Linguistics and Big Data have been a fruitful partnership since they first found each other, and new hookups with promising results are happening all the time. Here's a small sampling of the riches to be found in two new corpora — the TV Corpus and the Movie Corpus.  Continue reading...

For the first time ever, a euphemism been chosen as the American Dialect Society's Word of the Year. The winning term has an innocent sound that masks a sinister reality.  Continue reading...

Unesco chooses a cultural theme to highlight and celebrate every year. Now, in 2019, indigenous languages are ready for a long overdue closeup.  Continue reading...

Like most well-informed language books, this one is not going to be popular with the English-is-going-to-hell crowd. In this multifaceted yet focused book, Greene makes a powerful argument for the inherent resiliency of language, and his own sharp writing is serious support for language's power.  Continue reading...

Nothing is more intuitive and natural to humans than communicating via language, and specifically, via speech. Language must be central to developing a more robust channel for human-robot communication.  Continue reading...

Written language has an afterlife that is practically unlimited. When we commit something to writing we make a record that far outlives the context in which it is produced. Take the United States Constitution for example, now on the job for more than 225 years.  Continue reading...