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This article is about the Icelandic language, which is seen as a source of identity and pride, is being damaged by the widespread use of English. Former president of Iceland, Vigdis Finnbogadottir, is worried that the Icelandic language will end up in the "Latin bin".

There is no such thing as "just language." Anne Curzan, associate dean of humanities and Arthur F. Thurnau professor of English at the University of Michigan, uses her knowledge of linguistics to discuss the social power language holds. Curzan is the author of "Gender Shifts in the History of English" and is the subject of a 36-lecture series titled "The Secret Life of Words." In Curzan's lecture, "Politically Correct: Do Our Language Choices Matter?," she discusses everything from sexist language to preferred pronouns in order to dispel the stigma against politically correct speaking. She spoke to students in the Memorial Union Thursday evening. "It is never just language," Curzan said. "As soon as anyone says it's just language, it's because they don't want to deal with the real issue."

R.I.P. to the understatement. Welcome to death by Internet hyperbole, the latest example of the overly dramatic, forcibly emotive, truncated, simplistic and frequently absurd ways chosen to express emotion in the Internet age (or sometimes feign it). The trend toward hyperbole appears to echo a broader belief among experts that young women are its first adopters. One explanation for the use of hyperbole (OMG!) With the increase in digital, vs. face to face communication, we must come up with increasingly creative ways to express tone and emphasis when facial cues are not an option. There's a performative element to our social media interactions, too: We are expressing things with an audience in mind. Tyler Schnoebelen, a linguist and founder of Idibon, a company that uses computer data to analyze language, notes "Performance generally requires the performer to be interesting. So do likes, comments and reshares. Exaggeration is one way to do that."

The British Broadcasting System (BBC) World Service recently began producing digital news content in Naijá (Nigerian Pidgin). Though Naijá originated as a pidgin, trade communication between Portuguese and English speakers and natives of the Niger Delta, linguistically-speaking, its modern incarnation is actually a creole exhibiting systematic grammar and syntax. The service will bring language diversity to the news and current affairs that West and Central Africa audiences receive, where Pidgin is one of the most widely-spoken languages. The decision to make the service digital only was based on the fact that African people prefer to read content on their mobile phones. Itʻs also interesting to note the transformation of Pidgin, once solely an oral language, into standardized text-based language.

The brain interprets irony or sarcasm conveyed by an emoji in the same way that sarcasm is conveyed verbally, according to a new report from researchers at the linguistics department of the University of Illinois Researchers measured brain activity of native English-speaking college students reading sentences using various emoji at the end. They read sentences with positive, negative or ironic emoji at the end.

Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child." People use an array of strategies to make sense of confusing statements. This article reveals the different strategies brains use to create a correct sentence based on semantic expectations.

Hearing is important for humans to understand the world around them and it lies in our nature to want to describe what we hear. To do this, we frequently make use of onomatopoeias. But what exactly is an onomatopoeia? It is 'the formation of a word from a sound associated with what is named'. This blog post offers a cross-linguistic peek at onomatopoeia.

Learning English as a second language is far from uncommon around the world. Looking more specifically, what is it like learning English as a Chinese first language individual. This paper covers three main topics: 1. The differences between the Chinese and English languages 2. The differences between Chinese and American culture 3. The differences between Chinese and American educational practices When teaching English as a second language, it is important to know the what fits the students particular needs in learning and how your teaching will be most effective. This paper allows teachers to understand more about their Chinese students and their general linguistic and cultural background.

British researchers say they have found 23 words that have persisted for a staggering 15,000 years. These "ultraconserved words" include some that you might expect (you, me, mother, man), others you might not (spit, worm, bark), and at least one somewhat heartwarming entry (give). Over the centuries, the words have retained the same meaning and almost the same sound. The team claims that's because they all come from an ancient "mother tongue" that was used toward the end of the last ice age, the Guardian reports. They assert that the ancient language eventually formed seven language families, which in turn formed the 700 modern languages used by more than half of the planet today. To find the ultraconserved words, linguists looked for cognates-words that have similar meanings and sounds in different languages, like "father" (padre, pere, pater, pitar)-shared by all seven of the aforementioned language families. They then translated the cognates into what they believed the cognates' ancestral words (known as proto-words) would be, then compared those. They ultimately found 23 that were shared by at least four of the language families, including one (thou) that was shared by all seven. Here are all 23 "ultraconserved words", listed by the number of language families in which they have cognates. 7 - thou 6 - I 5 - not, that, we, to give, who 4 - this, what, man/male, ye, old, mother, to hear, hand, fire ,to pull, black, to flow, bark, ashes, to spit, worm

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.

Sarah Thomason, linguistics professor, estimates that by 2100, only 700 of the world's 7,000 languages will remain. Although this isn't a full article and mainly an advertisement for her lecture on this same subject, it will most likely be possible to find a full recording online after the event!

Some linguists estimate that roughly half of the world's 7,000 or so languages are on the verge of extinction. The UK-based startup Tribalingual is trying to prevent those types of sociolinguistic losses, offering classes that connect students with some of the few remaining speakers of endangered languages.

Priming is a linguistic and psychological concept where a "prime" idea (word, image, etc.) is presented before a "target". The prime might influence what a viewer thinks of the target. Psychological studies use priming in tests such as a completion or lexical decision task in order to test other phenomenon. Priming is also a strategy used in marketing. Advertisers use priming to get you see appeal in their product. Perhaps this is in the form of a commercial where statistics of the product vs other companies' products is shown to enhance their own product. This can also be as simple as playing moody music in a restaurant before you sit down!

This research article was published to the Journal of Experimental Psychology, but this experiment did include linguistics. The experiments purpose was to see if more engaged working memory could quickly determine whether a word was really a word, thus the effect of the working memory on semantic meaning. They found that a high working memory load impaired the prime and task efficiency.

This article explains a study which proved that we tend to over estimate our pronunciation skills when learning a foreign language. It explains how our familiarity with our own accent impacts how we perceive our pronunciation. Finally, the article theorizes about how our perception of our own pronunciation can lead to "fossilization".

This article talks about the difficulty of learning new languages at a certain age. It explains how there are different beliefs as to when it becomes difficult for us to become fluent in a second language. Some scientist say the age of 10 is when our ability to learn drops, others say 17-18. This is still an undiscovered mystery in the linguist world.

Some people seem to pick up a second language with relative ease, while others have a much more difficult time. Now, a new study suggests that learning to understand and read a second language may be driven, at least in part, by our ability to pick up on statistical regularities. Some research suggests that learning a second language draws on capacities that are language-specific, while other research suggests that it reflects a more general capacity for learning patterns. According to psychological scientist and lead researcher Ram Frost of Hebrew University, the data from the new study clearly point to the latter: "These new results suggest that learning a second language is determined to a large extent by an individual ability that is not at all linguistic," says Frost. In the study, Frost and colleagues used three different tasks to measure how well American students in an overseas program picked up on the structure of words and sounds in Hebrew. The students were tested once in the first semester and again in the second semester. The students also completed a task that measured their ability to pick up on statistical patterns in visual stimuli. The participants watched a stream of complex shapes that were presented one at a time. Unbeknownst to the participants, the 24 shapes were organized into 8 triplets -- the order of the triplets was randomized, though the shapes within each triplet always appeared in the same sequence. After viewing the stream of shapes, the students were tested to see whether they implicitly picked up the statistical regularities of the shape sequences.

With police brutality recently becoming a prominent topic in the political world, linguists are trying to find the link between police language used during these incidents and the incidents themselves. In the study, they analyzed police scanner transcripts and examined police communication ramifications. The goal of this ongoing study is to infer what the police officer is thinking and assuming at the time of the incident.

An unreleased study tracked infants', a group with autistic older siblings and another without, gaze when shown a video of an adult speaking while surrounded by toys. The two groups had similar times in watching the screen and mouth and face of the actor as a whole. But it was shown that the younger siblings may not internalize the linguistic clues that help babies learn language.

This article talks about different dialects in America and how American dialects are continuing to diverge, primarily with their vowel sounds. In particular, cities in the Great Lakes have been observed as revolutionizing the sound of English. Linguists have observed what's called a "chain shift," where by changing one sound, such as the short "a" sound, would have an effect in changing multiple sounds and therefore altering the Northern Cities dialects. This article goes on to outline the history behind these changes, the unawareness factor people from these cities experience, the racial aspect of how this dialect is diverging, and other points.