Every two years, at the end of February, linguists, language workers, and speakers of some of the world’s most endangered languages gather in Honolulu, on the Hawaiian island of O’ahu for the International Conference on Language Documentation and Conservation (ICLDC).…

In a country that speaks over 42 languages but uses English and Swahili as its official languages, it is easy for confusion to arise among people from varied backgrounds. The church reaches out to you in English; the mosque calls…

Everybody in Spain speaks Spanish, right? Well, yes and no. While Castilian Spanish is indeed the language used by the central government and the only official language universal across the nation, Spain is also home to a variety of separate…

A couple of weeks ago, our etymology enthusiast, Natalie Chang (who runs the Gobbledygook column), burst into an editorial meeting talking about just how interesting the word ‘gung ho’ is. Indeed, nobody but an etymology enthusiast would be so gung…

I’ve been studying linguistics at undergraduate level for about three semesters now, and one thing I notice we don’t do a lot of in class is try and predict the future. I guess it could be because a lot of…

For most people, there’s no greater joy in travelling than the ability to see a new place through one’s own eyes. To me, the greater joy is in being able to see a place through the eyes of the people…

Picture the following scenario: You’re in a classroom. You’ve just had a heavy meal. Your English teacher is droning on and on about the importance of subject-verb agreement or some other grammatical formality you’ll never pay much attention to outside…

Like all good magazines, we love hearing from our readers. We’re all about how linguistics helps us understand the world; we wanted to hear how the world understands linguistics. So we asked you a very simple question in our inaugural readers’…