archive

What if we occupied language?

Everyone speaks text message: Is technology killing indigenous languages or saving them? Well, you may soon be able to text in N’Ko. Dennis Baron on how to save an endangered language. What if we occupied language? A movement that challenges the power structure of language could help foster the sort of equality the protests aim to achieve. Is this the future of punctuation!?: On the misuse of apostrophe's (did your eye just twitch?) and our increasingly rhetorical language. Gary Girod on the decline and fall of the French language. Resistance may be futile: Are there alternatives to Global English? Google Translate already speaks 57 languages as well as a 10-year-old — how good can it get? A review of Is That a Fish in Your Ear?: Translation and the Meaning of Everything by David Bellos (and more). Tea leaves and lingua francas: Why the future is not easy to predict. From Language on the Move, Ingrid Piller on the politics of subtitling. Linguistic arrow of time: Recent work in linguistics strongly suggests that almost all of the 5000-odd current human languages may have been derived from a single ancient proto-language. A review of German: Biography of a Language by Ruth Sanders. What’s the language of the future? As English takes over the world, it's splintering and changing — and soon, we may not recognize it at all. A review of Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners by Michael Erard. From Mental Floss, a look at wonderful words with no English equivalent (and more). Here are 10 common words you had no idea were onomatopoeias.