English Language Studies

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2021/oct/31/vax-chosen-as-word-of-the-year-by-oxford-english-dictionary-firm

Research shows that sentences containing emojis can be processed very quickly, but “sentences” consisting entirely of emojis cannot. Thus, they will never replace text. This article argues that emojis function much like tones of voice, hand gestures, facial expressions, etc. in a text-based system.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2021/aug/10/emojis-debasing-language-symbols-communication?fbclid=IwAR3CcOFIfVmmhxS4nZwKxIdUR3dZoD5ut1MJlAVsi8cqDx0ET1KFoCANgW4

There are interesting effects of English on the French spoken in Sudbury:
https://www.sudbury.com/local-news/the-challenge-of-speech-language-pathology-in-a-city-that-speaks-frenglish-4202453?fbclid=IwAR3OWj9cKmlkAQVzHettZufU7F1_VcEad9PCc4zW2CRW7WI6AVxTp4NDZi0

Listen to this very interesting podcast about the new historical dictionary of Southern Appalachian English:
https://reckonsouth.com/the-unique-language-of-southern-appalachia/?fbclid=IwAR0Y4DUDM_fJVeG9GCFvp4J07iOPs0tINj-CrzQvwgGPneRn5HuUxjb130A

The Exeter Book is now available for viewing online:

Exeter Book Now Available to Browse Online

The LSA’s podcast “Subtitle” discusses the closest language to English, Frisian:

The language closest to English

The LSA podcast “Subtitle” has a very interesting discussion of the introduction of the Swedish 3rd person singular gender neutral pronoun “hen”. This is likely a borrowing from Finnish “hän”. It was discussed by a linguist in the 1950s and came to be used among special groups in the late 1990s, it only came to be widely known with the publication of the children’s book Kive & Monsterhund by Jesper Lundqvist in 2012.

The little pronoun that could

The use of “they” as a gender-neutral 3rd person singular pronoun has a long history going back to Middle English (see the OED entry for “they”, def. AI2). This article refers to some early 20th century attempts to deal with this problem:

https://www.theatlantic.com/culture/archive/2021/06/gender-neutral-pronouns-arent-new/619092/

https://www.theglobeandmail.com/arts/books/article-the-word-lady-shared-her-passion-for-canadian-english/

https://www.binghamton.edu/news/story/2903/neanderthals-had-the-capacity-to-perceive-and-produce-human-speech