For your reading (and listening and viewing) pleasure, a selection of items on language and linguistics that caught my eye (and my ear) in recent weeks:
Endangered alphabets.
How children use emoji.
The rise of ‘accent softening’.
Settling a grammar dispute (or not).
Finding room for unnameable things.
En Clair: a podcast on forensic linguistics.
The z in Boyz n the Hood as a key cultural signifier.
Macmillan’s unique Thesaurus now has its own website.
How bite configuration changed human speech (Discussion).
A brief visual history of British and Irish languages.
The many benefits of resurrecting lost languages.
Is the Middle Finger a phallic gesture?
Dog whistles in political discourse.
Who is the patron saint of slang?
How words enter the OED.
An A–Z of silent letters.
The Editing Podcast.
Code-switching: an overview.
The translator’s ambiguous role.
In praise of the literary translator.
The connotations of virtue signalling.
‘Dark speech’ in medieval Irish writing.
How a writer rediscovered her native Igbo.
The people who speak Dothraki and High Valyrian.
How novelists are treating new modes of communication.
Measuring the difference between a language and a dialect.
Why use a dictionary when you can Google a word?
Psychologists solve a mystery of songbird learning.
New trend in academia: fake co-authors.
An accent from the End of the Middle.
Understanding people’s final words.
Understanding babies’ first words.
The importance of book smell.
The Pompey (Portsmouth) dialect:
Emily Wilson on why and how she translated The Odyssey:
[archived language links]
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