Morse code revolutionized global communication in the 1840s, but it posed a unique challenge for Chinese: how do you encode tens of thousands of characters using just dots and dashes designed for 26 letters? The ingenious solution was the Chinese telegraph code, developed in 1871.

The first grammatical description of Irish was published almost 900 years before the first grammar of Spanish!

The etymology of “February”

Did childcare fuel language? A recent book on the evolution of language makes the case that rearing our unusually underdeveloped young may account for how language evolved www.newscientist.com/article/mg26...

*Rez Ball* is a basketball drama film about a high school team in the Navajo Nation. This behind-the-scenes video features the cast and crew discussing their commitment to authentic Navajo language representation in the film. www.youtube.com/watch?v=xWV5...

What is baby talk, and why do parents use it in the first place? Does it really have a role to play in a child’s language acquisition, or is it nothing but useless cutesy word play?

The Linguistic Society of America (LSA) recently launched a new Resource Hub, offering “easy access to essential materials, professional development tools, teaching resources, and more”. It’s a large database of recordings and documents related to linguistics careers, scholarship, and teaching.

🍯 Honeyguide birds learn regional human dialects 🎭 People with personality disorders use language differently 📜 Decoding the lost scripts of the ancient world 👽 The linguistics of Na’vi, the language of James Cameron’s Avatar movies 📰 Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics!

Do Inuit languages really have hundreds of words for snow? ❄️ If so, does it even matter? A recent study uses data from 616 languages to claim that Inuit languages really do have disproportionately more words for snow than other languages.

Chants of Sennaar is *the* game for language lovers. The player explores an ancient structure based on the fabled Tower of Babel. Within the area, there are several different cultures that speak incredibly disparate languages and players need to figure out how to translate and understand them.

Why is “February” spelled with two ⟨r⟩’s? Hint: It’s not because English speakers originally pronounced it that way!

Scholars are digitally unrolling scrolls that were burnt to a crisp and compressed at Herculaneum during the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius. An entire library of these scrolls was discovered at a villa, which is an archaeological treasure trove. AI may finally allow us to read them.

The 2026 LingComm Grants are $300 grants for communicating linguistics to wider audiences in new and engaging ways.

Linguists have built databases of over 100,000 Arapaho sentences and 20,000 Arapaho words, representing data from almost 100 speakers, as part of an effort to document and revitalize the Arapaho language. www.popsci.com/science/ling...

🪦 Is the dictionary dead? Or merely changing? 👂🏼 Words affect us based on how they sound 🤖 How your brain understands language may be more like AI than we previously thought 🏳️‍🌈 Polari: The lost-and-found language of gay men ㊗️ Why Morse Code didn’t work for Chinese

World’s oldest alphabet discovered in Syria, predating other earliest-known alphabetic writing by 500 years www.scientificamerican.com/article/worl... www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/a... apple.news/Ae-SwCc8KQgC...

And by "later today" I of course meant "tomorrow" 🙃 January 27th, 1pm ET

If you’re a fellow LingCommer (linguistics communicator), you may be interested in a panel I’m participating in later today: “An author’s guide to public linguistics and publishing books”.

There’s a revolution happening in English, and the affixes are winning. They’re breaking free from their original words, declaring independence, and forming new allegiances. “-cation” no longer belongs to “vacation”. “-pocalypse” has abandoned “apocalypse”. “-flation” has defected from “inflation”.

The first-ever monolingual Irish dictionary has been published www.joe.ie/news/launch-...

Linguistic Discovery’s mission is to educate the public about the science and diversity of language. To me, that means focusing on how language works, and the principles and processes that shape language—cognitive linguistics, social dynamics, language change, etc.

🔤 World’s oldest alphabet discovered 🐝 Bees understand morse code 👍 One-third of grammatical universals stand up to rigorous testing 💳 How debt shaped the way we speak 📰 Here’s what happened this week in language and linguistics! (links below)

Should you be talking to your infant? Or is it pointless to talk to them until they’re older?

Why do some people pronounce the ⟨g⟩ in “longevity” twice? Learn all about the history of “longevity” and its pronunciation here: Website: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/longev... Substack: open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Paraguay is fighting to preserve Guarani, one of the country’s two official languages (Spanish being the other). www.independent.co.uk/news/paragua...

Why does Q always need a U? A quirky guide to the alphabet The letter A was once an ox’s head and O was an eye — you’ll never look at a keyboard the same way after reading Danny Bate’s fascinating linguistic history www.thetimes.com/culture/book...

Linguistic Discovery’s 2025 year in review, and what’s coming up in 2026! #linguistics #language #science

Two hundred years ago, the son of a saddler from a rural French village devised a groundbreaking tactile writing method of raised dots for blind people at the mere age of 15. Here’s the story of how Louis Braille created a writing system for the blind. www.nationalgeographic.com/history/arti...

Whenever someone asks me how many languages I speak I’m going to show them this graph:

Babies’ brains recognize foreign languages they heard before birth www.scientificamerican.com/article/babi...

A new linguistics podcast launched in September called Linguistics HQ! The podcast explores the science of language, from how languages are structured to how we can use our knowledge of linguistics to discover exciting things and even make our world a better place.

The International Linguistics Olympiad (IOL) is an annual international competition that brings together secondary school students and experts from various fields of linguistics.

What languages are you learning in the new year?

Researchers have now managed to ‘decode’ Mandarin Chinese from brain activity, a huge step forward for brain-computer interfaces because it is the first study to successfully do so with a tonal language. www.science.org/content/arti...

Me when someone asks me if studying linguistics means I know lots of languages:

A new theory puts parenting at the center of human evolution. Could the origin of language be traced to childcare? www.theatlantic.com/books/archiv...

For 50 years, a linguist recorded his great-great aunt speaking the Pomo language. Now he’s a Ph.D. student in linguistics working with those materials to help teach their language to new generations. news.berkeley.edu/2025/11/06/b...

23 boxes and a suitcase full of tapes: How a linguist’s lifelong work is shaping Indigenous language today Collections at UC Berkeley's California Language Archive help keep Indigenous languages alive. This is the story of one of them.

English is a language of other languages—and therein lies its magic. A new book explores the etymology of over 450 words.

The five countries of the Organization of Turkic States (OTS) have overcome years of disagreements about letters and diacritical marks to agree on a common Latin alphabet for their languages that consists of 34 letters.

In a first, AI models analyze language as well as a human expert If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities? www.quantamagazine.org/in-a-first-a...

The latest bonus episode of the @Lingthusiasm podcast interviews linguist Claire Bowern @chirila.bsky.social about the mysterious Voynich manuscript from the early 1400s, which contains an undeciphered (and perhaps undecipherable) script. www.patreon.com/posts/144558...

From “skibidi” to “brain rot,” the words dominating your child’s group chat might sound like nonsense—but linguists say there's more to these words than you might think. Here’s the psychology behind ‘6-7’ and ‘skibidi': www.madeformums.com/apple-news/t...

🗣️ Men speak with vocal fry just as much as women 🤖 Merriam-Webster chooses “slop” as the 2025 Word of the Year 🌟 Gaelic and Scots recognized as official languages in the UK 🇨🇦 Canada’s prime minister called out for using British spelling 🌐 Why people feel entitled to correct your grammar online

Slang terms like ‘six-seven’ have no definition. But they’re loaded with meaning Older generations are demanding explanations of the viral phrase—but slang doesn’t have to make logical sense. www.theguardian.com/commentisfre...

New words are good, actually www.thetimes.com/comment/colu...

This week I joined Jess Zafarris @jesszafarris.bsky.social on the Grammar Girl podcast @grammargirl.bsky.social to talk about the 2025 words of the year! We explain each of the words chosen by different organizations this year and give our reactions. Have a listen at the links! ⬇️

Canada’s Prime Minister called out for ‘utilizing’ British spelling This one’s a little funny to me, because Canada’s spelling conventions are an interesting mix of American and British conventions in the first place. www.bbc.com/news/article...

And if you want to learn more about all the words (over 30!) connected to “one” (for one million!) in English, here’s the place to go: Website: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/one/ Substack: open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Linguistic Discovery’s social media channels reached a combined total of 1 million followers this week! 🎉