Fairly soon after her marriage to Prince Harry in May 2018, articles about Meghan Markle started to appear – in the BBC, Mirror, Daily Star and Daily Express – reporting a change in her speech. Apparently the American actress has taken on a “British” accent along with her membership of the royal family.
The thatched roof held back the sun’s rays, but it could not keep the tropical heat at bay. As everyone at the research workshop headed outside for a break, small groups splintered off to gather in the shade of coconut trees and enjoy a breeze. I wandered from group to group, joining in the discussions. Each time, I noticed that…
Don’t we all sometimes come across acronyms or abbreviations used in social media which we are wondering about? Our common social media shorthand has indeed become amazingly extensive. We have acronyms and abbreviations for not only the way we chat back and forth with one another but also the marketing that we use there. It should be great to share…
Dogs can understand human speech and are only truly happy if a praising tone of voice is matched by the actual words spoken Dogs understand what some human words mean, according to a study published in the prestigious journal Science. In a world-first experiment, academics in Hungary trained 13 dogs to voluntarily lie in an MRI scanner to monitor what happened in their brain…
There are three things you can be sure of in life: death, taxes – and lying. The latter certainly appears to have been borne out by the UK’s recent Brexit referendum, with a number of the Leave campaign’s pledges looking more like porkie pies than solid truths. But from internet advertising, visa applications and academic articles to political blogs, insurance…
Will learning piano or violin make you better at French? Music is what penetrates most deeply into the recesses of the soul, according to Plato. Language has been held by thinkers from Locke to Leibniz and Mill to Chomsky as a mirror or a window to the mind. As American psychologist Aniruddh Pattel writes: “Language and music define us…
Should you ever wish to be reminded of those irritating workplace catchphrases, the internet abounds in news features and helpful sites – “26 Annoying Business Clichés You Should Stop Using Immediately”; “The Most Annoying, Pretentious And Useless Business Jargon”, to name just two. There is even ClichéSite.com, which claims to be the largest collection of such linguistic pinpricks. When they…
This sentence begins the best article you will ever read.
Chances are you thought that last statement might be sarcasm. Sarcasm, as linguist Robert Gibbs noted, includes “words used to express something other than and especially the opposite of the literal meaning of a sentence.” A form of irony, it also tends to be directed toward a specific individual.
There are a lot of languages in the world, a whole lot actually. Ethnologue, the biggest authority on languages on the web, estimates that there are over 7,000 spoken languages in the world. Check out this list of the most popular languages worldwide to see which language has the most native speakers. You will also find a bit more context…
