Tag: language

Cary Barbor traverses language, culture, and class to connect with her new family.

Rani Neutill recalls a literary workshop in which a white man critiqued her ability to write in “proper” English.

Feliz Moreno searches for an answer to the frequently asked question ‘Do you speak Spanish?’ during a trip to Mexico.

As a semi-professional dog walker in Paris, expat Kate Gavino has found a comfortable way to learn French.

Upon returning to India, a course in Urdu helps Sharanya Deepak embrace the rich and turbulent history of her native country.

“A friend had handed down a beautiful book of Daniil Kharms poems for children… One was a song about a man who went into the forest with a club and a bag, and never returned.”

On the never-ending, unattainable quest to create the perfect English dictionary.

The days of the long, sinuous, multi-clause sentence might be numbered.

Diana Spechler recalls fleeing her life in New York City for a new one with a painter in his village in central Mexico.

While teaching English to communist party officials in post-war Laos, Kathryn Kefauver Goldberg reflects on silence and the legacy of trauma.

Four times a year, lexicographers update and add words to the OED. Katherine Connor Martin helps decide what makes the cut.

The bureaucratic voice presents governments and corporations as placid, apologetic, and unmovable. It also makes their victims as active as possible.

Merriam-Webster lexicographer Kory Stamper describes how she fell in love with words and offers a peek into the complex process of making dictionaries.

From akasha to kompromat, a guide to the words we learned in 2016.

In Canada’s most easterly province, volatile weather conditions and cultural isolation produced a fascinating vocabulary to describe the natural world.

“Like most cultural shifts in language, the rise of white, upper-middle class women who call themselves ‘mama’ seemed to happen slowly, and then all at once.” Elissa Strauss explores how the use of “mama” helped rebrand motherhood for the modern mother.

From visual emojis depicting simple emotional states, it’s a short step to the more dynamic emotion or reaction gifs, used by certain internet subcultures to respond or react in playful ways to an online discussion. These are gif images, often originating from internet memes, that depict elements of body language that can be too complex for an emoticon to describe. Essentially, it’s an innovative way for speakers to convey a sense of gesture on the internet.

Its earliest citation in the Nexis computer files is from an editorial in The New York Times on Oct. 21, 1984, about the Reagan-Mondale televised debates. ”Tonight at about 9:30,” wrote the editorialist, ”seconds after the Reagan-Mondale debate ends, a bazaar will suddenly materialize in the press room. . . . A dozen men in good suits and women in silk dresses will circulate smoothly among the reporters, spouting confident opinions. They won’t be just press agents trying to impart a favorable spin to a routine release. They’ll be the Spin Doctors, senior advisers to the candidates. . . .”

Some people use emojis sparingly, some with abandon; some are practical while others are creative; even emoji meanings are highly personal—smiley poop comforts my friend, grosses out my mom, makes my sister think of changing diapers. Emojis today are in a similar fluid state as the English language in the 16th century: Anything goes and […]

In the latest Mother Jones, Tasneem Raja argues that “code literacy” is becoming just as critical as reading and writing in education. To understand how we as a society might begin to take it seriously, it also helps to understand the history of literacy itself: Reading and writing have become what researchers have called “interiorized” […]

“First-language loss occurs almost across the board by immigrants’ third generation, Light says. That is, Daniel’s children would most commonly be the ones experiencing this issue, with Daniel as a bilingual father. Factors such as home life, the concentration of an immigrant community and the length of time away from a native-speaking environment determine the […]