Author Archives: brinton

A Stanford scholar has discovered that the version of the Magna Carta in Salisbury was in fact not written — as previously assumed — in the Chancery in London, but by a local scribe. This finding has consequences for how … Continue reading →

The Yale Grammatical Diversity Project is studying a number of syntactic phenomena in North American English, such as “done my homework”, “so don’t I”, double is, positive “anymore”, “have yet to”, double comparatives, and so on. You can read about … Continue reading →

Linguist Asya Pereltsvaig and geographer/historian Martin Lewis have a new book entitled The Indo-European Controversy: Facts and Fallacies in Historical Linguistics (Cambridge University Press, 2015). In it they argue against the evolutionary biologists Gray and Aitkinson, whose article in Science … Continue reading →

We have long known from studies of contemporary English that language change begins with young women. We now have “real-time”, historical evidence (from Early Modern letters) that young women are language innovators: http://qz.com/474671/move-over-shakespeare-teen-girls-are-the-real-language-disruptors/ Read about the work of historical sociolinguists … Continue reading →

This short article from Maclean’s describes the Canadian Shift: http://www.macleans.ca/society/life/in-the-midst-of-the-canadian-vowel-shift/ More details can be found in the Wikipedia entry: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Shift or in this article: http://www.meredithtamminga.com/documents/CLA2008_Sadlier-Brown_Tamminga.pdf

http://www.pri.org/stories/2015-02-05/across-several-languages-people-are-opting-um-over-uh

A recent study is suggesting just that: http://chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2015/01/22/o-canada-in-new-orleans/

An informative article in the New York Times from a few years ago, written by Guy Deutscher, considers the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis in light of new evidence: http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29language-t.html?pagewanted=all&_r=0

This article suggests a number of places in Britain to visit if you are interested in the history of the English language: http://mentalfloss.com/article/56688/11-places-visit-tour-english-language

The “recency illusion”, a term coined by Stanford University Professor Arnold Zwicky, names the fact that we believe that if we have just noticed a linguistic phenomenon, it is of recent origin (even though it may be very old). Here … Continue reading →