Which are the most spoken languages in the United Kingdom? There’s more linguistic diversity in the country than you might think! www.babbel.com/en/magazine/...

It might sound counterintuitive, but this article argues that we shouldn’t let ancient languages die—they illuminate our own blind spots. unherd.com/2025/01/dont...

“Learning to read in a foreign language has taught me to embrace ambiguity” www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Millennial or older? Here’s the slang that define Gens Z and Alpha www.scmp.com/lifestyle/ar...

Smart dogs have a humanlike knack for naming new objects In games with toys, “gifted” dogs can extend names to new objects with the same purpose as known ones www.science.org/content/arti...

Neanderthals had their own language—but was it like ours? And could our linguistic differences have led to their extinction?

Until recently, it was largely assumed within linguistics that the primary driver of language change is new generations of speakers: As children learn their first language, the meanings and grammatical structures they settle on are inevitably slightly different from that of their parents.

I think it’s helpful to know how to pronounce written words in other major languages, even if you don’t speak the language. So here’s a guide to the German alphabet from the @Duolingo blog: blog.duolingo.com/german-alpha...

How speaking in a second language directly affects your moral judgement “Ιf you asked a multilingual friend which language they find more emotional, the answer would usually be their mother tongue—the one they used while growing up and probably still use at home. [...]

The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages Vaughn Smith speaks 8 languages fluently and another 25 to varying degrees of proficiency. Of the 37 total, he can carry on length conversations in 24 of them. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/int...

Just added another podcast to the Big List of Podcasts on Linguistics! “Butter No Parsnips” @butternoparsnips.bsky.social is a weekly podcast that takes you on an adventure through the weird, wacky, wonderful, and sometimes wicked history of one wayside word.

Chicago’s hidden etymologies, from @etymologynerd.bsky.social Adam doesn’t mention it in the infographic, but the word “Chicago” may be distantly related to the word “skunk”, both coming from an Algonquian root meaning ‘smell bad’.

Here’s an older but fun book all about the philosophy, motivation, and mindset behind conlanging (inventing languages) Amazon: amzn.to/4k308uD Bookshop: bookshop.org/a/110785/978...

How the sounds of various Indo-European languages correspond with one another, from “The American heritage dictionary of Indo-European roots”

**Grammatical mood** is a category indicated on verbs that expresses a speaker’s *attitude* toward what they are saying, like whether it’s a statement of face, a desire, a command, etc.

Deaf quarterback Paul Hubbard called for his football team at Gallaudet University to circle around him in 1894, inventing the huddle and changing sports forever. www.smithsonianmag.com/innovation/d... #football #sports #Deaf #SignLanguage #linguistics #language #huddle

There are around 80 indigenous languages spoken or once spoken in what is today the state of California, comprising 20 different language families. Prior to colonialization, California was one of the most linguistically diverse places on earth.

Have you ever wanted to learn one of the ancient Indo-European languages, like Hittite, Sanskrit, Gothic, Old Norse, Tocharian, or Old English? Early Indo-European Online has free courses on all the well-studied ancient Indo-European languages. lrc.la.utexas.edu/eieol

Is American Sign Language (ASL) actually its own language? Yes—here’s why: indepthnh.org/2025/07/16/s...

Do kids in poor families really hear 30 million fewer words by age 4? A 1995 study claimed that young children in higher socioeconomic status homes hear up to 30 million more words by age 4 than those in lower socioeconomic status households.

Did you know you can play Wordle in the International Phonetic Alphabet? It’s called Heardle! Instead of guessing words using their spelling, you have to guess them using their pronunciations! joshuamandel.com/heardle/ #Wordle #phonetics #linguistics #language #pronunciation

Would it be better to learn new languages like a child does? Maybe not! Adults have all sorts of metacognitive and explicit learning abilities they can bring to bear on the task of language learning that children do not. Moreover, children have a great deal more neural plasticity than adults do.

Here’s a neat book a friend pointed out to me last year: “Water, whiskey, and vodka: A story of Slavic languages”

Tocharian is a branch of Indo-European languages whose speakers trekked all the way to northwest CHINA thousands of years ago and were still in the area until the 700s CE.

Speakers of endangered languages are finding creative ways of using AI to help revitalize their languages.

Can brain structure alone explain why we have language? How human languages came to exist is an unsolved mystery within science mindmatters.ai/2024/11/can-...

Darius the Great was inventing an entire writing system for Old Persian and sticking it on a giant monument right around the same time the early Romans were learning about this thing called “writing” from the Greeks

When did “American English” emerge? Did linguistic independence from Britain appear before political independence? www.iflscience.com/when-did-ame...

What’s the difference between verb tense and verb aspect? indepthnh.org/2024/07/01/s...

A *language family* is a group of related languages that descend from a common ancestor. There are about 400 language families in the world, including language isolates. Here’s a big list! en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...

What invented languages can tell us about human language www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/lang...

Could Neanderthals speak? It depends on who you talk to mindmatters.ai/2024/05/coul...

What’s your favorite grammatical aspect? While grammatical *tense* has to do with *when* in time an action happens, grammatical *aspect* is about *how* in time an action happens: Does the event extend over a period of time or just happen once? Is the event repeated/habitual? etc.

Why do some slang words come and go quickly while others have staying power? Linguists explain www.upworthy.com/linguists-ex...

What’s your favorite grammatical case? *Case* is a grammatical category that indicates what function a noun is serving in the sentence.

The Online Database of Interlinear Texts (ODIN) is a collection of glossed interlinear texts extracted from documents on the web. v2.1 contains 158,007 instances of interlinear examples from 1,496 languages. depts.washington.edu/uwcl/odin/

In the name of Pānini, William Jones, and Edward Sapir we pray. Amen.

🧠 Why your brain is faster at dismantling some words than others 👶 Mom defends decision to teach her kids French despite not being a native speaker ✨ Why English isn’t actually decaying 👶 Baby talk is good for your child, actually 🫦 The etymology of “hooker”

@gretchenmcculloch.com still waiting for you to write this book “My book, WORDS OF FIRE, is out today! I’m so excited to share the adventures of Glossa, the time-travelling linguist dragon, and her sidekick Diacritic. Give it to any YA readers, fantasy fans, or linguistics enthusiasts you know!”

What are the oldest written languages in the world? blog.rosettastone.com/oldest-langu...

7200 languages in the world and you decide you wanna talk shit

AI is actually kind of like a word calculator, in that they mimic the statistical patterns of language theconversation.com/actually-ai-...

Is it “Iran” or “Persia”? What about “Farsi” versus “Persian”? Here’s your guide to the many names for Iran, its peoples, and its languages: Website: linguisticdiscovery.com/posts/name-o... Substack: open.substack.com/pub/linguist...

Translanguaging is the use of linguistic resources from more than one language in a single discourse setting, in a way that crosses linguistic, political, or social boundaries. The term is meant to encompass a variety of phenomena, including code-switching and crossing.

Where did we get the letters of the alphabet from? And why does English use them so strangely? This new book takes you on a linguistic odyssey through the history of the alphabet! “Why Q needs U: A history of our letters and how we use them” @dannybate.com

Polari is a secret slang or “cant” used by gay men that developed in the UK and became an integral part of gay subculture. Many Polari words are still in common usage today, including: - zhuzh (smarten up, stylize) - (rough) trade (working class / tough-looking sex partner)

How to kill a language: Power, resistance, and the race to save our words A forthcoming book from UK journalist Sophia Smith Galer @sophiasgaler.bsky.social looks and how languages are lost and what happens when they disappear Amazon: amzn.to/3K3VrF0 Bookshop: bookshop.org/a/110785/979...