Language

Accent expert and actor Amy Walker breaks it down — the authenticity, the enunciation and the style.

How African American Vernacular English made it to the internet.

Do language learning apps really work?

"Get the corona!" is starting to make an appearance.

Jargon such as pain points and pushback can be a much-derided feature of many workplaces. Even when so much of the country is working from home, this corporate lingo still grates. But what's the worst offender?

In speech context is everything. Six "rules" called the Gricean maxims outline how this can be done.

The nuances with which he delivers all these impressions is seriously impressive.

No matter where you are in the country, local and national news anchors have the same vocal delivery. There's a good reason why they learn it.

The software giant has started to update Microsoft Word to highlight two spaces after a period (a full stop for you Brits) as an error, and to offer a correction to one space.

You know what they say: one woman's "man" is another woman's "trash."

Social distancing might not entirely change the way we talk, but a Mars expedition might do the trick.

English and a handful of other languages dominate the internet, but this is leaving indigenous cultures without a voice online. Now they are fighting back.

Learn all the British, Scottish and Welsh "ism's" from Rachel Weisz, Simon Pegg, Emma Thompson and so many others.

The Bannatyne Manuscript is an anthology of some 400 medieval Scottish poems.

Here's why Nintendo decided to localize Animalese, the fictional language spoken in "Animal Crossing."

I've used Grammarly for as long as I can remember (and my memory stretches back at least two months, maybe even longer), and I can confirm that the AI overlords are not beyond human grammar-checkers just yet

When I began to research the history of crosswords for my recent book on the subject, I was sort of shocked to discover that they weren't invented until 1913.

A good, dramatic "damn" is much better than half an expletive cut off by a sound effect.

How did valspeak permeate into, like, the American way of talking?

Classifying something as "speech" is only the first step in First Amendment analysis.

A.I. generated text is getting really good — what does that mean for the future of the internet?

From "haunting" and "orbiting" to "cloaking" and "whelming," everyone wants to coin the next ghosting, but few of these trendy dating terms really catch on.

The mellow duo Air Supply found success in the 1980s thanks to their easy-listening love songs. But one lyric was so strange it had to be revised.

Once a source of shame, but I now say it proudly: bad English is my heritage.

While he may not have always gotten the language exactly right, the translator has some great instincts when it comes to pinpointing a general region where the language might come from.

The pernicious spread of corporatespeak — or garbage language — which permeates the ways we think of our jobs and shapes our identities as workers.

Mandarin and English are the most-spoken languages in the world, but the fuller picture is far more complicated and more interesting.

Despite all the progress we've made in technology, computers still lag in making sense of what we're telling them.

There's a whole lot we don't know vision and speech perception.

Learning a language is child's play, but linguists are still trying to understand how children do it so easily.

Don't just memorize words. Memorize patterns of speech. Oh, and learn a language like a baby would.

Why are so many scholars and scientists obsessed with deciphering a bizarre, illustrated 600-year old manuscript?

Ireland's ascendent Sinn Féin party is nothing like Trump, but that hasn't stopped critics from levying an increasingly banal attack.

Once he noticed an American Sign Language interpreter parked close to him, Robin Williams, like many other comedians, had a habit of getting crude with them.

As The Sims celebrates its 20th anniversary, we look back at one of its defining traits: Simlish, a made-up language that helped players better connect to their in-game creations.

Here's a chart of movies that gave zero f*cks about dropping the F-bomb again and again.

When you are aware of your own consciousness — meaning your own individual scattershot thoughts, like what to make for lunch, whether to cross the street, or when it's time to go hit the pillow — what do you hear?

Xiaoma astounds people at this restaurant in Chinatown by speaking both perfect Mandarin and Cantonese.

The fascinating kuş dili or bird language allows speakers to communicate long distances.

Discussions of prose style very seldom concern themselves with the actual grammar of sentences. We think of grammar as strict and harsh, something punitive, prescriptive. And yet grammar is the key to much of what makes sentences sing.

It isn't just languages that are endangered: dozens of alphabets around the world are at risk. And they could have even more to tell us.

Put in your sex, the decade you were born, and start entering your name below. I'll try to guess your full name before you're done.

As they paddle out each night, they sing in a disappearing language.

The reading levels of American presidential speeches have plunged over the years. Are presidents dumbing them down for their listeners?

The most commonly-used word in English might only have three letters — but it packs a punch.

Goya. A small word, but one that contains multitudes. It is one of those mythic beasts, the "untranslatables," the foreign words that supposedly lack any equivalent in English. Lists of them spread virally online. But for now, let us examine goya.

Rawhide, Tumbler, Smurfette, Mogul — what's the secret behind the coolest (and weirdest) White House code names?

For migrants who speak Mayan languages, a grassroots group of interpreters is often their only hope for receiving asylum.

Robert Harrison speaks to Werner Herzog about his devotion to books.

Ironic Capitals and strettttchedddd
out words have allowed us to communicate our feelings in writing like never before.

By one measure, Baidu's natural-language algorithm understands English better than any other.

How did a word once reserved for union bosses get co-opted by anybody with a viral tweet?

Question mark rules: is it ungrammatical to drop the question mark when texting?

The Tar Heel State is the intertidal zone of the linguistic South: Overwhelming forces wash in and out, but weird, fascinating little tide pools remain.

The Hawaiian language nearly went extinct. Now it's being taught in dozens of immersion schools.

Even if Baby Yoda lived with other Yoda-style speakers in the past, it's still doubtful that he would have typical Yoda syntax.

John Richards, one of the most ardent defenders of the correct use of the apostrophe, is giving up. We have to keep the cause alive.

"When I decided to binge watch several dozen spaghetti westerns, I didn't expect the dubbing to be one of the best parts. It was."

When it comes to English-speaking countries, the popular conception is that Smith is the most common last name, but is that conception really true?

Word clouds don't show the relations between the words, losing the context.