It often makes sense that languages from the same family tree stay close to one another geographically. Slavic languages are tightly bound to Eastern (and parts of Central) Europe; Romance languages are mostly clustered around southern Europe and France, and even Niger-Congo languages, the largest language family tree in Africa, are glued together...
Affecting around 700 million people worldwide, dyslexia isn't unheard of, yet few educators are aware of how language can be learned more efficiently by dyslexic students. Particularly where systems are limited, dyslexic students are often left to their own devices at school and beyond.
Content note: This article contains some history of language suppression and can be upsetting for some
You may have experienced it at some point as a language learner, especially when socialising skills kick in like a wave at a late-night foreign language exchange event. You're suddenly making great strides in your Spanish conversations, and you're able to express just about everything that crosses your mind. You're an invincible hispanohablante,...
China's relationship with the English language is almost like none other. From uneasy beginnings to favouritism, and from favouritism back to rejection, the eastern power's love-hate dynamics with English in a short 200-year timeframe is coloured by its ever-shifting relationship with the world.
Apart from an intense green owl overly invested in your language studies, Duolingo's fame is also marked by its infinitely quirky sentences. The creativity levels of its content staff are wild and the sentences that learners are presented with are, more often than not, nonsensical. Picture these as sentences introduced to your linguistic...
'It's daunting to find the language so foreign, so distant, but also so thrilling. One is absolved of
Linguists must find the they/them idea remarkable. Just two single-syllable words with a slash, powerfully and consistently practised by the mass public, challenge age-old ideas of genders. Truly a demonstration of how simple language use can spark colossal movements.
It's a near-universal observation: European languages are largely similar to each other, yet no two types of Chinese are barely mutually intelligible. If we move the spotlight across the pond to South America, we can also see that the vast triangular land's wealth of languages - from Quechua on the broader west coast to Tupí-Guaraní in the south-...
In June 2022, a potpourri of emotions fueled an ongoing Twitter storm. Realbotix, a Californian AI company specialising in the creation of human-like robots, had just presented a brand new, 'world's first sex robot'. The lifeless blonde bombshell managed to have many eyebrows raised not much for her identity, but for a striking feature: her...
It is pretty much official for many applied linguists: bilingualism appears to defer the onset of Alzheimer's and other dementias. The reason for that? That task-switching between two languages sharpens one's executive function, which later contributes to cognitive reserve in old age.
Let's be brutally honest - the English aren't exactly known for their multilingualism. This, of course, isn't really a matter of aptitude, but rather it reflects the remnants of English nationalism over the centuries, coupled with a deficient foreign language education system in secondary schools. And despite the foreign language curriculum being...