Words R Us

A research paper done by Nancy G. Kutner and Donna Brogan, while both being professors at Emory University, on the slang usage of university students split between the gender binary: what sort of slang each gender uses, which gender uses slang more commonly, and the cause and effects of both.

This chapter of Oliveria's "A Nation Rising: Hawaiian Movements for Life, Land, and Sovereignty," talks about the cultural significance of the Hawaiian language and its revival in educational environments.

This paper written by Kamehameha School's Research & Evaluation division, explores the revival of 'Ōlelo Hawai'i, one of two official state languages of Hawai'i (alongside English). Authors Ng-Osorio and Ledward dive into the history of the Hawaiian language, it's decline and marginalization, as well as the efforts toward its revitalization.

"Stay Mentally and Socially Active" is an article in the Alzheimer's Association that researches further into the workings of AD and how to mitigate and slow some of the irreversible symptoms that comes with the disease. Through various mental activities and social ones, patients diagnosed with AD can grasp a better understanding of ways to reach out to the community and extend their memories for as long as possible.

This study researches how AI may be used as a tool in the learning environment. It describes how pedagogy may evolve with new technologies, thus allowing AI to personalize learning to the student based off of digital footprint.

This comprehensive talks about what AI is and where it came from, along with the basics of why it has gained so much success lately. It explores how we can go about trusting this new technology, both in terms of tailored online services like ChatGPT and in terms of bigger machinery such as smart homes, self-driving cars, and more.

This study explores the use of filler words through the lens of gender. Filler words are more commonly associated with women due to the "valley-girl" stereotype. However, these researchers found that, while filler words were used more frequently by women in the past, men use tend to use more filler words than women present-day. This paper discusses how the shift in gender roles and social dynamics between the genders contributes to speech patters.

Filler words ("um", "uh", "like", etc) play an important linguistic role in communication. This article explores explains the different types of filler words that exist, as well as the function that they serve in conversation. It also briefly touches on the use of filler words in different demographics.

From the Zippys.com website: Did you know that Hawaiʻi is the only US state to have two official state languages - English and Hawaiian ('Ōlelo Hawaiʻi)? The month of February is designated as "Mahina 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi" (Hawaiian language month) by the Hawaiʻi State legislature, various county councils around Hawaiʻi, and by other organizations. The purpose for the month is to celebrate and normalize the use of 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi in everyday life, as well as to perpetuate the Hawaiian culture. Zippy's is proud to celebrate all of the cultures in Hawai'i that make our home a special place in the world. For the month of February, Zippy's is supporting Mahina 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi Month by giving you an opportunity to learn a little bit of the language and to see what the Zippy's menu looks like in 'Ōlelo Hawaiʻi! Check out the Papa Kuhikuhi Mea`ai o ka Hale `Aina `o Zippy's in PDF form here. (Makemake `o Kumu Cowell i ka Pā Zip!)

Alzheimer's disease (AD) is being further studied as more and more Americans are getting diagnosed with this chronic disease. In this specific study, the researchers do a systematic review on how this disease affects speech and memory, and why a cure needs to be found in order to help the patient continue to communicate with language. This page was able to identify the main resources that can support the development of decision support systems for AD and help people grasp a better understanding on the importance of helping those with AD

There's evidence deaf Hawaiians had been communicating with a homegrown sign language for generations, predating the arrival of missionaries, sugar plantations and the Americans who would overthrow the Hawaiian Kingdom in 1893. But linguists didn't officially document the language until 2013, when research by the University of Hawaii found HSL to be a language isolate: born and bred on the Hawaiian Islands with no outside influence. More than 80 percent of its vocabulary bears no similarity to ASL. The findings launched a three-year project to document what remained of HSL, led by Lambrecht and linguistics professor James "Woody" Woodward, who has spent the last 30 years studying and documenting sign languages throughout Asia. By 2016, the team had built a video archive and developed a manuscript for an introductory HSL handbook and dictionary, featuring illustrations of Lambrecht demonstrating signs.

Hawaii Sign Language (HSL) was once believed to be similar to American Sign Language (ASL), used in the majority of deaf communities in the U.S. However, the work of Woodward and his team revealed they're not similar at all. In 2013, the language was recognized as its own distinct language. "Everything is different," Woodward says. "The vocabulary has less than 10% correlation to ASL, which is typical of languages that don't have a relationship to each other and were developed independently." HSL also uses much more body movement and facial expression than ASL.

The notion of a "gay lisp"-an offensive stereotype to many people-has been a confusing phenomenon for linguists. For decades, popular depictions of gay men have sometimes portrayed them pronouncing the letter "s" as more of a "th" sound-even though studies have failed to find "lispier" speech in gay men than in straight men. Now, however, preliminary data from a small study presented here last week at the biannual Meeting of the Acoustical Society of America (ASA) show that young boys who don't identify with their assigned gender use "th"-like pronunciation at slightly higher rates than their peers who do, although they seem to grow out of that tendency. The authors speculate that stereotypes of gay adults may be rooted in the speech of boys who go on to identify as gay.

Learning a second language is usually difficult and often when we speak it, we cannot disguise our origin or accent. However, there are important differences between individuals with regard to the degree to which a second language is mastered, even for people who have lived in a bilingual environment since childhood. Members of the Cognitive Neuroscience Research Group (GRNC) linked to the Barcelona Science Park, have studied these differences. By comparing people who are able to perceive a second language as if they were native speakers of that language with people who find it very difficult to do so, they have observed that the former group is also better at distinguishing the sounds of their own native language. The study results show that there is a positive correlation between specific speech discrimination abilities and the ability to learn a second language, which means that the individual ability to distinguish the specific phonemes of the language, both in the case of the mother tongue and in the case of other languages, is, without a doubt, a decisive factor in the learning process, and the ability to speak and master other languages."

The Times asked several couples to share how they navigate the heart-shaped expectations of their multilingual relationships. Here are the accounts of five couples, talking about their chosen language(s) of love and affection and the reasons behind why they communicate in those ways;

A coded lexicon mostly spoken by gay men, Swardspeak draws from English and Tagalog, as well as Spanish and, to a lesser extent, Japanese. It's what might be referred to as an "anti-language," the lingua franca of an "anti-society"-in this case, the Philippines' gay subculture.

The term 'eye dialect' was first coined in 1925 by George P. Krapp in The English Language in America (McArthur 1998). The term was used to describe the phenomenon of unconventional spelling used to reproduce colloquial usage. When one encounters such spellings "the convention violated is one of the eyes, and not of the ear". Furthermore, eye dialect would be used by writers "not to indicate a genuine difference in pronunciation, but the spelling is a friendly nudge to the reader, a knowing look which establishes a sympathetic sense of superiority between the author and reader as contrasted with the humble speaker of dialect". Mrs. Cowell's note: Contemporary writers of color now employ eye dialect to show disdain for the word that's misspelled, e.g. Cherokee writer Qwo-Li Driskill uses "AmeriKKKan" to underscore the racism and cultural genocide happening in a country that pays lip service to justice and equity.

Columbia University linguist John McWhorter opines on the impact AI translation might have on second language learning. We already know that Americans and UK folx are the most monolingual populations in the world; fewer than one in 100 American students currently become proficient in a language they learned in school. McWhorter argues that AI might offer utilitarian practicality for casual users, e.g. translating useful phrases on the fly while traveling: "With an iPhone handy and an appropriate app downloaded, foreign languages will no longer present most people with the barrier or challenge they once did." Yet McWhorter also says, "I don't think these tools will ever render learning foreign languages completely obsolete. Real conversation in the flowing nuances of casual speech cannot be rendered by a program, at least not in a way that would convey full humanity." He also suggests that genuinely acquiring a language will still beckon a few select people, e.g. those relocating to a new country, those who'd like to engage with literature or media in the original language, as well as those of us who find pleasure in mastering these new codes: that language learning will become "an artisanal pursuit" of sorts.

Written language is an imperfect method for the messy, complex business of communication, where facial expressions, gestures and vocal tones transmit oceans of meaning and subtext - for those, at least, who can read them. Words themselves offer none of that: In a famous study, Albert Mehrabian, a psychology professor at U.C.L.A., found that humans tend to perceive only a fragment of a speaker's meaning through spoken words. Instead, he observed, most meaning is gleaned from body language and tone of voice. In a text-only environment, how can we ever be certain other people understand what we mean when we post online? Enter tone indicators. Tone indicators are paralinguistic signifiers used at the ends of statements to help readers fill in the blanks. Put simply, they are written shorthand for the poster's intent and emotion. One might use "/srs," short for "serious," to express sincere affection for a pop culture crush.

That's because lol and lmao have evolved, and are now predominantly used as tone indicators, explains John Kelly, the Associate Director of Content and Education at Dictionary.com. As we increasingly spend our lives online and communicate largely through digital messages, the paralinguistic functions we use IRL to convey emotion, tone and nuance - i.e. body language, gesturing, facial expressions - gets lost in our texts, emails, Slack messages and tweets. So we have to rely on different things to do that, like emojis and text acronyms. So what are we trying to communicate when we sign off our text messages with a lol? It's not because we're literally laughing out loud; rather, we're using this lowly little acronym to try and soften the tone of our messages.