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Nebulae are those star nurseries familiar through the fabulous Hubble images like the one above. Languages are also born – indeed every language is reborn, quite literally in the nursery. In my new book The Interaction Engine, just like the astronomers I turn the focus not onto language itself but onto the systems that gave […]
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This book has been fun and also somewhat liberating to write. To explain this we have to tell the story of how the book came about. We are all corpus linguists, i.e. we use specialist software to study the use of language in very large datasets, or corpora. Over time, we all developed an interest […]
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Languages appear to us as self-evident truths in the world. Until recently, the definition of what is a language seemed to be relatively straightforward: a language is what people from the same culture, living in the same territory, use to communicate with each other. We find its rules documented in dictionaries and grammar books. In […]
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During the 2022 Oscars ceremony, actor Will Smith famously walked onto the stage and slapped presenter Chris Rock across the face, in response to a joke about the former’s wife. Pictures of the slap soon went viral and entered meme lore, with people online adding textual labels onto the two main dramatis personae. One such […]
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Esperanto, Klingon, Na’vi … these are examples of invented or constructed languages (conlangs for short). Unlike ‘natural’ languages such as English, Swahili, or Navajo, which arise and change organically, conlangs are consciously created; Esperanto by Ludwik L. Zamenhof, Klingon by Marc Okrand, Na’vi by Paul Frommer. Like natural languages, many conlangs boast rich vocabularies in […]
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A new book that reveals the sound-painted secrets of 124 languages. Boom… plop! Woof! Vroom! Sound familiar? Like something out of a comic book, baby talk, or a cartoon? Not quite! These “funny little noises” are actually a serious linguistic topic – and they have a lot to tell us about how languages work, how […]
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Have you ever heard someone say: I hate it when people say ‘___’? When a sociolinguist hears that kind of comment, they take it as a good indication there’s something interesting going on. This book shows you how to uncover the hidden patterns in the way people speak. It demonstrates how to study language phenomena […]
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In today’s rapidly globalizing world, multilingual education is no longer a niche interest—it is an essential approach to preparing learners for the linguistic realities they will face locally and globally. But what exactly is multilingual education? How does it differ from bilingual education, and why is it becoming such a vibrant field of study and […]
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