linguistics

This word for outdoing or outshining others originated in the manosphere, but is now thoroughly mainstream. Why is it so popular – and should we be worried about slang that arises from toxic subcultures? Until recently, if someone had said “mog” to me, I probably would have assumed they were talking about the children’s book cat created by the late great Judith Kerr. If asked about “mogging” or b…

The Vocabulary of Violence: Inside the Language That Divides the World Why do some words wound more deeply than weapons? Why can a slur, a slogan, a tweet, or a political speech ignite hatred, inspire violence, or reshape entire societies? In Obscenity and Hate Speech, the fifth volume of The Tower of Babble and a crucial installment of Peter Ayolov’s Miscommunication Trilogy, language itself bec…

This paper proposes the concept of “Present Chinese” as a theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary Chinese language is continuously produced through symbolic institutions, platform media, and AI-mediated corpus circulation. Rather than treating Chinese as a naturally unified language, the paper approaches “Chinese” as a Master Signifier that temporarily sutures heterogeneous lingu…

In the book Ségou, by Maryse Condé, we find the following song of benediction that is sung at marriages: Que ce mariage soit heureux ! Qu’il en sorte pieds et mains ! Que dure le feu de cette union ! ...

The Disappearing Complexity: Simplicity, Speech and the Planned Obsolescence of Language What if the greatest crisis of the information age is not misinformation, censorship, or technological disruption, but the gradual decline of language itself? Simplicity of Human Speech, Part 25 of The Miscommunication Trilogy: The Entropy of Communication, Vol. II, explores one of the most overlooked transfo…

The Complex Nature of Language: Meaning, Mind, and the Architecture of Communication Language is humanity’s most remarkable invention and its most enduring mystery. In The Complex Nature of Language, the twenty-fourth volume of The Miscommunication Trilogy: The Entropy of Communication, Vol. II, the intricate structures, hidden mechanisms, and evolving dynamics of language are examined through an…

IntroductionLinguistic choices rapidly evoke social meanings, that is, information related to social identities, group membership, and social evaluations of the speaker, the hearer, and their relationship, but this activation is influenced by the linguistic domain. Moreover, social meaning and language attitudes are shaped by the societal context, but most previous studies focused on monolinguall…

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 26 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02348-w Public trust and policy impact depend on communication in local languages. Nonetheless, one language, English, dominates scientific publishing. Multilingual science communication is not outreach — it is part of research responsibility.

A paper by MA student Brandon Osgan, "Vowel reduction is conditioned by quality and quantity interactions: Evidence from Bolognese," has appeared in the current volume of the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America. The open-access paper is available ... The post Brandon Osgan in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America appeared first on Department of Linguistics .

Faculty member Misha Becker has been named as the next Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Acquisition, effective as of July 2026. Congratulations, Misha! The post Misha Becker named next Editor-in-Chief of Language Acquisition appeared first on Department of Linguistics .

The parliamentary rule that only English – and not Jamaican – is allowed has reignited debate about language, legitimacy, and postcolonial identity When MP Nekeisha Burchell stood up to give her maiden speech, she was keenly aware of how much Jamaica’s parliament mirrored the Westminster version, thousands of miles away in London. As in the UK, the session on 12 May had started with the arrival o…

IntroductionThis study investigates the role of conceptual metaphors in constructing China’s national image within Chinese-English press conference interpreting.MethodsDrawing on Critical Metaphor Analysis and the online corpus tool Wmatrix, the research identifies and examines metaphorical patterns in the interpreted diplomatic discourse.Results and discussionSix types of conceptual metaphors re…

Following on from the hugely successful two previous events The Balkans, its Diasporas, and the Stories of Material Culture; and Eating the Balkans: Language, Cuisine, and Cultural Meaning, the organisers are getting together for another day of in-depth discussion. This time, the focus will be on the multilingualism in the Balkans.This event explores the Balkan diaspora’s linguistic landscape, fo…

In French, greetings center on going, as in "ça va?" (Lit: it goes?) In Italian you have "come stai" (lit: how are you staying?) and Spanish also has "¿como estas?" (How ...

I don't know that any word is truly untranslatable, but I'd say the more words it takes to explain the meanings of a foreign word is a measure of translatability. So how about the common Indonesian word biji . It is usually translated as "seeds", but actually it means "a collection of... Read more

IntroductionNumerous studies have shown that consonants play a more crucial role than vowels in lexical recognition and learning, a phenomenon known as the C-Bias or C-advantage. While traditionally considered universal, recent findings suggest it may depend on language-specific phonotactic properties. This study examines whether the C-Bias is modulated by phonotactic constraints in Spanish, wher…

_Journal of Applied Philosophy_. forthcomingThe words we use to represent the world shape how we interpret and respond to it; language frames what it represents. In some cases, these frames can have prejudicial effects; for example, ‘workplace flirting’ versus ‘sexual harassment’. This paper examines how specific words and phrases (i.e., lexical frames) may anchor oppressive social practices. Tha…

The philosophical literature has long debated whether trait-targeting pejoratives (e.g., whore, wino, bitch) and group-targeting slurs (e.g., nigger, faggot) form distinct categories, or whether the boundary between them reduces to extra-linguistic factors. We report five experimental studies comparing particularistic insults, trait/behaviour pejoratives, and group slurs (8 tokens per class). Stu…

A new book by linguistics professor Valerie Fridland, who was raised in Memphis by French parents, explores the power behind the way we speak Valerie Fridland writes in her new book, Why We Talk Funny: the Real Story Behind Our Accents, that humans instinctively to use accents to categorize those around us. “We learn to recognize other people as being like us through the way that they sound,” Fri…

So, I saw this text in a meme but the point is that this construction involving "whoever" is quite commonplace: "This is to whoever keeps doing XYZ..." I believe this is ...