Daily Archives: December 28, 2013

This blogger (Jules Sherred), not a professional linguist, has done quite a good job identifying a number of new Canadianisms (by using a survey questionnaire). http://geekmom.com/2013/12/55-canadianisms/ Most all of these will appear in the forthcoming Dictionary of Canadianisms on Historical … Continue reading →

Check out this program from the Oxford English Dictionary: http://blog.oxforddictionaries.com/2013/12/oed-birthday-words/ It allows you to determine which word was coined the year you were born. My own word is frenemy – what is yours?

The use of because as a preposition has been noticed in the media. Writers of dictionaries will have to follow this trend to see whether it survives: http://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2013/11/english-has-a-new-preposition-because-internet/281601/

While we know that grammatical gender is arbitrary (not related to the real world sex of the item denoted), can it still have some reality for speakers? This fascinating article explores this topic: http://www.geocurrents.info/population-geography/gender/islamic-fatwas-grammatical-gender-translation-beware-sexualized-vegetables

A study by Amalia Arvaniti and Amanda Ritchie of the phenomenon of “uptalking” (rising intonation in declarative sentences) has found that men also participate in this speech pattern, though it is twice as prevalent among young females as males in … Continue reading →

The following quiz (based on the Harvard Dialect Survey) allows Americans to see where their dialect places them. As a Canadian (or American) you might find it fun to take this survey: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2013/12/20/sunday-review/dialect-quiz-map.html?smid=pl-share&_r=0