When someone mentions Paris, you likely envision fashionable art museums, sidewalk cafes by the Eiffel Tower, maybe romance. Similarly, the name "New York City" probably conjures images of crowded subways, the bright lights of Times Square, and bustling city streets. But would we feel the same way about these places if they still went by their old names? Would [...]
Language is one of our world’s most powerful tools, and throughout history, governments and large organizations have used different forms of language planning as a way to control that power. In a broad sense, language planning is an organized effort by a major entity to change a society’s language. These efforts can be, and usually are, done for the [...]
Flashback to ten years ago and imagine hearing someone say, “She had to ghost him because his side hustle in the metaverse was sus.” You would think this was either utter gibberish or perhaps there had been a murder of some sort - “She turned him into a ghost?” In the present day and age, however, not only is [...]
Slogans are powerful. They accompany nearly every part of our daily lives and we ingest them unconsciously. We often think of them as being attached to products or services which are being sold. For example, most people from the U.S. need to simply hear the words “Just Do It” or “Have It Your Way”, to tell you the phrases belong [...]
Forensic linguistics is the use of applied linguistics in legal settings. That definition is extremely broad, but so is the field of study itself. Perhaps it is easier to look at the two words separately. Forensics is when science is used to resolve a legal issue. Linguistics is the scientific study of written and spoken language. Forensic linguistics then, is [...]
Movies and television are fairly new inventions in the breadth of humanity’s artistic endeavors. Since the first commercially aired film on December 28th, 1895, storytelling in film has rapidly evolved with visual effects progressively becoming more impressive. This has allowed filmmakers to design vivid depictions of multiple universes. These worlds usually come fully loaded with populations of either aliens, fairies [...]
Hangul is unique among alphabets in multiple ways, including the fact that it has its own day of celebration. On October 9th, South Korea commemorates the approximate day in 1446 when King Sejong published the newly developed set of characters for his people. Unlike most alphabets which developed slowly over time, Hangul was deliberately invented to respond to the illiteracy [...]
Throughout most of the world, the language spoken in Spain is known as Spanish. However, many people in Spain actually refer to their language as “Castellano” or “Castilian” in English.[1] This name is derived from the name of the region where the language first came into being. The Castile region of Spain makes up more than one quarter of the [...]
Gen Z certainly seems to have amassed a dictionary of their own. If you’re walking past a group of middle school students, or scrolling through TikTok, it is not uncommon to find yourself confused by some words. Sometimes these slang words are just words that already existed, and were then repurposed by Gen Z. Other times they appear to have [...]
What if we, as a species, could go back in time and witness the formation of language through history? Well, that’s not possible, but during the 1980’s, linguists came as close as possible to the creation of a brand new language in Nicaragua. Nicaraguan Sign Language (NSL) is in fact the only spontaneously developed language to have been recorded from [...]
