Sprognyheder

Imagine the progress of the English language as a moving train. It need not be a fast-moving train; in fact, it helps if you picture it chugging along majestically through a flat landscape. Our two authors are actively interested in observing the progress of the train.

ALGHERO, Italy — The first Catalans reached Sardinia in the 14th century, when troops sailed from the eastern coast of what is now Spain as part of an expansion into the Mediterranean.

John Holm, a linguist who helped bring the study of creole and pidgin languages into the scholarly mainstream, died on Dec. 28 in Azeitão, Portugal. He was 72.

French-language radio program in Louisiana. Last speakers. Codeswitching French-English. Cajun French.

Researchers suggest in the journal PLOS One that the interrogative word "huh"; could be a universal word.

Researchers are teaching computers to be funny — and, in the process, showing humans why we laugh.

Amazon’s decision to delete thousands of book reviews has generated an uproar, but the company has not offered a public explanation for the sweeping purge.

How a teacher in Homer, N.Y., changed the way students learn grammar.

To this day, Paraguay remains the only country in the Americas where a majority of the population speaks one indigenous language: Guaraní. It is enshrined in the Constitution, officially giving it equal footing with the language of European conquest, Spanish. And in the streets, it is a source of national pride.

Whether it be uptalk (pronouncing statements as if they were questions? Like this?), creating slang words like “bitchin’ ” and “ridic,” or the incessant use of “like” as a conversation filler, vocal trends associated with young women are often seen as markers of immaturity or even stupidity. Right?

A movement that challenges the power structure of language could help foster the sort of equality the protests aim to achieve. “occupy,” is the odds-on favorite to be chosen as the American Dialect Society’s Word of the Year.

When University of Oregon football fans cheer their team, they often hold out their hands in the shape of the letter “O,” for Oregon. If this makes some Ducks players blush, it is because many of them chose sign language to fulfill their foreign language requirement, and in sign language, the fans are saying — screaming, really — the word vagina

A team of Swedish and American linguists has applied statistics-based translation techniques to crack one of the most stubborn of codes: the Copiale Cipher, a hand-lettered 105-page manuscript that appears to date from the late 18th century. Discovered in an academic archive in the former East Germany, the elaborately bound volume of gold and green brocade paper holds 75,000 characters, a perplexing mix of mysterious symbols and Roman letters.

When you start to become aware of these bogus quotations, you can’t stop finding them. Henry James, George Eliot, Picasso — all of them are being kept alive in popular culture through pithy, cheery sayings they never actually said.

The language is Tamazight, the tongue of the Amazigh, or Berbers, who, after decades of oppression in Libya are re-emerging as a political force.