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 [...]
If you’re in the process of updating or writing your resume/CV you may be wondering how to include your language skills. The number of bilinguals in the U.S. doubled from 1980 to 2018 and in Europe it’s common for the average person to speak 3 languages. This means, the ability to write and speak more than one language could prove [...]
Is there a way to know how someone is feeling by simply looking at them? A quick internet search of the words “body language” will produce a slough of articles, books and interviews which claim to reveal hidden mysteries about human body language. Practitioners in this field usually make claims that with proper training, we can either detect clues or [...]
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 [...]
Wordle is the latest word game to captivate the hearts of humanity. If you haven’t played it yet, Wordle is a fun, simple, and free word game. It’s so easy to begin playing, you don’t even need an app. Between the low barrier of entry, and the fact that there are no ads, Wordle has infected the hearts of millions. [...]
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 [...]
