Ever wonder how the food terms macaroon, macaron and macaroni are related? It turns out that all three are "rooted in the great meetings of the Islamic and Christian culinary traditions in the Middle Ages." Read all about it on The Language of Food, Dan Jurafsky's wonderfully nuanced blog, here.

Ben Trawick-Smith is an actor with a deep interest in English dialects. On his Dialect Blog, he takes on a range of interesting linguistic issues. One recent post traces the history of the pronoun y'all: "One word. Two continents. Three shores. Four centuries. Five separate dialects. Wow." Read the fascinating story here.

In 2000, the American Dialect Society picked the Word of the Millennium: she, which entered English in the 12th century. But where did the word come from, exactly? Visual Thesaurus contributor Stan Carey writes on his Sentence First blog that its origins remain shrouded in mystery. Read all about it here.

In his new blog Shady Characters, Keith Houston seeks to tell "the unusual stories behind some well-known — and some rather more outlandish — marks of punctuation." Get started with the first of Houston's "typographic raconteurs," the pilcrow.

Today is the 11th annual commemoration of International Mother Language Day. The United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) asks the world community to celebrate linguistic diversity and the promotion of mother tongues. Read more from the United Nations here, and check out the LingEducator blog for ideas about classroom activities.

On his blog The Web of Language, Dennis Baron, a professor of English at the University of Illinois and a regular contributor to the Visual Thesaurus, runs down the top ten language-related stories of the past year, covering everything from a dictionary ban to a temple to the goddess English. Read the full list here.