The relations among words are not so different from those among people. It's not unusual for, say, first cousins to bear no obvious resemblance to each other, but if we examine their DNA we find that they have a grandparent in common.  Continue reading...

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...