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Language and Linguistics

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Tag Archives: Language and Linguistics

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  • 14 Apr 2025
    Patriann Smith

    Sans “White Gaze”: From the Transgressive Multilingual Radiance of a Franco-Malian Pop Star to the Transnational Englishes of Innocent Caribbean Youth

    In July 2024, amidst the global attraction of a Paris 2024 Olympics with eugenicist roots historically designed in part to prove the athletic superiority of Europeans racialized as white, Aya Nakamura, the then most streamed female Francophone pop artist in the world, found herself “at the center of France’s culture wars.” A single-parent immigrant mother […]

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  • 13 Feb 2025
    Daria Dayter, Sofia Rüdiger

    Decoding Persuasion: A Linguistic Journey Through Manipulation and Influence

    People will always do what they want to do. Right? Well, not exactly. We can easily think about situations in which we tried to change someone else’s mind: begging parents for a toy, asking a reluctant friend to come to a dinner party, or making a case for your boss to grant you a few […]

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  • 22 Jan 2025
    Yaron Matras

    Britain’s cities are multilingual, but utopian visions of equality are being cancelled

    It’s a cliché that Britain’s power as a nation is linked to the English language, so much so that prime minister Theresa May assured the public that Brexit would be a success because “our language is the language of the world” and Boris Johnson complained that there were “too many people in our cities who […]

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  • 1 Aug 2024
    Ryan M. Nefdt

    A Broad Philosophical View of Linguistic Theory

    Human beings, homo sapiens, are linguistic creatures. One of the things that make us particularly sapient is our ability to convert a seemingly never-ending stream of thoughts into coherent language, interpretable by other similarly equipped creatures. This phenomenon is many-dimensional. When our thoughts leave our lips or shape our hands they take on a form, […]

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  • 22 Feb 2024
    Marco Antonio Valenzuela-Escárcega, Mihai Surdeanu

    To Understand Large Language Models We Need to Go Back to the Basics

    Arthur C. Clarke famously stated that “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Most of us have experienced this law with respect to the latest iterations of large language models (LLMs) such as GPT-4. This perspective may lead to incorrect usage of LLMs, resulting in undesirable and dangerous effects such as privacy violations, proliferation […]

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  • 2 Nov 2023
    Tim Wharton, Louis de Saussure

    Emotion? We don’t talk about it!

    Few would deny that emotions are fundamental to what it means to be human. Indeed, according to some, emotions are what make us human. Given that, and given the fact that humans communicate about their emotional states a great deal, you might think that theories of language and communication would include comprehensive accounts of how […]

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  • 19 Oct 2023
    Ekkehard Wolff

    Reconstructing an ancestral African language, mother to 80 present-day languages in the central African Sahel

    In this blog, I provide answers to a few basic questions that I imagine a reader, who is not an expert in historical African linguistics, might wish to ask the author. Why this topic, what’s so interesting about it? Africa is the cradle of humankind and where human language evolved. Tens of thousands of years […]

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  • 7 Feb 2023
    Colin H. Williams

    The New Speaker Phenomenon

    Today many European minority language communities are undergoing profound changes, in part as a result of globalisation, increased mobility and accelerating socio-economic fragmentation within heartland areas. Whereas in the past the family and community network ensured inter-generational language transmission, now it is mainly the statutory education system which provides the skills necessary to communicate effectively […]

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