Michael Erard has been covering language in major publications for a good long while. What has he learned, and what can linguistic communication take from his work? Michael sits down for a chat with…
How do children learn language, and why can't other animals? Why are false friends between languages always naughty? And how is public perception of language changing? Dr Karen Stollznow is taking us…
Emoji, once regarded as some kind of frivolous nonsense, have become an important way we communicate online. But how did these little pictures come to our devices? What is the Unicode Consortium, and…
Why don't we all sound the same? Are some accents easier to learn? And are there reasons for the differences in how people sound and sign, or is it just random? We use sound and sign to encode…
How does it feel to be isolated from a language and a culture that could have been yours? There are many paths to language loss, but there are also many ways back. Language revitalisation is now…
Translating Shakespeare takes a knowledge of language, culture, and poetry — both in English and in the target language. There are tradeoffs and pitfalls, but a skilled translator can bring…
The public has voted, and a winner has been decided! We're looking all the words chosen by the various dictionary bodies, and counting down our Words of the Week of the Year. And there's a very…
What was language like a year ago? Ten years ago? A hundred? What about before that? We're climbing into the Linguistic Time Machine and finding out. Along the way, we'll explain the resources that…
What is a woman? Or a man? Or a chair, or a sandwich? Or anything, really? "Gender critical" people are making language into a vector to attack the rights of trans people. They treat categories like…
We've got mail, and linguistic MVP Dr Nicole Holliday is here to help us sort some things out around here. And we chat about the state of lingcomm today. Why is dog sushi made FOR dogs, but duck sushi…
