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...
In this article, I argue how some aspects of English language requirements for international universities are problematic. Read all about it here: https://www.varsity.co.uk/opinion/23686
My TED talk - 'Could Different Languages Strengthen Our Cognitive Health in Different Ways?' - is officially on Youtube! I was not too satisfied with my on-stage delivery, unfortunately (there were some technical issues along with the fact that I slept only four hours the day before from being too excited). However, these things aside, I was still...
In an increasingly bilingual world, parents often occupy themselves with the age-old question of how to (effectively) raise a child to be bilingual. Beyond that, perhaps a more theoretically fundamental question to unpack is how infants come to differentiate between languages in the first place. What are the mechanisms that account for this...
The other day during my usual (though shamefully lengthy) scroll on Facebook, I came across a post on one of the language learning groups I am following. Someone posed a question on how to 'say cheese' in different languages, with a specific inquiry on what is said across different countries to 'force' smiles of those whose photos are being taken....
The history of female literacy tells disheartening, but sometimes intriguing stories. In the earlier chapters of human history, a common (yet not entirely universal) fate that women faced across cultures was the lack of opportunity to build literacy. The deprivation, however, did not appease women's rebellion- loud or quiet- had given birth to some...
In The Applied Linguist's first ever article in 'The Neuroscientist is In' series, we explore in depth the science behind early exposure to a second language, and crucially, whether earlier is necessarily better.
In current times, machine translation is key for intercultural communication, particularly in multimedia platforms. A common experience is that machine translation works well for typologically-related, lexically-syntactically similar language pairs (e.g. Norwegian to Swedish) but not so much in a typologically distant pair (e.g. English to...