When faced with a fictional language, here’s what you should do.

The Senate Standing Committee on Aboriginal Peoples has adopted an amended version of Bill C-91, the Indigenous Languages Act, with changes largely

The overwhelming popularity of Murakami Haruki’s novels in translation has transformed the image of Japanese literature around the world. How will the country’s writing continue to be received on the global stage?

Despite its ubiquity, the origins of the dollar sign remain far from clear, with competing theories touching on Bohemian coins, the Pillars of Hercules and harried merchants.

Which country has the most official languages?

We love untranslatable words; you love untranslatable words. Here's our roundup of our 10 favorite ones. We think you'll enjoy them too.

All the technical writers I met had different backgrounds, interests, and expertise when it came to the equipment, so what do technical writers do?

The cocktail renaissance of the 21st century, in which craft-cocktail bars have proliferated and classic cocktails are back in fashion, has proved that there is a true art to inventing and mixing drinks. But, what about naming them?

“Learning Dothraki has kept a youthfulness about myself. All of this is really just play," one Dothraki speaker told Refinery29.

Ammon Shea loves dictionaries – especially the OED. He loves the OED so much, he read it – the whole thing, in its second edition: 21,730 pages with around 59 million words. It took him a year, ful…

Peter Bilak likes to think of fonts as the voice of the text. They convey emotions and tone, just like voices—and just like voices, there are some fonts that are inherently better at communicating a message. Bilak knows this universe of fonts, with their adjunct emotions, intimately. In 2009, the Slovakian typeface designer had co-founded …

M. Buna speaks to Johannes Göransson about his “Transgressive Circulation: Essays on Translation.”

In a paper, scientists at Amazon's Alexa division describe a transfer learning method that makes it easier to add support for new languages to AI systems.

When it was suggested to Joshua Blau, at the start of his professional career, that he study the letters of Maimonides, there were those who warned him not to undertake the task. The three scholars who had previously begun dealing with the letters had died unnatural deaths. The first was found deceased at his desk …

New research investigates how people sequentially add new color terms to languages over time – and the results hold surprises about assumptions linguists have made for 40 years.

In 2016 the United Nations General Assembly proclaimed that 2019 would be the International Year of Indigenous Languages. The declaration's goal was to raise awareness for disappearing language systems around the world, while mobilizing a coordinated global effort to help preserve them. At the time

At work in central Hong Kong, David Hand is surrounded by people speaking Chinese and English. But inside his home, the Welsh language rules.

At work in central Hong Kong, David Hand is surrounded by people speaking Chinese and English. But inside his home, the Welsh language rules.

Barbara Malt and her collaborators examine how we talk about objects across multiple languages—and how that reflects human thought processes.

How languages get built for fantasy and sci-fi worlds, explained.

From word lists and word origins to games and our help pages – start here to find all you’re looking for from Oxford Dictionaries.

"We kept our languages hidden," says a host from Central California's Radio Indígena 94.1, "but no longer." The shows appeal to farmers of indigenous origin.

Code depends on English—for reasons that are entirely unnecessary at a technical level.

This is a list of 15 helpful apps for all you working linguists out there. The list includes mono- and multilingual dictionaries, grammar and proofreading aids, linguistic article catalogues, and apps for improving productivity and organisation. Download, and enjoy! Dictionaries Oxford Dictionary of English FREE This free app offers the most comprehensive coverage of the …

Far from the reach of the Chinese government, Uyghur booksellers are protecting their language from being erased.

The first time you saw the word biopic, did you pronounce it ‘bi-OPic’, to rhyme with myopic, either aloud or in your head, before learning that it’s ‘bio-pic’, as in biographical picture? If so, y…

From word lists and word origins to games and our help pages – start here to find all you’re looking for from Oxford Dictionaries.

Milpa Alta – which maintains traditions from its pre-Columbian past – feels like a tiny mountain village, making it hard to believe that it’s part of Mexico City.

An article about bias in automatic language processing tools. Excerpt:  Gobo was designed to address the lack of knowledge and control that people have over how their social media feeds are filtered. It aims to give power back to the user by allowing users to adjust how their feeds are filtered along six categories: politics, seriousness, rudeness, gender, brands, and obscurity. When the user changes the filters for each of these categories, posts will either get filtered in or out of their feed, and Gobo will tell them why. […] The rudeness filter is what stood out to me the most — not necessarily because it performed worse than the other filters, but because of those posts were being filtered out. When I set my feed to show me posts that Gobo deemed “less rude,” I noticed that many of the posts from women of color disappeared. […] Several filters on Gobo are created with third-party tools, including the rudeness filter. This filter uses an API from Jigsaw — an incubator within Google’s parent company, Alphabet — called Perspective, which uses “machine learning models to score the perceived impact a comment might have on a conversation,” according to its website. […] My own experience using Perspective revealed another layer of misrecognition when it comes to linguistic differences. Perspective fails to recognize AAVE. As a result, statements like “you in yo bag sis! You betta do it sis!!!!!!!!” may be inappropriately flagged as toxic, despite the meaning being positive. Read the whole thing.

In 2017, Samanta Schweblin’s novel, Fever Dream, was released in English. The surreal, hallucinatory tale about a woman dying from a mysterious poison, expertly translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell, earned a cult-like reputation among writers and raves from critics for its sparse prose and haunting tension. Schweblin’s latest collection in English, Mouthful of Birds, …

Learning languages rewires the brain and changes how we perceive time.

The Government of Nunavut says it will work with Inuit organizations to press Ottawa for amendments to the federal Indigenous Languages Act. The federal

How is our speech shaped by what we hear? The answer varies, depending on the make-up of our brain's pathways, a team of neuroscientists has found. The research, which maps how we synchronize our words with the rhythm of the sounds we hear, offers potential methods for diagnosing speech-related afflictions and evaluating cognitive-linguistic development in children.