Language

For migrants who speak Mayan languages, a grassroots group of interpreters is often their only hope for receiving asylum.

Robert Harrison speaks to Werner Herzog about his devotion to books.

Ironic Capitals and strettttchedddd
out words have allowed us to communicate our feelings in writing like never before.

By one measure, Baidu's natural-language algorithm understands English better than any other.

How did a word once reserved for union bosses get co-opted by anybody with a viral tweet?

Question mark rules: is it ungrammatical to drop the question mark when texting?

The Tar Heel State is the intertidal zone of the linguistic South: Overwhelming forces wash in and out, but weird, fascinating little tide pools remain.

The Hawaiian language nearly went extinct. Now it's being taught in dozens of immersion schools.

Even if Baby Yoda lived with other Yoda-style speakers in the past, it's still doubtful that he would have typical Yoda syntax.

John Richards, one of the most ardent defenders of the correct use of the apostrophe, is giving up. We have to keep the cause alive.

"When I decided to binge watch several dozen spaghetti westerns, I didn't expect the dubbing to be one of the best parts. It was."

When it comes to English-speaking countries, the popular conception is that Smith is the most common last name, but is that conception really true?

Word clouds don't show the relations between the words, losing the context.

Stop defending "you guys," y'all. A sociolinguistics professor believes we're at an inflection point.

If someone asks you a question online or over text, do not respond with "OK." or "Yes." You might use "sure" or "yep" without punctuation; you should probably add an exclamation mark. Otherwise you might sound passive aggressive, dismissive, or angry. There's a good reason for this.

The British actress and the "Black Panther" star discuss the unique terms they use from their hometowns.

Hearing loss changes some people's ability to speak. This father tried to understand his deaf daughter without her use of American Sign Language.

The decipherment of Linear B, the earliest form of Greek, was a history changing achievement, but decoding the older Linear A would open a new window on the origins of European culture.

It's uncanny — and very unsettling.

Wouter Corduwener speaks many languages and bet random people €5 he could speak theirs. Here's how he did.

Scientists have tried contacting extraterrestrials with a number of bespoke linguistic systems. But we might be better off using our own languages.

A dialect coach sees if he can pick up cues to see who is faking their accent.

The hilariously dark dysfunctional family drama owes its success to its use of language.

You may think you're hearing Brooklynese, but scholars agree — there's no such thing.

Starting in the 1970s, "pardon my French" been an increasingly popular way to ask others to excuse your uncouth language.

We're ceding to corporations the building blocks of speech — and thought — itself.

I'm fascinated by the phenomenon of non-Chinese political candidates choosing Chinese names. I've collected names from the sublime to the ridiculous, and 2019 was no exception.

While English is not *the* hardest language to learn — that concept itself, that there is a most difficult language in the world, is faulty — there are definitely some quirks within the language that makes it tricky for foreign speakers.

The argument was that these characters could be spelled using the letters K, V and KS, respectively.

The use of typeface is not value-free, it generates its own meaning and
can transform that which it represents. To choose a typeface like the
italics, slant and bowed, is apparently to acknowledge subjugation and
erasure. But is that true?

A man travels deep into Mordovia to hear a very unique language.

What's going on? Do millennials have a thing for E.E. Cummings?

When did the word insinuate itself into our language?

The "Star Trek: The Next Generation" star explains how Patrick Stewart originally threw him for a loop on how to say "Data" and ended up forever changing American vernacular.

New language can become a useful tool for changing how people deal with each other.

People often complain that English is deteriorating under the influence of new technology, adolescent fads and loose grammar. Why does this nonsensical belief persist?

The word "sugar" is said to originate from the Sanskrit word "sarkara," and it's amazing how many different languages have words that are closely linked to it.

An actor gets a dialect coach and a lesson in pronunciation from Matt Damon.

A close look at a strangely global idiom about how little we understand each other.

An etymologist breaks down the complex histories of our favorite male sobriquets.

Karel Čapek's play "R.U.R." premiered in January 1921. Its influence cannot be overstated.

Welsh and other smaller language movements on Wikimedia projects suggest there may be ways to train technology to allow for cultural differences.

Letter-for-letter, no part of speech gets people more worked up than pronouns do. Linguistic history is dotted with eruptions of pronoun rage.

It was born into a time period of writerly experimentation and invention, a time when there were no punctuation rules, and readers created and discarded novel punctuation marks regularly.

That supposedly irresistible thing we call a "baby's first word" is a romanticized milestone, shaped by social and economic circumstances, and it is surprisingly recent.