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"Latin is a language as dead as dead can be; It killed the ancient Romans, and now it's killing me!" In the past, Latin teaching has emphasized grammar and translation. Yet, to paraphrase Monty Python, Latin might now well say, "But I'm not dead yet!" Read about this movement to revive spoken Latin, in order to make it a "living language" more relevant and engaging to a new generation of learners.

This article talks about general language disorders, how to detect impairments, options for treatment, and much more. More specifically, one portion of the article focuses on receptive versus expressive forms of language, and the characteristics that fall beneath each of these categories. Lastly, the article addresses how parents can help their child succeed from a young age.

For centuries, Central America's Afro-Indigenous Garifuna people have kept the culture's oral history alive through their ancestors' native language. But decades of modernization, haphazard native-language training in Garifuna schools, intermarriage between cultures, and the ridicule of young people who speak the language, collectively led to Garifuna being listed on the UNESCO Atlas of Endangered Languages in 2001. Today, linguists estimate that about 100,000 speakers remain. The threat of language extinction isn't new. Some linguists estimate a language dies every two weeks, as some languages become dominant tools for social and economic exchange, while others are pushed to the margins. But there are ways to save at-risk languages, as well. The key is that the language needs to be thought of less as preserved, "but indeed part of their present and their future," says Liliana Sánchez, a linguist and professor at the University of Illinois at Chicago. That's exactly what the Garinagu (Garifuna people) are doing. For the past two decades, Garifuna artists have used a cultural cornerstone-spirited dance music-to inspire young Garinagu to learn and share their native language. Now, with a new Garifuna Tourism Trail project in Belize, travelers can experience and support the cultural renaissance, too. Elements of the Garifuna culture-including music, dance, and language-were listed as a UNESCO Masterpiece of Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity in 2001. Around that same time, Garifuna musicians and cultural activists hatched a plan: Create irresistible melodies, sung entirely in Garifuna, to rally young Garinagu to embrace the culture and learn the language. Will music save the Garifuna language? Time will tell. Garifuna remains on UNESCO's endangered-language list, last updated in 2010. And, as the Hawaiians learned from revitalizing their own language post colonization, this kind of revival is a long, multi-generational road.

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.

While the invention of emojis was fairly recent, researchers have found that instead of creating a new type of communication, emojis call back to ancient proto-languages and cuneiform-type scripts. Emojis can be helpful in communicating online across cultures, due to the ease of interpretation across all language systems.

Thanks to Gabby Gonzales '24 for this site! Programmer Thomas Dimson, author of Instagram's original content-ranking algorithms, created this website which uses GPT-2 algorithm to generate words that sound like they should exist, but don't, along with definitions and examples. Example: downage (verb) dow·nage obtain or retain (something) at a reduced price "the team had to downage contracts after a series of sellout losses"

This article describes a study conducted by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence which evaluated AI's capability to actually understand the language it produces. This comes after recent advancements in natural-language processing (NLP) have allowed AI to generate convincing literary works. In the study, researchers posed over 44,000 questions, built off the Winograd Schema Challenge, to an AI system. Essentially, the questions used pairs of sentences with slight differences that flipped the meaning of a pronoun, thus requiring a comprehensive understanding of semantics in order to correctly assign the pronoun. The study found that the AI only had a 60-80% success rate, compared to the human success rate of roughly 94%.

This article goes over how powerful swearing is due to the emotion behind it and how it stimulates our brains. Swearing not only generates a range of emotions, but acts as a release of energy/emotion. This is why curse words are often present in music and movies because they are able to better portray how one is feeling and the emotions they are experiencing.

This article discusses how "trendy slangs" are becoming more appealing to foreigners wanting to learn english. In the UK a survey was conducted to determine the type of slang these foreigners are hearing amongst social media platforms. This article relates how many slangs have a root in Multicultural London English (MLE) or African-American Vernacular English (AAVE). This article informs those learning english the type of slangs to use and when appropriate to do so. The slangs range from an older generation to current-ish slangs.

There's evidence deaf Hawaiians had been communicating with a homegrown sign language for generations, predating the arrival of missionaries, sugar plantations and the Americans who would overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. But linguists didn't officially document the language until 2013, when research by the University of Hawaii found HSL to be a language isolate: born and bred on the Hawaiian Islands with no outside influence. More than 80 percent of its vocabulary bears no similarity to ASL. The findings launched a three-year project to document what remained of HSL, led by Lambrecht and linguistics professor James "Woody" Woodward, who has spent the last 30 years studying and documenting sign languages throughout Asia. By 2016, the team had built a video archive and developed a manuscript for an introductory HSL handbook and dictionary, featuring illustrations of Lambrecht demonstrating signs.

This article writes general information about the standard measures taken to ensure clear communication, as it is very important in aviation. These measures include speaking slowly (under 100 wpm), highly coded language, and the difficulties that non-native speakers have with Aviation English. The topic that the article studies is the different errors accented and native speakers commit when communication with air traffic controllers.

This site is very insightful as to the differences in language development in the brain between those that learn a second language in childhood and those that learn the language as adults. It explains briefly the idea of a critical period and discusses the interesting aspects that come along with learning a second language later in life. It mentions Broca's and Wernicke's area.

This book chapter discusses two research projects that examine how teachers/instructors view slang terms and how those views affect young people. It explains how young people have their own vernacular and how older generations who don't understand it may see "youth speak" as a threat to "standard" English.

This article shares how the perceptions people have that teen slang and texting shortcuts are "ruining" the English language may not be true. It discusses a study that indicates language changes over the course of a lifetime rather than just during teenage years. Language evolves to fit the needs of each generation.

This article talks about how sarcasm is implemented across cultures and generations, but the nuances of sarcasm used changes with who it is used with and where. Most commonly participants of the study stated that they used sarcasm with friends and to "be funny".

This article is about emotion in generative AI and how far the technology has come

This article is on how emotional language can affect the responses of generative AI and how the AI can learn from the language