the truth-but they didn't. 2) GOSSIP KARMA: You talked about someone or something in confidence with a colleague only to have your damning comments made public. 3) TABOO TOPICS: What it looks like: You said something about race, sex, politics or religion that you thought was safe, but others distorted it, misunderstood it, took it wrong, used it against you, etc. 4) WORD RAGE: You lost your temper and used profanity or obscenities to make your point. 5) "REPLY ALL" BLUNDERS. You accidentally shared something harmful via technology (email, text, virtual meeting tools, etc).

Gawker is running a competition, tournament style, to see which accent will be crowned "America's Ugliest." In the running are 16 cities in the US, and readers get to vote. Accent discrimination still thrives... Josef Fruehwald, the linguist author of this article, states, "Linguists call this general pattern "standard language ideology." It's the idea that somewhere out there, there's a perfect, unadulterated version of English, and what your everyday person speaks is a poor copy. I call it the kilogram model of language, because there is literally a physical object in France by which the unit kilogram is defined, and there are in fact multiple and worryingly imperfect copies of it around the world. But what linguists have discovered is that language is definitely not like the kilogram. The only place where English really exists is in the minds of its everyday speakers. To the extent that varies geographically and socially, so does English. There are no imperfect copies."

Award-winning, Chinese contemporary artist, Xu Bing, has created _Book From the Ground_, a text that speakers of any language can "read." His interest in pictorial storytelling was heightened by a bubblegum wrapper he happened upon-a series of three images connected by two arrows that instructed the chewer to put the gum back into the wrapper after chewing and throw it in the trash. This became Xu's inspiration for _Book from the Ground_. Xu's book reflects cultural literacy and modern tools and technologies, rather than traditional literacy. The author predicts that the younger generation is likely to find his icon language easier to "read" because they've been exposed to these images for as long as they can remember on the Internet. "I think it can be seen two ways," says Robert Harrist, a professor of Chinese art history at Columbia University who has taught a semester-length course on Xu's work. "It's great that everybody can communicate now and stay in touch constantly through one medium or another, a kind of shared, plugged-in visual world." But at the same time, with the "flattening and evening out in communication so much is lost," especially when it comes to tense or nuance. "The real surprising thing here and the challenge and the thing I love about it is he makes you ask yourself: What is writing?" adds Harrist, who describes Xu as "the greatest living Chinese artist, simple as that.... Everything he does is profoundly thoughtful."

Some of us love using technology to write, but as we highlighted yesterday, the best writing system is the one that stays out of your way. Author Patrick McLean discusses why, despite his love for tech, he sticks with longhand when writing.

Elise Piazza, lead author and a postdoctoral research associate with the Princeton Neuroscience Institute, said, "Motherese contains exaggerated pitch contours and repetitive rhythms that help babies segment the complex noises around them into building blocks of language." She added that the speaking style also helps parents capture the attention of their babies and engage them emotionally.

This article states that humans judge people by their voices. It is something that we all do because we cannot help it. The author touches upon Shakespearean plays to elaborate his argument for why tone of voice does in fact matter.

Americanisms are becoming more common in British English. The author expresses concern over losing more British words. The article also discusses whether Americanisms are necessarily disadvantageous.

Bwahaha! Giving the former colonists a taste of their own medicine by infiltrating the Queen's English.

The author of this piece simply explains how some languages involve more characters than others. Also, this leaves languages like Chinese, Japanese, Korean, etc., with an advantage because they are able to express their thoughts through fewer characters.

The Académie française, established in 1635, is the official authority on the French language, establishing the standards for proper French. One of the aims of the Académie, whose 40 members include writers, linguists, historians and philosophers, is to protect French from foreign, notably "Anglo-Saxon" invasions. To that end, it comes up with French equivalents to pesky Anglicisms that slip into French, for example changing email into courriel.

Author Sena Moore writes about how music can re-wire our brains for speech. Singing and speaking activate similar areas on both sides of the brain, primarily in the motor production and sensory feedback areas. Singing, however, also activates the right hemisphere in some areas more strongly than the left. Speech is a left-hemisphere-dominate function. In other words, similar networks in the brain associated with vocal production are activated when a person is singing and when s/he is speaking. And the "stronger right hemisphere" activation supports the clinical observation that those who cannot speak because of damage to the left hemisphere speech areas known as Broca's area can still produce words by singing them.

Lukianoff, a First Amendment lawyer, the president of the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (fire), and author of _The Coddling of the American Mind_, speaks about free speech controversies at American universities and the dangers of protecting students from ideas and words that they dislike. Such moves, although well-intentioned, arguably diminish tolerance for diversity and dialogue, and ironically, may exacerbate both depression and anxiety.

Article discusses the findings of researchers who've documented and categorized the utterances of the dying (morbid, but true!) Author Michael Erard notes that more research should be done in this area, because "Even basic descriptions of language at the end of life would not only advance linguistic understanding but also provide a host of benefits to those who work with the dying, and to the dying themselves. Experts told me that a more detailed road map of changes could help counter people's fear of death and provide them with some sense of control. It could also offer insight into how to communicate better with the dying. Differences in cultural metaphors could be included in training for hospice nurses who may not share the same cultural frame as their patients."