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Great find, Kai!

Republicans and Democrats are easily distinguishable through one minute speeches by their vocabulary and phrase use.

This website, five years in the making, documents humorous uses of Chinglish: spoken or written English that reflects L1= Chinese influence. Radtke's collection of signage has been documented in two books: _Chinglish: Found in Translation_ and _More Chinglish: Speaking in Tongues_. Thanks to Kayla LaRieu for sharing!

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.

The Stanford Literary Lab is a research collective that applies computational criticism, in all its forms, to the study of literature. Check out their pamphlets to read more about their various literary projects, including "The Emotions of London", "The Language of World Bank Reports."

'By studying language in people with aphasia, we can try to accomplish two goals at once: we can improve our clinical understanding of aphasia and get new insights into how language is organized in the mind and brain,' said Daniel Mirman, Professor of Psychology at Drexel University. Mirman is lead author of a new study which examined data from 99 people who had persistent language impairments after a left-hemisphere stroke. In the first part of the study, the researchers collected 17 measures of cognitive and language performance and used a statistical technique to find the common elements that underlie performance on multiple measures. Researchers found that spoken language impairments vary along four dimensions or factors: 1. Semantic Recognition: difficulty recognizing the meaning or relationship of concepts, such as matching related pictures or matching words to associated pictures. 2. Speech Recognition: difficulty with fine-grained speech perception, such as telling "ba" and "da" apart or determining whether two words rhyme. 3. Speech Production: difficulty planning and executing speech actions, such as repeating real and made-up words or the tendency to make speech errors like saying "girappe" for "giraffe." 4. Semantic Errors: making semantic speech errors, such as saying "zebra" instead of "giraffe," regardless of performance on other tasks that involved processing meaning. In the second part of the study, researchers mapped the areas of the brain associated with each of the four dimensions identified above.

Researchers from King's College London Institute of Psychiatry, in collaboration with Bellvitge Biomedical Research Institute (IDIBELL) and the University of Barcelona, mapped the neural pathways involved in word learning among humans. They found that the arcuate fasciculus, a collection of nerve fibres connecting auditory regions at the temporal lobe with the motor area located at the frontal lobe in the left hemisphere of the brain, allows the 'sound' of a word to be connected to the regions responsible for its articulation. Differences in the development of these auditory-motor connections may explain differences in people's ability to learn words. Researchers used diffusion tensor imaging to image the structure of the brain before a word learning task and functional MRI, to detect the regions in the brain that were most active during the task. They found a strong relationship between the ability to remember words and the structure of arcuate fasciculus, which connects two brain areas: the territory of Wernicke, related to auditory language decoding, and Broca's area, which coordinates the movements associated with speech and the language processing. In participants able to learn words more successfully their arcuate fasciculus was more myelinated i.e. the nervous tissue facilitated faster conduction of the electrical signal. In addition the activity between the two regions was more co-ordinated in these participants. Dr Catani concludes, "Now we understand that this is how we learn new words, our concern is that children will have less vocabulary as much of their interaction is via screen, text and email rather than using their external prosthetic memory. This research reinforces the need for us to maintain the oral tradition of talking to our children."

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.

Words formed from a sound and intended to imitate that sound-what linguists refer to as onomatopoeia-fluctuate around the world even when the underlying sound is roughly the same in each place. And the thing about it is, we don't really understand why this fluctuation occurs. It has something to do with the alchemy of humans in different times and places striving to mimic noises in the world around them, and to incorporate this mimicry into distinct linguistic systems and cultural contexts. Some have hypothesized over the years that language originated with the imitation of natural sounds-a notion sometimes referred to as the "bow-wow theory." But whatever the answer to this question, onomatopoeia explains only a sliver of the words we use. The article goes on to share some fun collections of onomatopoeia.

In this study, researchers analyzed 700 million words, phrases, and topic instances collected from the Facebook messages of 75,000 volunteers, who also took standard personality tests, and found striking variations in language with personality, gender, and age. Articles (a, an, the) are highly predictive of males, being older, and openness. As a content-related language variable, the anger category also proved highly predictive for males as well as younger individuals. Females used more emotion words [(e.g., 'excited'), and first-person singular, and mention more psychological and social processes (e.g., 'love you' and ) for 23 to 29 year olds.

describes techniques that memory-athletes use

This article talks about the different arguments for the linguistic status of hashtags. One of the arguments is that they are like compound words. Compound words are words that are a combination of two existing words which were formed into one word (ex. notebook, living room or long-term). Another suggestion is that hashtagging is a less formal and completely new process of forming words. It suggests that there are no rules in hashtagging other than that there can be no spaces in between the parts. The authors argue that their research goes against both arguments by saying that they shouldn't be considered as words at all, but that they are still very interesting linguistically because they function in many different roles in language use on social media.

This article argues that hashtags are artificial words based on their research of a collection of millions of New Zealand English tweets. Hashtags are a widespread feature of social media posts and used widely in search engines. Anything with the intent of attracting attention comes with a memorable hashtag like #BlackLivesMatter, #MeToo, and #COVID19. There are two main theories regarding the linguistic status of hashtags. One claims hashbrowns are like compound words. This is a way of making new words by gluing two or more words together. Another claims that hashtags are words that arise from a completely different process. Hashtagging is a much looser word-formation process with fewer restrictions. However, these researchers argue against both these conjectures. They suggest hashtags are written to look orthographically like words but their function is much broader and similar to keywords in a library catalogue or search engine. The researchers also created their own term, hybrid hashtags, meaning hashtags comprising one or more words from two distinct languages. Their example of hybrid hashtags included #kiaora4that and #letssharegoodtereostories which combined English and Maori, the indigenous language of New Zealand.

Lera Boroditsky, then an assistant professor of psychology, neuroscience, and symbolic systems at Stanford University at the time of this article, looks at how the languages we speak shape the way we think. Boroditsky's research data, collected from around the world, suggeststhat people who speak different languages do indeed think differently and that even flukes of grammar can profoundly affect how we see the world. Language is a uniquely human gift, central to our experience of being human. Appreciating its role in constructing our mental lives brings us one step closer to understanding the very nature of humanity. Boroditsky argues that patterns in a language can indeed play a causal role in constructing how we think - that learning a new language isn't simply learning a new way of talking, but a new way of thinking. Languages shape the way we think about space, time, colors, and objects. Other studies have found effects of language on how people construe events, reason about causality, keep track of number, understand material substance, perceive and experience emotion, reason about other people's minds, choose to take risks, and even in the way they choose professions and spouses. Taken together, these results show that linguistic processes are pervasive in most fundamental domains of thought, unconsciously shaping us from the nuts and bolts of cognition and perception to our loftiest abstract notions and major life decisions. Language is central to our experience of being human, and the languages we speak profoundly shape the way we think, the way we see the world, the way we live our lives.

English as She Is Spoke is a charming 19th century (1884) phrasebook created by a Portuguese gentleman, Pedro Carolino, who only wanted to help teach the English language to his peers, but instead created a literary disaster that became a linguistic phenomenon. Check out the digital scan of the book here: https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/english-as-she-is-spoke-1884

The urge to converse with animals is age-old, long predating the time when smartphones became our best friends. A new app, is the product of a growing interest in enlisting additional intelligences - machine-learning algorithms - to decode animal communication. The app detects and analyzes cat utterances in real-time, assigning each one a broadly defined "intent," such as happy, resting, hunting or "mating call." It then displays a conversational, plain English "translation" of whatever intent it detects. MeowTalk uses the sounds it collects to refine its algorithms and improve its performance, the founders said, and pet owners can provide in-the-moment feedback if the app gets it wrong. In 2021, MeowTalk researchers reported that the software could distinguish among nine intents with 90 percent accuracy overall. But the app was better at identifying some than others, not infrequently confusing "happy" and "pain," according to the results. Dogs could soon have their own day. Zoolingua, a start-up based in Arizona, is hoping to create an A.I.-powered dog translator that will analyze canine vocalizations and body language. Still, even sophisticated algorithms may miss critical real-world context and cues, said Alexandra Horowitz, an expert on dog cognition at Barnard College. For instance, much of canine behavior is driven by scent. "How is that going to be translated, when we don't know the extent of it ourselves?" Dr. Horowitz said in an email.

I found this article on writing survey questions really helpful. Definitely worth a read if you're planning to use survey instrumentation as part of your research data collection process. Badly-written questions can skew data, cause confusion, and bias respondents. The number of questions, how choices are ordered, and the demographics of who you're surveying can also affect the information that you gather.

An important area of the field of second/foreign language teaching and learning is pragmatics -- the appropriate use of language in conducting speech acts such as apologizing, requesting, complimenting, refusing, thanking. Meaning is not just encoded in word semantics alone, but is affected by the situation, the speaker and the listener.A speech act is, according to linguist Kent Bach, "the performance of several acts at once, distinguished by different aspects of the speaker's intention: there is the act of saying something, what one does in saying it, such as requesting or promising, and how one is trying to affect one's audience". Speech acts can be broken down into 3 levels: 1. locutionary: saying something 2. illocutionary: the speaker's intent in performing the act. For example, if the locutionary act in an interaction is the question "Is there any salt?" the implied illocutionary request is "Can someone pass the salt to me?"; 3. In some instances, there's a third perlocutionary level: the act's effect on the feelings, thoughts or actions of either the speaker or the listener, e.g., inspiring, persuading or deterring. The Center for Advanced Research on Language Acquisition (CARLA) at University of Minnesota provides a collection of descriptions of speech acts, as revealed through empirical research. The material is designed to help language teachers and advanced learners to be more aware of the sociocultural use of the language they are teaching or learning. These speech acts include: Apologies Complaints Compliments/Responses Greetings Invitations Refusals Requests Thanks

With topics ranging from slang etymology to how slang affects a culture. "Slang is a reaction to standard language. To have slang, I think you need to have a tradition of education to emphasize the importance of the standard language. You also need to have a stratified society with a certain amount of mobility in it, so very different kinds of people have opportunities to mingle. Finally, I think you have to have an established cultural tendency toward irreverence. You have to have the standard and at the same time a popular skepticism about it."

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.