Color. Simple, right? I am absolutely in love with a study about color terms that was done in 1969 by Brent Berlin and Paul Kay (link below). It blew my mind. Essentially, basic color terms are defined by a set of rules: In English, we have eleven color terms: black, white, gray, red, orange, yellow, […]

Picture a detective. Combing the crime scene. Checking surveillance footage. Analyzing word choice? Linguistics can be an invaluable tool for solving crimes. Examining a writer’s style may help narrow down suspects. Phonetic clues in phone calls can be used to identify a caller or analyze their true emotions. Even the famous (and fictional) Sherlock Holmes […]

Meme. Selfie. Vibe. Plant-based. Zoomer. GOAT. Ghost. Mic Drop. Binge-watch. These are all relatively new terms in the English lexicon, testament to the ever-changing nature of language and constant emergence of creative neologisms. Every January since 1990, the American Dialect Society crowns a Word of the Year at the annual meeting of the Linguistic Society […]

You’re traipsing through the Amazon, deep in the heart of South America. Suddenly, you stumble upon a tribe with a language unlike any other: Pirahã. Pirahã is truly one of the most fascinating languages. I reviewed articles from MIT News and The New Yorker (links below) to better understand the unique facets of the Pirahã […]

Conlanging is the process of making a constructed language, called conlang for short. Well-known examples of conlangs are Klingon, created by linguist Mark Okrand for the Star Trek movie franchise, and Quenya and Sindarin, created by J.R.R. Tolkien for his books about Middle-earth. But conlanging isn’t always for fiction or entertainment. Esperanto, the most widely […]

The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated February 21st as International Mother Language Day to highlight the importance of cultural and linguistic diversity. What is mother language? It is the language you learn first and use at home – also called mother tongue, native language, or first language. Research shows the easiest […]

“Some people say that less is more. But I think more is more.” – Dolly Parton. The Chinese language has been a passion of mine since I started learning it in seventh grade. It is a fascinating language and I want to look at one of its linguistic facets in particular: the Chinese writing system.  […]

Welcome to New York City!  NYC is known as a melting pot for people coming to the United States from different countries, bringing with them their language and culture to share with their new country. In the borough of Queens, more different languages are spoken per square mile than anywhere else in the world.  Sadly, […]

This Irish phrase means: “More Irish than the Irish themselves.” The saying is attributed to historian John Lynch who described the 12th century Norman invaders that had adopted the Irish language and culture, eventually appearing more Irish than the native-born population. In 2022, the census in Ireland showed that only 72,000 people speak Irish daily […]

The name’s Bond…Baby Bond. Your incredible brain can distinguish the speech sounds of seven thousand world languages. Whoops – I meant you had this international, globetrotting skill but it ended when you were six months old! Up until six months of age, infants with normal hearing can differentiate all the units of sound, called phonemes, […]

Knock knock. Who’s there? To. To who? Actually, it’s to whom. I loved knock-knock jokes as a kid. The linguistics of humor has been studied for a long time. It goes all the way back to Roman philosopher Cicero, who made a distinction between “de re” and “de dicto” humor, modernly known as “referential” (uses […]

Gricean Maxims may sound like the hero of an epic Greek myth, but in fact, the term refers to general rules (maxims) for conversation outlined by British philosopher Paul Grice. Important! One should avoid “flouting” or violating these rules: 1) Maxim of Quantity – Be Informative: This rule requires a delicate balance between saying everything […]

👋! Emojis may seem like a strange topic for linguistic analysis, but they have a lot to offer when studying languages. Emojis can exhibit the feature of human language called polysemy. Polysemy is when a word has multiple meanings, like play, bank, and run. The goat emoji 🐐 can represent a literal goat or the […]

Does language shape thought? One of the biggest questions linguists tackle is whether our languages affect how we experience the world. Let’s explore one side of the debate that agrees with the idea of language influencing thought, called the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis or Linguistic Relativity, or its stronger version that theorizes language determines thought, called strong […]

Then I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your theories down! Language shaping thought is hogwash! This is the argument made by linguist John McWhorter in his book The Language Hoax: Why the world looks the same in any language. It is counter to last week’s post on linguist Benjamin Whorf’s theories that language […]

What makes any mystery more interesting? Being unsolved for 600 years! A fifteenth century document known as the Voynich Manuscript has puzzled linguists, historians, and code breakers alike. Even after all this time, no one has been able to decipher the manuscript’s language (including famous mathematician Alan Turing and the FBI). As many now wonder, […]

Whale hello there! Did you know that sperm whales not only have a language, but they have an alphabet as well? It’s not exactly like the ABCs you learned in preschool though. Project CETI (Cetacean Translation Initiative) is a team of scientists, including linguists, that are determined to decode sperm whale communication. It began in […]

What do doggie, seedling, and booklet have in common? They are all diminutives, something that you probably use every day although you might not know what they were called. Diminutives are modified words that convey a sense of smallness, endearment, or even belittlement (e.g., sweetie, kiddo, tallish). It turns out diminutives are trendy. Why do […]

The fear of your mom sternly stating your full name in public is no longer a human-only experience. A new study published in June of 2024 has revealed that elephants appear to use different calls for each member of their family. It is still hard to tell what exact part of the elephant’s rumblings is […]

Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day? No, because a summer’s day is not going to learn about Shakespeare’s linguistic influence on the English language it’s most famous neologist. Neology is the use of a new word or expression, or of an established word in a new or different sense. I’ll be using some […]

I can’t find my doohickey. Have you seen my whatchamacallit? I need to give it to what’s-his-name.  When you temporarily can’t remember the word for something or someone, and you feel the word is just within reach, you are experiencing tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) phenomenon. Linguists also call this lethologica, in which speakers temporarily cannot retrieve a […]

Translation: Would you like some cake? Slang is one of the great parts of language because it helps create communities. Even with a shared language like English, there are dozens of terms unique to Brits, Scots, Australians, Americans and more. A recent article reveals that British slang is declining in use. For example, 60% of […]

“Crawl, Walk, Run” refers to the progression of physical development in children. We first must learn to crawl before we can walk and eventually run. It’s also widely used to describe any form of progression. Take playing chess as an example. You need to learn the game’s basic rules, like what each piece on the […]

The horse raced past the barn fell. Huh? If this sentence is confusing – you are not alone! This is a classic example of a “garden-path sentence,” one that is grammatically correct but leads you down the wrong “path” as you read it. The term “garden-path” refers to the saying “to be led down the […]

For Fall 2024, corporate grey is the new black according to the fashion world. This phrase appeared in the 1960s when Gloria Vanderbilt stated that, “pink is the new black” while traveling to India. You probably know this phrase, but you might not know it’s called a snowclone. The term snowclone came from a contest. […]

What do you call a person who speaks many languages? A polyglot. What do you call a person who speaks two languages? A bilingual. What do you call a person who speaks one language? An English speaker. Psycholinguists (not to be confused with psycho linguists) study how language is processed in the mind. They research […]

Just ask Marvel – everyone loves an origin story!  Linguists theorize that all the languages in the world originated from a single, prehistoric protolanguage. As people migrated across the globe, their spoken language changed and split creating new languages or branches. Today, over seven thousand languages are spoken worldwide and organized into about 430 language […]

My voice is hoarse this week!  I am acting in my school’s play and sound raspy. The phrase “my voice is hoarse” is an idiomatic expression but the saying “I have a frog in my throat” is called a calque. A calque is a “loan translation” or literal word-for-word translation from another language. In contrast, […]

Reduce, Reuse, Recycle. This is the language mantra for Icelandic.  Instead of adopting loanwords from other languages, Icelanders create new terms using existing words and roots. They even recycle Old Norse words no longer in use!  Here are some Icelandic neologisms for new technology terms:  Since “podcast” in a new concept, Icelanders created a new […]

Puzzler: The name of what widely spoken world language consists of four consecutive United States postal abbreviations?  To help you out – here are the fifty state abbreviations: AK AL AR AZ CA CO CT DE FL GA HI IA ID IL IN KS KY LA MA MD ME MI MN MO MS MT NC […]

We all know those “it” girls that seem to gather followers wherever they go. Among East African languages, Swahili is the queen bee. It’s even called the lingua franca of East Africa with a whopping 60-150 million estimated speakers. How did Swahili become so popular? It started in the 1960s when Swahili was used by […]

Who would guess that this spell, from Shakespeare’s play Macbeth, would help establish the legitimacy of a repressed language? When dictator Franco took over Spain in 1939, the Spanish language was enforced, and all other languages, including Basque, were forbidden. Translation is used to prove that all languages are equal, which is why exiled Basque […]

Pumpkin! Pirate! Witch! Ghost! If you grew up celebrating Halloween, you remember dressing up in a costume on October 31st to go trick-or-treating. Each year, costumed young children are instructed to ring a neighbor’s doorbell and say the phrase “Trick or treat.” What does trick-or-treating teach us about early language acquisition? Psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason […]

Bai, Bai, Zhi Hua (摆摆枝花) (Swing, swing, the flower branch) – Mandarin Chanda hai tu, mera suraj hai tu (You are the moon, you are my sun) – Hindi Durme, durme, ijiko de madre (Sleep, sleep, mother’s little one) – Ladino There are good reasons why lullabies can be found in languages worldwide. Not only […]

One of the ingenious ways the Mandarin language borrows words from other languages, called loanwords, is to create similarly sounding words that retain some of the meaning. The delicious coffee and chocolate dessert, Tiramisù, which comes from the Italian “tirami su,” meaning “pull me up” or “pick me up” in English, gets a creative transliteration […]

Geography has had a massive linguistic impact by affecting the spread or evolution of languages. Anthropological linguist Caleb Everett discovered a unique way geography could be a factor in phonetics. He analyzed the geographic location and phonology of 567 world languages. 92 of those languages use ejective non-pulmonic consonants, sounds made by pushing air from […]

Archaeologists might have discovered the world’s exciting gift tag. The 4,500-year-old clay cylinder “gift tag” was found in a Syrian tomb in 2004, but didn’t gain notoriety until now. Researchers believe they have deciphered the etching on it as the earliest example of alphabet writing. The tag spells out “silanu,” which they think could be […]