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This article talks about the use of emojis in place of words. It describes emoji for serious, tragic matters as offensive and crass. They say when discussing these serious-type matters, it is better to say nothing at all than use emoji's to an express a verbally indescribable emotion.

WHO can say what order should be used to list adjectives in English? Mark Forsyth, in "The Elements of Eloquence", describes it as: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose and then Noun. "So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you'll sound like a maniac." Mr Forsyth may have exaggerated how fixed adjective order is, but his little nugget is broadly true, and it has delighted people to examine something they didn't know they knew.

There was a time when the term "mom" (when said in public, anyway) elicited a certain kind of eye roll. Yet these days, "mom" is the highest form of flattery. And you don't even have to be an actual mother to receive it (nor does the mom you're talking about need to be yours). Mom (adj) has become Internetspeak for the absolute coolest.

a spate of recent studies challenge this idea. They suggest that we seem instinctively to link certain sounds with particular sensory perceptions. Some words really do evoke Humpty's "handsome" rotundity. Others might bring to mind a spiky appearance, a bitter taste, or a sense of swift movement. And when you know where to look, these patterns crop up surprisingly often, allowing a monoglot English speaker to understand more Swahili or Japanese than you might imagine (see "Which sounds bigger?" at the bottom of this article). These cross-sensory connections may even open a window onto the first words ever uttered by our ancestors, giving us a glimpse of the earliest language and how it emerged.

This article is about he worldwide medias use of strong/violent words regarding the Israel-Palestine conflict. The words used by the media are only making the conflict worse apparently.

One of the central questions of Words R Us is what conditions fostered the emergence of language. In this article, you can discover where the 'F' and 'V' sounds, so challenging to replicate in ventriloquism, came from. A hint is that diet influenced the human bite and mouth shape, but take a peek to find out more!

Check this article out to learn more about how our own language and our Top 20 keywords in the Oxford Corpus has changed since the beginning of the pandemic. While some words are not uncommon, two new ones come to mind. These are "social distance/social distancing" and "self-isolate/self-isolation." We can see the impact of the coronavirus by seeing which words are now used more frequently.

On the Isle of Man, illustrator Vicky Webb, 31, and Manx husband Dylan, have designed a book using Manx words to both help children learn the alphabet and keep the ancient Manx language alive.

President Joe Biden and Dr. Anthony Fauci mispronounced the new COVID variant at a recent White House speech, calling the variant "omnicron" instead of the Greek letter "omicron." However, linguists explain that this is an expected error, as it is common for humans to take words from other languages and 'nativize' foreign sounds to make it more natural-sounding in their mother tongue. The abundance of English words with the prefix omni- seems to serve like a magnet, drawing in speakers to the similar set of letters and tempting speakers to mispronounce the omi- prefix as "omnicron."

According to Ethnologue, of the 115 Indigenous languages spoken in the U.S. today, two are healthy, 34 are in danger, and 79 will go extinct within a generation without serious intervention. In other words, 99% of the Native American languages spoken today are in danger. Despite the Cherokee Nation's efforts, the Cherokee language (ᏣᎳᎩ ᎦᏬᏂᎯᏍᏗ) is on that list. There are 573 federally recognized tribes in the United States, and most are battling language extinction. Since 2008, thanks in part to the Esther Martinez Native American Languages Preservation Act, the Administration for Native Americans (ANA), through a competitive grant process, has allocated approximately $12 million annually to tribes working to preserve their languages. In 2018, only 47 language projects received funding - just 29% of all requests, leaving more than two-thirds of applicants without funding, according to ANA. The Bureau of Indian Education, the Department of Education's Department of Indian Education and the National Science Foundation allocated an estimated additional $5.4 million in language funding in 2018, bringing the grand total of federal dollars for Indigenous language revitalization last year to approximately $17.4 million. Compared to how much the United States spent on exterminating Native languages, that sum is a pittance. At the height of the Indian boarding school era, between 1877 and 1918, the United States allocated $2.81 billion (adjusted for inflation) to support the nation's boarding school infrastructure - an educational system designed to assimilate Indigenous people into white culture and destroy Native languages. Since 2005, however, the federal government has only appropriated approximately $180 million for Indigenous language revitalization. In other words, for every dollar the U.S. government spent on eradicating Native languages in previous centuries, it spent less than 7 cents on revitalizing them in this one.

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.

Issues of equality and acceptance of transgender and nonbinary people - along with challenges to their rights - have become a major topic in the headlines. These issues can involve words and ideas and identities that are new to some. That's why we've put together a glossary of terms relating to gender identity. Our goal is to help people communicate accurately and respectfully with one another. Proper use of gender identity terms, including pronouns, is a crucial way to signal courtesy and acceptance.

A new longitudinal study, led by Mary E. Brushe, a researcher at the Telethon Kids Institute at the University of Western Australia, gathered data from 220 families across South Australia, Western Australia and Queensland with children who were born in 2017. Once every six months until they turned 3, the children wore T-shirts or vests that held small digital language processors that automatically tracked their exposure to certain types of electronic noise, as well as language spoken by the child, the parent or another adult. The researchers were particularly interested in three measures of language: words spoken by an adult, child vocalizations and turns in the conversation. They modeled each measure separately and adjusted the results for age, sex and other factors, such as the mother's education level and the number of children at home. Researchers found that at almost all ages, increased screen time squelched conversation. When the children were 18 months old, each additional minute of screen time was associated with 1.3 fewer child vocalizations, for example, and when they were 2 years old, an additional minute was associated with 0.4 fewer turns in conversation. The strongest negative associations emerged when the children were 3 years old - and were exposed to an average of 2 hours 52 minutes of screen time daily. At this age, just one additional minute of screen time was associated with 6.6 fewer adult words, 4.9 fewer child vocalizations and 1.1 fewer turns in conversation.

This article describes a linguistic experiment that took place in Antarctica in 2017-2018. Scientists going to Antarctica were surveyed on their pronunciation of specific words, and by the end of the four month trip, the team pronounced one of the words in a different way to their individual original pronunciation. This illustrates that accents form through prolonged social and geographical isolation.

This report touches on a bunch of different aspects on how language defines us. It shows us through short summaries and linked sources how language can tell us behavioral patterns, inform our knowledge about other languages, and predict perceived stereotypes.

This article talks about the impact language has on shaping people and culture. It dives into how language influences perception, behavior, and understanding, affecting everything from personal identity to social norms. It also discusses how language can be a tool for empowerment and change but can also perpetuate stereotypes and inequalities.

This article serves as an update in the new year of 2024 on which states require their public schools to teach kids how to read and write in cursive. New to the 27 state list are California and New Hampshire, as they now all require some form of cursive education for the youth in school.

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

An article about researchers recording results after a patient regained his sight after being blind his whole life and how he reacts to the "new world"

New ways to grab dinner, the trick to using a tool, and learning the local dialect. These are behaviors that animals pick up from each other. K iller whales, chimpanzees, and birds seem to have a cultural component to their lives. Now a new study suggests that sperm whales should be added to that list.

Chinese New Year, known in China as Spring Festival, has an abundance of unique traditions associated with it. Some of these traditions are more widespread than others. Among the many New Year's customs are a few whose meaning is derived from puns of Mandarin words.