English Language Studies

Despite the title of this article, it mostly addresses changes in language which the author sees taking place (or about to take place) and which she attributes to the internet, to television, to advertising, and to politicians:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2018/mar/12/grammar-gripes-why-do-we-love-to-complain-about-language?CMP=share_btn_link
We must, however, be very cautious about the causes of these changes (and in fact their ultimate effect on the language).

Geoffrey Pullum, writing in “Lingua Franca”, a column in The Chronicle of Higher Education, rates an article from the British newspaper The Telegraph one of the “dumbest of the week”. The article argues that emojis are ruining young people’s “grasp of the English language”:
https://www.chronicle.com/blogs/linguafranca/2018/04/23/emoji-are-ruining-grasp-of-english-says-dumbest-language-story-of-the-week/

This article discusses the myth that Shakespeare coined 1700 words and is largely responsible for the English language. While the author rejects this number, he largely shares the view of Shakespeare’s prodigious contribution to the English lexicon:
http://www.openculture.com/2018/04/the-1700-words-invented-by-shakespeare.html
However, Jonathan Culpeper (Lancaster University) has compared Shakespeare’s language with that of his contemporaries and has largely debunked the idea of Shakespeare’s vast contribution to the English lexicon (see http://www.research.lancs.ac.uk/portal/en/upmprojects/encyclopaedia-of-shakespeares-language(a5856ca6-dbde-425d-a028-ce4e424ab619).html)

https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2018/02/21/technology/conversational-bots.html

The conversion from the Cyrillic to the Roman alphabet in Kazakhstan has proved to be a matter of politics, all surrounding the use of the apostrophe:
https://www.nytimes.com/2018/01/15/world/asia/kazakhstan-alphabet-nursultan-nazarbayev.html?smprod=nytcore-ipad&smid=nytcore-ipad-share

Why would Trump say he is “like, really smart” rather than simply that he is “really smart”? What is “like” doing in this expression. Read what the experts say:
https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2018/01/why-would-the-president-of-the-united-states-like-tweet-this-way/549890/?utm_source=eb

The use of “pled” vs “pleaded” in a Trump tweet may be evidence of authorship:
http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2017/12/looking-for-the-linguistic-smoking-gun-in-a-trump-tweet/547361/?utm_source=eb

More generally, can “forensic linguistics” point to the authorship of Trump’s tweets?
https://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2017/12/forensic-linguists-tackle-trumps-notorious-flynn-tweet/547898/

Here is a wonderful rendition of McCartney’s “Yesterday” in Old English by a German group:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nTRl0bMfWUQ

After over 50 years of work and six published volumes, the Dictionary of American Regional English is finally coming to end:

https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/the-closing-of-a-great-american-dialect-project

See “Indexes and Databases” in the UBC Library for an electronic copy of the dictionary.