The language we choose to use is important, both in terms of the individual words we say and getting our point across. Language reveals us, our values and our views in the words we choose and the ones we carefully omit. But what if our mother tongue is inherently biased in its word choices? What(…)

When we think of languages that have a global reach, we’re probably biased enough to think first of English, and then of perhaps Mandarin, or Spanish. But another language that is always in top ten lists of most widely spoken languages yet gets neglected despite being spoken in numerous countries in the world is Arabic.(…)

Living in a country where the language is monolingual means even the idea of having an official language that isn’t your own is, well, foreign. But we’ve already looked at Switzerland where there are three official languages, and South Africa where there are eleven, and in their own ways for both of these countries, multilingualism(…)

Gender roles and understanding gender fluidity is a very much 2018 sort of topic. With so many countries, policies and attitudes moving in the direction of acceptance and anti-discrimination, languages, not just English, are ever-evolving. At the end of the day, the language we use about ourselves and others is ultimately what defines us. And(…)

Sometimes us native English speakers forget that the variety we see in our own language is to be found in other languages as well. That is to say, for every American correcting a Brit on spelling, for example, there is a Brit looking down on what some see as the simplification of English by Americans,(…)

Despite being considered a humanities subject, language crosses boundaries with science more often than you’d think. With that in mind, it seems the jig is up. Sorry language sticklers: it appears that a new study by evolutionary biologists at UPenn looking at the natural patterns and standard use of English from 11 CE up to the(…)

Brexit has been blamed for all manner of things: changing trade routes, price increases, you name it. However, one of the latest things it stands accused of is the eventual dilution of the purity of the English language and the rise of something called Euro-English. Wait, what? Isn’t that just English? Well, sort of. It(…)

Can we agree that languages are weird? They go through more experimental phases than the average teenager and tend to change before you can get a grasp on its current iteration. The result? Strange, mixed breed words. Take the Dominican Republic, for example. For one, there’s the mix of Spanish, African and Taíno culture that(…)

Brick walls. We’re all susceptible to them, especially when it comes to learning something completely new. Brick walls are very common in language learning, and can often have the detrimental effect of causing the student to give up in a fit of frustration. If you’ve been in a slump lately and aren’t quite sure how(…)

Sometimes when you turn on the radio, you find yourself mumbling along to words to songs you’d not normally want anything to do with. These earworms wriggle their way into your head, and the next thing you know, you’re word perfect for the lyrics to a Justin Bieber song. The horror. But what if these(…)