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Research by professor Ilija Casule of Macquarie University in Sydney, Australia shows that Burushaski, a language spoken by about 90,000 people in a remote area of Pakistan is Indo-European in origin, and not a linguistic isolate, as previously thought. He explains how 20 years of research has tied this isolated group of people to a migration that started in the Balkans and moved East 3,000 years ago.

Video featuring British historical linguist and Early Modern English scholar, David Crystal, and his son, Ben Crystal, speaking about their work in re: speaking Shakespeare's words as they originally sounded.

Linguist Danny Erker studies how Spanish is spoken, and changing, in the United States.

In this essay, D.E. Whittkower, in the Dept. of Philosophy at Old Dominion University, attempts to establish that social media communications constitute a secondary literacy, which shares many of the features of spoken language ("orality"). Whittkower's discussion of Facebook, in particular, is thought-provoking; he suggests that the site is a "remarkably well-suited site for the activity of friendship," providing opportunities for relationships and interests to grow and intensify and for participants to engage in linguistic and post-linguistic social grooming.

Examination of dialect acquisition

Younger you are, the better the linguist you are. Multilingual brain is "nimbler, quicker, better able to deal with ambiguities, resolve conflicts and even resist Alzheimer's disease and other forms of dementia."

Insecurity has several linguistic calling cards, and learning to spot them may help you both assuage others and more skillfully present yourself to the world. People at the edges of a given group are more likely to use language that emphasizes their membership in the group. Central figures are less likely to assert their belonging. Also signs of insecurity: a focus on the pronoun "me", borrowing prestige by using a different conversational style, and hypercorrection.

Some game modes: Try to created the longest sentence. The longer the sentence, the higher the score. Timed feature to test ability to construct nonsensical phrases under pressure. App called Sleep Furiously. Available from Apple, Google and Amazon

The English language is not sick. It is not even afflicted with a head cold, much less languishing on its deathbed. Nor is it under attack: there are no nefarious forces conspiring to change it from an eloquent tongue to a series of grunt and emoticons.

A linguist with autism?

After analyzing the music of some of hip hop's biggest artists, from Eminem to Public Enemy, linguists at the University of Manchester in England noticed something pretty impressive. As it turns out, Grammy Award-winning rappers seem to have an intuitive sense for rhyme, using subtle rhyming patterns called half-rhymes (like "hop and "rock") much more often than traditional rhymes (like "cat" and "mat").

Terrific narrated slide show by a linguistics professor at Towson University

An excellent compilation of lots of websites in different areas of linguistics

rather funny take on American metaphors from a Hungarian linguist

"David [Harrison] and Greg [Anderson] will circle the planet to hear the last whispers of a dying language. They are The Linguists." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Linguists

nice overview of several linguistic topics (skip lingua franca links)

"Your question is really asking, "What is a syllable?" For the most part, our original grammar school understanding that "A syllable is a part of a word with a single vowel sound" is essentially correct, but there's more to it than that. Let's look at a linguistic defintion of "syllable":..."