English Language Studies

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 Southern California. However, it remains unclear whether this feature originated in Southern California among females (it is found widely among younger speakers), and researchers also do not know why women use it more frequently:
http://nyti.ms/Jlp5AW

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

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute in Nijmegen, The Netherlands, have researched the word “huh” – “a simple syllable with a low-front central vowel, glottal onset consonant, if any, and questioning intonation” – and found that it exists in widely divergent and typologically different languages such as English, Mandarin, and Siwu (West Africa):
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/11/09/arts/that-syllable-everyone-recognizes.html?_r=0
This may provide evidence for the social origins of language.

Warning: potentially offensive language
A Canadian is arguing in a Dubai court that in Canada f*** off is not swearing but just an emphatic way of telling someone to leave one alone:
http://news.nationalpost.com/2013/11/04/canadian-man-fights-strict-dubai-swearing-laws-by-arguing-f-off-is-not-an-insult-in-canada/

Professor Andrew Bryd of the University of Kentucky here recites the fable “The Sheep and the Horses” in reconstructed Proto-Indo-European. This fable was composed in 1868 by the German linguist August Schleicher. Like the words and grammar of PIE, the sounds of the language are a theoretical construct (and must, of course, be taken with a liberal grain of salt):
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/09/28/proto-indo-european-language-ancestors_n_4005545.html

The urge to correct others’ grammar may affect all of us at one time or another. An interesting article in slate.com discusses this issue:
http://www.slate.com/articles/life/the_good_word/2013/09/language_bullies_pedants_and_grammar_nerds_who_correct_people_all_the_time.single.html
An edition of lexicon valley also discusses this issue with linguist John McWhorter:
http://www.slate.com/articles/podcasts/lexicon_valley/2013/08/lexicon_valley_with_john_mcwhorter_on_why_prescriptivism_lives_in_all_of.html

The linguist David Crystal discusses and performs Shakespeare with his actor son Ben, using both modern (RP) and EModE (what they call “OP”) pronunciation in this 10-minute video:
http://twentytwowords.com/2013/09/05/performing-shakespeares-plays-with-their-original-english-accent/