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How can mispronunciation of a word today can become tomorrow's strongly defended norm

Journalist David Shariatmadari examines mispronunciations and malapropisms and how they contribute to language change.

Historical Linguists have uncovered that language may have found its origins 100,00 years ago, but the mystery of what it sounded like remains.

Interactive timeline of the history of English (spread across 10 different "acts") - includes sound clips (including Beowulf and the Canterbury Tales prologue), English language history, etc.

Adding on to Ryan's commentary: For each era, you can click on the different icons and do the following: 1. Read and hear a famous document 2. Get a brief historical overview 3. Linguistic developments 4. New words entering the language 5. A fast fact 6. A pun or riddle

excellent explanations

A very interesting and amusing presentation. From the abstract (http://nwav40.georgetown.edu/262.docx.pdf): "I use co-occurrences of words and emoticons to (i) develop a taxonomy of the affective stances Twitter users take, and (ii) characterize the meanings and usage of their emoticons. ... It's reasonable to ask what emoticons themselves mean and reversing the direction of analysis shows how emoticons pattern across words. ... Emoticons with noses are historically older. ... this means that people who use old-fashion noses also use a different vocabulary ... affect and word choice both create and reflect social characteristics like age and gender."

At the heart of the current friction between Hong Kong and mainland China isn't just Hong Kong's autonomy and political freedoms. It's the territory's language. Though they share many of the same Chinese characters, Mandarin and Cantonese use them in such divergent ways-in terms of both grammar and vocabulary-that they constitute two different writing systems. China's government has tried to insist that Cantonese isn't really a language, and to suppress its use. But as with Bengali in the independence movement for Bangladesh, and the Soweto uprising against the imposition of Afrikaans in apartheid South African schools, Cantonese is beginning to take on a central role in Hong Kong's resistance to the authority of mainland China.

For more on the historical divide between Mandarin and Cantonese language speakers, see this article: http://www.chinese-lessons.com/cantonese/difficulty.htm

Many linguists, including Noam Chomsky, contend that language in the sense we ordinary think of it, in the sense that people in Germany speak German, is a historical or social or political notion, rather than a scientific one. For example, German and Dutch are much closer to one another than various dialects of Chinese are.

It's not unusual to hear about attempts to save a disappearing language - but in one place in rural California, some Native Americans actually want their language to die out with them.

Sadly, one of the Maidu tribe members reports, "Those that know the language don't want to speak it. They associate it with difficult times. They don't want to stir up… anything." Having suffered historically at the hands of outsiders who encouraged assimilation and forgetting the native language, the Maidu are distrustful of outsiders attempting to revitalize the language.

This article has some pictures of Tolkien's notebooks that he created four elvish in. The languages he made for Lord of The Rings were fairly complex. They were all derived from each other and he even created historical evolution throughout the languages.

This article talks about: -Eminem -his rhyme schemes -how his rhyme schemes compare to historical rhyme schemes (ie. Shakespeare) -his rapping speed -his word puns and wordplay

Africanized versions of the Arabic alphabet are collectively called "Ajami." Much as the Latin-based alphabet is used to write many languages, including English, Ajami is not a language itself, but the alphabetic script used to write a language: Arabic-derived letters to write a non-Arabic-in this case, African-language. "Ajami" derives from the Arabic a'jamiy, which means "foreigner" or, more specifically, "non-Arab." Historically, Arabs used the word to refer to all things Persian or non-Arab, a usage they borrowed from the ancient Greeks. Yet over the last few centuries, across Islamic Africa, "Ajami" came to mean an African language written in Arabic script that was often adapted phonetically to facilitate local usages and pronunciations across the continent, from the Ethiopian highlands in the east to the lush jungles of Sierra Leone in the west. The use of Ajami is tied to the religious spread of Islam. From its beginning, Islam was a literate religion. Iqra' ("read") is the first word of God's revelations to Muhammad that became the Qur'an. Knowledge of Islam meant knowledge of the revealed word of God: the Qur'an. Consequently, wherever Islam went, it established centers of learning, usually attached to mosques, where children learned to read and write Arabic in much the same way that European and American children have often been taught literacy by using the Bible. For members of African societies where oral tradition predominated, Arabic was the first written language to which they had been exposed.

Censorship has been a long-standing issue in China, but its citizens continue to fight for self-expression through clever linguistic circumvention of Internet restrictions. Much of Chinese Internet lingo involves codewords, and the corpus of codewords is constantly changing to accommodate new topics and avoid smarter, stricter censors. It has reached the point where a simple understanding of Chinese vocabulary, syntax, and grammar is no longer enough to fully understand Chinese Internet discourse. On today's Chinese Internet, fully comprehending the language requires a thorough knowledge of current events, a deep respect for historical implications, an agile mastery of cultural conventions, and more often than not, a healthy appreciation of topical humor.

English originated in England and is the dominant language in many countries including the United States, the United Kingdom, Canada, Ireland, New Zealand, and Australia. It is also the official language of India, the Philippines, Singapore, island nations in the Carribean Sea and Pacific Ocean, and many countries in Africa, including South Africa. About a third of the world's population uses English and it is the first choice of foreign language in most other countries in the world. The parent language of English Proto-Indo-European was used about 5,000 years ago by nomads. The closest language to modern English is Frisian, used by the Dutch province of Friesland. During the course of many millennia, modern English has slowly gotten simpler and less inflected. In English, only nouns, pronouns (he, him, his), adjectives (big, bigger, biggest) and verbs are inflected. English is the only European language to use uninflected adjectives (tall man & tall woman versus Spanish el hombre alto & la mujer alta. For the verb "ride", English has 5 forms (ride, rides, rode, riding, ridden) versus German reiten that has 16 forms. The simplification and loss of inflection has made English more flexible functionally and more open in vocabulary. English has "borrowed" words from other languages (e.g. cannibal, cigar, guerrilla, matador, mosquito, tornado, vanilla, etc. From Greek, English "borrowed": alchemy, alcohol, algebra, arsenal, assassin, elixir, mosque, sugar, syrup, zero, cipher etc. From Hebrew is: amen, hallelujah, manna, messiah, seraph, leviathan, shibboleth, etc. There are many other words in the English dictionary that are taken from other languages. Many countries speak or use English, but not in the same way we use it. The article is very long and goes through phonology (sounds), morphology inflection (grammar forms of tense, case, voice, person, gender, etc), composition, syntax (sentence forms), vocabulary, orthography (spelling systems) of English. It also gives

Languages a world apart have a similar habit of borrowing elevated vocabulary from other languages. In 1066, because the ruling class spoke Old French, that set of vocabulary became synonymous with the elite. Everyone else used Old English. During this period, England's society was diglossic: one community, two language sets with distinct social spheres. Today, English-speakers pick and choose from the different word sets-Latinate (largely Old French borrowings) and Germanic (mostly Old English-derived words)-depending on the occasion. Although English is no longer in a diglossic relationship with another language, the Norman-era diglossia remains reflected in the way we choose and mix vocabulary. In informal chat, for example, we might go on to ask something, but in formal speech we'd proceed to inquire. There are hundreds of such pairs: match/correspond, mean/intend, see/perceive, speak/converse. Most of us choose one or the other without even thinking about the history behind the split. Germanic words are often described as earthier, simpler, and friendlier. Latinate vocabulary, on the other hand, is lofty and elite. It's amazing that nine hundred years later, the social and political structure of 12th-century England still affects how we think about and use English. The article also discusses a similar historical phenomenon in India, where much of southern India, just like Norman England, was diglossic between Sanskrit (an Indo-European language used ritually and formally by Hindu elites) and vernacular Dravidian languages. Today, that diglossia is gone, but Sanskrit-derived vocabulary still forms an upper crust, mostly pulled out for formal speech or writing.

Western literature exhibits a gradual progression from narratives that relate actions and events to stories that portray minds in all their meandering, many-layered, self-contradictory complexities. Perhaps people living in medieval societies were less preoccupied with the intricacies of other minds, simply because they didn't have to be. When people's choices were constrained and their actions could be predicted based on their social roles, there was less reason to be attuned to the mental states of others (or one's own, for that matter). The emergence of mind-focused literature may reflect the growing relevance of such attunement, as societies increasingly shed the rigid rules and roles that had imposed order on social interactions. But current psychological research hints at deeper implications. Literature certainly reflects the preoccupations of its time, but there is evidence that it may also reshape the minds of readers in unexpected ways. Stories that vault readers outside of their own lives and into characters' inner experiences may sharpen readers' general abilities to imagine the minds of others. If that's the case, the historical shift in literature from just-the-facts narration to the tracing of mental peregrinations may have had an unintended side effect: helping to train precisely the skills that people needed to function in societies that were becoming more socially complex and ambiguous.

Deaf people from Philadelphia have a noteworthy, distinctive regional accent in their signg language. When most people talk about a dialect in spoken languages, and in sign languages too, a lot of what they center on are lexical differences: differences in words. In ASL, there are many, many signs that have lexical differences. For example, the (Philadelphia) sign for hospital is exceptionally different from what standard ASL would be, and among other things. To the point where the signs are not able to be deciphered based on what they look like. The historical reason for the differences between Philadelphian sign language and standard ASL: the first school for the deaf was founded by a French teacher, and therefore Philadelphia sign is more akin to French signing than American signing.

Sound symbolism is a non-arbitrary relationship between speech sounds and meaning. We review evidence that, contrary to the traditional view in linguistics, sound symbolism is an important design feature of language, which affects online processing of language, and most importantly, language acquisition. We propose the sound symbolism bootstrapping hypothesis, claiming that (i) pre-verbal infants are sensitive to sound symbolism, due to a biologically endowed ability to map and integrate multi-modal input, (ii) sound symbolism helps infants gain referential insight for speech sounds, (iii) sound symbolism helps infants and toddlers associate speech sounds with their referents to establish a lexical representation and (iv) sound symbolism helps toddlers learn words by allowing them to focus on referents embedded in a complex scene, alleviating Quine's problem. We further explore the possibility that sound symbolism is deeply related to language evolution, drawing the parallel between historical development of language across generations and ontogenetic development within individuals. Finally, we suggest that sound symbolism bootstrapping is a part of a more general phenomenon of bootstrapping by means of iconic representations, drawing on similarities and close behavioural links between sound symbolism and speech-accompanying iconic gesture.

Previously, genetic analysis had indicated that the ancestors of Native Americans left Siberia to migrate across ancient Beringia (the strip of land that once connected Asia and what's now Alaska) about 25,000 years ago, but the earliest evidence of human habitation on North America dates to 15,000 years ago. With ice covering much of Alaska, the ancestors of Native Americans might've lived in Beringia for about 10,000 years before moving on. Now linguistic evidence may help support that theory. A pair of linguistics researchers, Mark Sicoli and Gary Holton, recently analyzed languages from North American Na-Dene family (traditionally spoken in Alaska, Canada and parts of the present-day U.S.) and the Asian Yeneseian family (spoken thousands of miles away, in central Siberia), using similarities and differences between the languages to construct a language family tree. As they note in an article published today in PLOS ONE, they found that the two language families are indeed related-and both appear to descend from an ancestral language that can be traced to the Beringia region. Both Siberia and North America, it seems, were settled by the descendants of a community that lived in Beringia for some time. In other words, Sicoli says, "this makes it look like Beringia wasn't simply a bridge, but actually a homeland-a refuge, where people could build a life."