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Language and Linguistics

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Tag Archives: Language and Linguistics

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  • 24 Nov 2025
    Vered Shwartz

    AI Language Technologies are Powerful—But Not Without Limits

    Imagine waking up in the morning. You read your emails with the morning coffee and use Gmail’s autocomplete feature to compile the answers. Before leaving the house, you ask Siri for the weather forecast, to decide whether you need to bring your jacket. Later in the day, you interact with a customer service chatbot about […]

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  • 5 Sep 2025
    Stephen C. Levinson

    The language nebula – how language was born in social interaction

    Nebulae are those star nurseries familiar through the fabulous Hubble images like the one above. Languages are also born – indeed every language is reborn, quite literally in the nursery. In my new book The Interaction Engine, just like the astronomers I turn the focus not onto language itself but onto the systems that gave […]

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  • 28 Aug 2025
    Britta Schneider

    Liquid Languages – Or: Are Languages an Imagination from the Age of Print Literacy?

    Languages appear to us as self-evident truths in the world. Until recently, the definition of what is a language seemed to be relatively straightforward: a language is what people from the same culture, living in the same territory, use to communicate with each other. We find its rules documented in dictionaries and grammar books. In […]

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  • 25 Jul 2025
    Lívia Körtvélyessy

    Welcome to the Colourful World of Onomatopoeia!

    A new book that reveals the sound-painted secrets of 124 languages. Boom… plop! Woof! Vroom! Sound familiar? Like something out of a comic book, baby talk, or a cartoon? Not quite! These “funny little noises” are actually a serious linguistic topic – and they have a lot to tell us about how languages work, how […]

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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
    Sofia Rüdiger, Daria Dayter

    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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