31/08/2017–08/09/2017 Headlines A new study published in Nature Human Behavior has shown that creoles—languages usually produced in “multilingual situations of extreme social upheaval” like colonial slavery—take their grammars from other languages instead of innovating grammar from scratch. According to Martin Haspelmath,…

25/08/2017–31/08/2017 Headlines Think you can go incognito by anonymising your writing? Not so apparently. This article reports how the National Security Agency was able to locate a said individual by comparing his ‘known’ writings to a massive number of writing…

18/08/2017–25/08/2017 Headlines Prone to hearing voices in the dark? You may be more sensitive to hidden speech than others without this skill. In a study published in Brain, it was found that people who experience auditory verbal hallucinations, and who…

This week’s round up compiles language news from the last fortnight. 04/08/2017–18/08/2017 Headlines Fascinated by science but terrified of its jargon? Fear not, for a free online programme called the De-Jargonizer has recently been created. The De-Jargonizer is capable of coding…

28/07/2017–04/08/2017 Headlines The Spanish Royal Academy has set up a Judeo-Spanish branch in Israel to preserve Ladino, the language spoken by Spain’s Jewish population that was expelled five centuries ago. There are an estimated 400,000 speakers of Ladino in Israel…

21/07/2017–28/07/2017 Headlines How do new fonts get created? Well, here’s a good example of new ideas and technology changing the way we write: We’ve recently just discovered a new font—Ryman Eco—that is meant to save 33% of inkspace as compared…

14/07/2017–21/07/2017 Headlines We have been told time and again the benefits of giving young children a bilingual environment. While this can be done with ease in bilingual households, the same cannot be said for monolingual households. A recent study by…

07/07/2017–14/07/2017 Headlines Remember Valar Morgulis? Duolingo now offers a course in High Valyrian, the language spoken by Danaerys Targaryen in the fantasy epic Game of Thrones. Mind you, this is the most formal version spoken on by Westerosian royalty, not…

This week’s round up compiles language news from the last fortnight. 23/06/2017–07/07/2017 Headlines Too many illustrations in storybooks can hinder word learning. This is the finding, in short, of an experimental study carried out in the Word Lab at The University…

This week’s round up compiles language news from the last fortnight. 02/06/2017–23/06/2017 Headlines “There are fewer than 20 people fluent in Haida, the language of the Haida people of British Columbia.” A new feature film in Haida called Edge of the…

02/06/2017–09/06/2017 Headlines A new American Sign Language dictionary recognises something that most others don’t: Sign Language isn’t alphabetical! Naomi Caselli, a language and literacy professor at Boston University worked with a team from Tufts University and San Diego University to…

26/05/2017–02/06/2017 Headlines Thanks to generations of colonisation and state policy, the Iroquoian language of Mohawk (or Kanyen’kéha) has been experiencing a steep decline in the past few decades. On Thursday, Mohawk was spoken in Canada’s Parliament by Quebec Liberal MP Marc…