Words R Us

This author of this article explains that using filler words like, 'like,' can actually be a sign of intelligence

This article talks about how certain sounds in names can affect the way some names can be interepreted.

This article discusses how bilingualism and multilingualism affect how a person dreams. It discusses the reason why a person might dream in one language and not the other.

This was a study looking at the use of elderspeak in a referential communication task. The study was used to determine if young adults paired with older adults, who stimulated dementia or acted normally, would change their fluency, prosody, grammatical complexity, semantic content, or discourse.

How does your phone affect your attention span? This article looks at how younger generations have a shorter attention span because of our constant use of phones. Also has a few tips for improving attention and focus.

Interesting article looking at cell use in college classes and the impacts that has on learning.

In fear of being left behind, China wanted to modernize their language to keep up with the rest of the world. This article considers how the political climate and technological advancements impacted the modernization and simplification of characters and phonetic writing of the pronunciation.

Homophones are words that sound the same but have different meanings. This article explains what homophones are in the Chinese language, how it impacts Chinese culture, and provides examples.

Exploring the difference and similarities between Language and Music, this article explores how some things are similar, such as local variants of music (creoles in a way), and how some things are different, such as the ecological functions in human life.

Across societies, music can be found in tandem with infant care, healing, dance, and love (among many others, like mourning, warfare, processions, and ritual), as found in 315 societies and 118 songs from 86 cultures, coming from 30 geographic regions.

Due to the increase in language-learning technology, learners of second languages can get exposure to the new language that weren't possible before, making it easier to learn a new language.

New research on language acquisition in babies leads scientists to believe that babies map sounds and critical aspects of their language before they begin speaking.

Prairie dogs have different alarm calls for different predators and can also indicate the size, color, speed, etc of the predator. In fact, it was found that the animals could combine and restructure their calls to describe things they hadn't seen before. This was found by having different breeds of dog (a golden retriever, a husky, a Dalmatian, a cocker spaniel) wander through the prairie dog territory one at a time and recording the resulting alarm calls; the calls highly varied even though the 'predator' was of the same predator class. They also showed different calls when researchers wearing different colored shirts walked through the territory (the same for different heights and walking speeds).

While this video has been posted here on the Diigo page before, the bookmark is from 2011 and has very few relevant tags. This short film has many different voices from our community, and it provides the most authentic sounding pidgin that I've been able to find on Youtube, as it shows ordinary people just talking and expressing their relationship with the language, and as it is not performative. I personally discovered it when trying to explain pidgin to a friend from the mainland, and it seems to be a very good tool for providing a solid foundation of understanding about pidgin. Notable speakers within the video include linguist Kent Sakoda, who discusses the formation of pidgins as a whole, the formation of HCE as a result of plantations here in Hawaii, the formation of a few particular common phrases that arose as a combination of various languages, and how HCE is something that binds people together as a community here in Hawaii as well as Pastor Earl Morihara, who speaks on the importance of pidgin to him in a personal sense, elaborating that it's "da language of my heart," and that it comes naturally to him when speaking with others in the Hawaii community.

This is a Hawaii News Now article and video talking about a translation of the Bible into Hawaii Creole English (pidgin), and the audiovisual translation project that arose in conjunction with it. In it, the speakers touch on how pidgin is "one language of da heart," and how messages given in Standard American English won't resonate in the same way that the same messages in pidgin would, which reflects the importance of one's L1 in communication and understanding, particularly in an emotional sense.

This was a research study conducted about vaccine rhetoric with participants that spoke different languages. The researchers found that depending on whether the participant viewed a foreign language as more trustworthy, they might be more inclined to follow the advice of that language over their own language. The opposite is also true if they find their first language more trustworthy and persuasive.