Linguistics – The Conversation

Should language teaching describe how a language is used, or how it should be used?

AI tools can help communities respond to floods, heatwaves and other climate emergencies – but only once trained to interpret the nuance of everyday language.

Listen to the The Conversation’s Curious Kids podcast to hear anthropologist April Nowell explain the origins of language.

A new book for scholars, students, and curious readers invites readers to think critically about the promises and perils of language tech and examines AI’s impact on poetic practice.

Automated speech recognition is a powerful tool – but it comes with a host of assumptions.

Bubble, hoop, wiggle, bed: Some words bear an uncanny resemblance to the shape of the object or action they describe. And we tend to process them faster.

Language loss is often a reluctant choice made to escape violence, not a willing choice made to gain benefits.

Throughout the history of the language, what has been considered ‘bad’ speech often becomes ‘proper.’ You just have to give it time.

As AI-generated text becomes harder to identify, the real clues lie in how online conversations are being manipulated.

Does a seashell arrangement in the form of the numerals ‘86 47’ amount to a criminal threat to assassinate President Donald Trump, as prosecutors suggest?

‘Typoglycemia’ is often shared online as a quirky insight into how our brains work. But this viral claim is only part of the story.

Exaggerating phrases and talking in a sing-song way can actually help, not make it harder, for young children to master speaking a language.

Both President Trump and Vice President Vance pronounce Iran as ‘Ih-RAN,’ not ‘Ih-RON.’ A linguist says that how the country’s name is pronounced may be a political choice.

With the dissolution of the Soviet Union came rapid societal shifts. In Georgia, people called for the end of the Russification of their country and their culture.

A linguistic expert explains the techniques Enron traders used to build and retain trust in their criminal strategies.

Language that fails to explicitly name women has historically excluded them. And that exclusion is an active, reversible mechanism that’s now resurfacing.

A linguist explains what makes human English human, and why you shouldn’t overdo it with large language models.

The language of burnout turns up in agricultural records from more than 200 years ago, long before the term entered popular use.

The White House’s controversial Aliens.gov portal dehumanises undocumented non-US citizens by blurring the boundaries between the term “illegal aliens”, or unauthorised residents, and extraterrestrials.