Of all the controversies about this year’s World Cup, perhaps none is so conversationally ubiquitous as how we in the English-speaking world are supposed to pronounce the name of the country where it is being played. Traditionally, it has been something like “ka-TAHR.” This version has been mainstream in European…

The first impeachment trial US President Donald Trump hinged largely on whether he held out military aid to Ukraine as a bargaining chip to get his counterpart Volodymyr Zelensky to investigate the son of his rival Joe Biden. In other words, was he offering a quid pro quo? …

In linguistics, two generations is a long time. If, thanks to migration or cultural or political change, grandchildren grow up speaking a different primary language than their grandparents, it is unlikely that the latter’s language will ever recover. During his forty-year reign from 1936 to 1975, General Francisco Franco did…

It is a popular quip in linguistics that a language is a dialect with an army and a navy. Around the world, this is generally true. But what if, for example, the dialect used to have an army and navy 500 years ago, and it wants to have one again…

Last week, the American senior congresswoman Nancy Pelosi made international headlines by spending an afternoon on the island of Taiwan. Reactions by politicians and pundits were swift, passionate, and confused. Beijing, which normally encourages foreign dignitaries to visit China, blasted Pelosi for visiting Taiwan, which of course is part of…

It is a phenomenon well-established and oft-lamented that major languages often become simpler over time. As we observed in Part I, tongues from English and Latin to Mandarin Chinese shed grammatical and phonological idiosyncrasies as they became the daily languages of millions of people. How and why languages get simpler…

Anyone who speaks any language knows someone who is assiduously, perhaps annoyingly, insistent on observing the proper rules of grammar, pronunciation, et cetera. Language snobbery is nothing new: thousands of years ago, pedantic Romans wrote entire books indexing common errores in how the hoi polloi spoke Latin. Much to the…

Or, the Terribly Tricky Turkish Tongue After two years trapped in their homes, this summer a lot of people are going on long-awaited vacations. If your next trip is to somewhere where they speak a different language, you have probably given some thought to how you will scale that barrier. …

A few years ago, Google released an ad touting their next big thing: the ability to translate spoken conversations as they happen. …