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It may seem surprising, but in this age where geographic mobility and instant communication have increased our exposure to people outside of our neighborhoods or towns, American regional dialects are pulling further apart from each other, rather than moving closer together. And renowned linguist William Labov thinks there’s a connection between political and linguistic segregation. 
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Being bilingual makes you smarter and can have a profound effect on your brain.
Bilingüebabies's curator insight,
April 16, 2013 2:41 AM
I hope my children thank me, I wish my great grandparents knew this! 
Franchie Cappellini's comment,
January 24, 2014 6:14 AM
I had no idea the lasting effects of bilingualism! I also think its so interesting how the view of bilinguals has changed over the years. From this article I can clearly see the benefits of raising your kid bilingually—they are more adept and aware of their environment.
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You don’t have to be a language maven to find the direct object in a basic English-language sentence. Just look next to the verb.
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Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people's linguistic ability to interpret and accept words, according to a linguistics researcher.
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Last year, a report claiming to support the idea that the origin of language can be traced to West Africa appeared in Science. The article caused quite a stir.
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The likelihood that a man will match his language to that of a female conversation partner depends on how fertile she is, according to a study published Feb. 8 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.
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The linguist G. K. Zipf discovered that the frequencies of words in a language are distributed according to a power-law. They fall into an L-shaped curve with a tall spine containing a large number of rare words (like deliquesce, kankedort, and apotropaic) and a long tail containing a small number of extremely common ones (like the, be, and of). In any corpus of language, a small number of the most common words account for a large proportion of word tokens. The physicist and psychologist Lewis F. Richardson discovered that the frequencies of wars between 1815 and 1952 are distributed according to a power-law.
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In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.
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The way people copy each other's linguistic style reveals their pecking order.
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A new study of how compound word formation is influenced by subtle forms of linguistic pressure demonstrates that words which 'sound better' to the speakers of a language have a higher chance of being created, suggesting that, like biological...
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(PhysOrg.com) -- A computerized method for determining when prehistoric languages were spoken has been developed by an international group of scholars known as the ASJP (Automated Similarity Judgment Program) consortium.
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Over 50 years ago, he began a revolution that's still playing out today. Visit Discover Magazine to read this article and other exclusive science and technology news stories.
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In the hyperconnected Western world, our preoccupation with technology is evident in the glut of new expressions now in common parlance. Cringeworthy they may be, but expressions such as 'Let's take this offline, 'Do you have bandwidth?' and 'My brain needs a reboot' signify tech has become interwoven into our language. But is technology having a more lasting impact on our words? How are the digital communications tools we use shaping what we say and type? The birth of new words, and new meanings for existing words, are the most obvious signs of what technology has wrought in linguistic terms.
Blake Turnbull's curator insight,
April 8, 2013 9:57 PM
An interesting look at technology factors on language change including text-talk in the digital age and young people's technology driven language use. |
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With the scanned sortiment of scanned google books, "culturomics" managed to gain new mathematical knowledge about the history of words:
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Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.
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"This article gives us some insight into why, despite being regular clickers ourselves, many of us can’t help but hear African clicks as noise-like when they’re used in words where we expect consonants to be. Our brains have plenty of experience in hearing clicks—just not in that particular role. It may also explain why speakers of click languages are bemused by our inability to hear them as plain old consonants."
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From
io9
Last April, a linguistic study likened the spread of the sounds of language to the human gene pool, and used this information to suggest language arose once in Africa 10000 years ago.
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From
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The way people discuss the future varies from language to language. Some have a well-defined future tense, while others distinguish much between present and future. But does this point of grammar actually affect how we see the world?
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Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in Anthropology at Stanford, and his longtime collaborator Murray Gell-Mann, a founder and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe Institute, have mapped the evolution of word order in a paper titled "The Origin and Evolution of Word Order," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious -- as a way for individuals to exchange information -- linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years.
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The study of linguistics is not a laughing matter -- unless you happen to have Stan Dubinsky as your professor.
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Graph Words is a free visualization tool to explore English dictionary and thesaurus, helps you to search the meaning of words and other associated words. Via Joao Brogueira
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We tend to associate certain vowel sounds like "E"s and "I"s with light objects while "O"s and "U"s suggest heavier things. Could there be some evolutionary reason for this?
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A team of Cambridge linguists has embarked on an ambitious project to identify how the languages of the world are built – from Inuit Yupik to sub-Saharan Bantu, from Navajo to Nepalese.
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Languages, like genes, can tell evolutionary tales...
Now a small contingent of researchers, many of them evolutionary biologists who typically have nothing to do with linguistics, are looking at language from in front of their computers, using mathematical techniques imported from the study of DNA to wring scenarios of language evolution out of huge amounts of comparative speech data.
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