Author Archives: brinton

The English language lost the distinction between singular and plural addressees about 1700, but this hasn’t prevented speakers from restoring the distinction in various ways. “Y’all” seems to be spreading from the southern US to other parts of the US … Continue reading →

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. … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

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 … Continue reading →

Here is an informative article on gender in language and how it shapes us (ignore the headline given in the URL): https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20201006-are-some-languages-more-sexist-than-others?ocid=ww.social.link.email

Is it all a matter of prosody? It’s complicated. https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/why-linguists-are-fascinated-by-the-american-jewish-accent?utm_source=share_by_email&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=mailto_share