‘Hen’ expected to be recognised as alternative to feminine ‘hun’ and masculine ‘han’ in official language this year
A new gender-neutral pronoun is likely to enter the official Norwegian language within a year, the Language Council of Norway has confirmed.
“Hen” would become an alternative to the existing singular third-person pronouns, the feminine “hun” and the masculine “han”.
Continue reading...Accolade reflects how use of the short form of ‘vaccine’ rose by 72 times in a year and spread across society
In a year when talk over the virtual garden fence has focused on whether you have been jabbed, jagged or had both doses yet, and whether it was Pfizer, AstraZeneca or Moderna you were injected with, Oxford Languages has chosen vax as its word of the year.
After deciding last year that it was impossible to sum up 2020 in one word, the company that produces the Oxford English Dictionary said the shorthand for vaccine had “injected itself into the bloodstream of the English language” this year during the Covid pandemic.
Continue reading...David Taylor, who was a police officer for 30 years, offers an insight into the handling of ‘minor’ crimes, while Ann Kelly and Caroline Ley reflect on the language used by ministers and the media
Having been a police officer for 30 years, serving as a detective inspector and in the police complaints arena, I can say officers and staff nationwide will have been horrified by the murder of Sarah Everard (Sarah Everard’s killer might have been identified as threat sooner, police admit, 30 September). The approach of all police forces, not just the Met, as to how they deal with “minor crime” is now under scrutiny. Such crime is only considered “minor” by the police and not by the victim, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone to the trouble of reporting it.
While every day many officers and staff successfully conduct criminal investigations and go the extra mile for victims, this is not the case for all; you only have to report a crime considered by the police to be “low level” to realise this. Each crime is assessed based on its seriousness and its solvability, often by desk-based staff under pressure to file the case without further investigation. This “don’t look too close” approach means any evidence that potentially exists is not pursued or is ignored. In my experience, too many police officers and staff lack investigative professional curiosity, compounded by the fact that there is often a complete lack of challenge from first-line supervisors towards staff they consider as their mates, or where such scrutiny could attract accusations of bullying.
Continue reading...Exclusive: ‘like’, ‘bare’, ‘that’s long’ and ‘cut eyes at me’ among terms showing up in pupils’ work now vetoed in classroom
A London secondary school is trying to stop its pupils from using “basically” at the beginning of sentences and deploying phrases such as “oh my days” in a crackdown on “fillers” and “slang” in the classroom.
Ark All Saints academy has produced lists of “banned” language which includes “he cut his eyes at me”, which the Collins dictionary says originates in the Caribbean and means to look rudely at a person and then turn away sharply while closing one’s eyes dismissively.
Ermmm …
Because …
No …
Like …
Say …
You see …
You know …
Basically …
He cut his eyes at me (he shot me a withering sidelong glance)
Oh my days (my goodness)
Oh my God
That’s a neck (you need a slap for that)
Wow
That’s long (that’s boring, tough or tedious)
Bare (very, extremely)
Cuss (swear or abuse)
Continue reading...Whistled languages exist on every inhabited continent – now some scientists think similar dialects could have preceded the spoken word
For centuries, shepherds from the small village of Aas in the French Pyrenees led their sheep and cattle up to mountain pastures for the summer months. To ease the solitude, they would communicate with each other or with the village below in a whistled form of the local Gascon dialect, transmitting and receiving information accurately over distances of up to 10 kilometres.
They “spoke” in simple phrases – “What’s the time?”, “Come and eat,”, “Bring the sheep home” – but each word and syllable was articulated as in speech. Outsiders often mistook the whistling for simple signalling (“I’m over here!”), and the irony, says linguist and bioacoustician Julien Meyer of Grenoble Alpes University in France, is that the world of academia only realised its oversight around the middle of the 20th century, just as the whistled language of Aas was dying on the lips of its last speakers.
Continue reading...How did humans learn to talk and why haven’t chimpanzees followed suit? Linguistics expert Sverker Johansson busts some chauvinist myths
How and when did human language evolve? Did a “grammar module” just pop into our ancestors’ brains one day thanks to a random change in our DNA? Or did language come from grooming, or tool use, or cooking meat with fire? These and other hypotheses exist, but there seems little way to rationally choose between them. It was all so very long ago, so any theory must be essentially speculation.
Or must it? This is the question presented as an elegant intellectual thriller by The Dawn of Language: Axes, Lies, Midwifery and How We Came to Talk. Its author is Sverker Johansson, a serene and amiable 60-year-old Swede who speaks to me over Zoom from his book-crammed home study in the city of Falun, where he works as a senior adviser at Dalarna University.
Continue reading...The cognitive scientist explains the link between intelligence and telling fibs – and why lying is such a common form of communication in fields from art to politics
Martin Turpin is a PhD researcher at the department of psychology at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, who is studying linguistic bullshit. He is the lead author of a recent paper entitled Bullshit Ability As an Honest Signal of Intelligence, which found that people who produce “satisfactory bullshit” are judged to be of high intelligence by their audience.
What made you choose bullshit as a topic to research?
Two main intellectual drives led me here. I think individual human brains are fascinating machines, but there is something far more magical to me about what happens when multiple brains are organised in a network. It can be more rational to have the wrong answer but be part of a group than being a lonely person with the correct answer. That seeming contradiction from the perspective of someone who highly values truth for its own sake makes for a fascinating creature to study.
The island’s Indigenous people are in a race against time to save their native tongues before they are lost forever
In a modest conference room near the edge of Taiwan’s Sun Moon Lake, Panu Kapamumu holds up an unwieldy A3 booklet. The home-printed document contains every known word of Thao, the language of his Indigenous tribe. Kapamumu runs his finger down the list, reading out a selection of Thao words, meanings and translations. He reads slowly and purposefully, a man in his sixties but still just a student of his mother tongue.
Continue reading...Linguist who compiled list of words says they help tell story of life during pandemic
From coronamüde (tired of Covid-19) to Coronafrisur (corona hairstyle), a German project is documenting the huge number of new words coined in the last year as the language races to keep up with lives radically changed by the pandemic.
The list, compiled by the Leibniz Institute for the German Language, an organisation that documents German language in the past and present, already comprises more than 1,200 new German words – many more than the 200 seen in an average year.
Continue reading...A leading linguist pleads for moderation as a huge outbreak of ‘Greenglish’, much of it Covid-related, spreads
Usually, Professor Georgios Babiniotis would take pride in the fact that the Greek word “pandemic” – previously hardly ever uttered – had become the word on everyone’s lips.
After all, the term that conjures the scourge of our times offers cast-iron proof of the legacy of Europe’s oldest language. Wholly Greek in derivation – pan means all, demos means people – its usage shot up by more than 57,000% last year according to Oxford English Dictionary lexicographers.
Continue reading...More people than ever are being exposed to sign language through Covid press briefings as interpreters work to pass on vital information
Saamanta Serna describes herself as a Coda – the child of a Deaf adult. She grew up up with a Deaf mother and a father who is hearing and an American sign language (ASL) interpreter, and later decided to pursue interpreting herself after high school.
Now a certified ASL interpreter, Serna has done frequent in-person interpreting for medical appointments during Covid. She has also noticed a change in the world’s perception of sign language since the beginning of the pandemic: more people are paying attention.
Continue reading...Our foreign correspondents reflect on the practical and cultural importance of fluency in a country’s native tongue
During the worst of the coronavirus outbreak in China, people described to us deeply personal and traumatic experiences – losing their parents, suffering the death of a child, being harassed and intimidated for trying to speak out. Having these conversations in Mandarin was important not just for capturing nuance and detail but for a sense of empathy.
Continue reading...In this book extract, Amanda Laugesen says it’s hard to argue that Australians swear more than others, but we do our best, and we try to be inventive in the process
Linguist Geoffrey Hughes writes that “people swear by what is most potent to them”.
What is considered to be “most potent” changes across time, although taboo has often focused on the religious (hell), the sexual (fuck), and the excretory (shit). More recently racial, sexist and other discriminatory epithets have become our most taboo and controversial terms.
Continue reading...Group of language experts is taking local governments and organisations to task for their over-reliance on machine translation
Encountering mangled English is a frequent source of mirth for many residents of Japan, but for one group of language professionals, the proliferation of inappropriate words and phrases is becoming a national embarrassment.
Their recently formed group, loosely translated as the association for the consideration of Japan’s English, is taking local governments and other bodies to task for their over-reliance on machine translation on official websites and public signage.
Continue reading...Publisher labels ‘bitch’ as offensive but fails to satisfy some equality campaigners
Oxford University Press has updated its dictionaries’ definitions of the word “woman” following an extensive review triggered by equality campaigners.
Among the updates to Oxford Dictionaries’ definitions is the acknowledgement that a woman can be “a person’s wife, girlfriend, or female lover”, rather than only a man’s.
Continue reading...Moniker has spread far beyond its Irish origins – but risks suffering the same fate as Kevin
Liam is set to become the new Kevin, researchers predict, as the mellifluous moniker graduates from its Irish origins and rises up baby name charts around the world.
Fewer Liams were born in the Republic of Ireland last year (334) than in Germany (an estimated 3,800), Spain (962), Sweden (760), Belgium (575) and Switzerland (443). For American baby boys, the short form of Uilliam or William has been the most popular choice for three years running, with 20,502 boys named Liam born in the US in 2019 alone.
Continue reading...The British empire forced its colonies to abandon their own languages. Now they are making English their own
There is one expression I have grown up hearing from relatives of a certain age, but never been able to accept. It’s the description of Twi – the Akan language spoken by my family – as “the vernacular”, a term which implicitly compares it with the colonial language, English, and somehow finds it wanting. The word itself is a revealing symptom of the colonial project. Just as nations like the Yoruba, with a population of more than 40 million, were patronisingly described as “tribes”, when in fact they were substantial nations, African languages were downgraded to “the vernacular”. It’s a term more befitting of a regional dialect than a nation’s language, with its own history, politics and literature.
The attempt to discourage Africans from speaking our own languages not only failed, but has had the glorious result of backfiring, to the extent that now Britain’s own inhabitants are officially adopting African vocab. This month the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) added Nigeria’s first entries to already recognised gems like “howzit” from South Africa. Other Africans will recognise lots of the latest lingo to get the OED stamp – “chop”, to eat or to misappropriate funds; “next tomorrow”, the day after tomorrow; “sef”, a great Pidgin flourish for emphasis.
Continue reading...American Dialect Society’s choice recognises word’s rising use to refer to person whose gender identity is non-binary
US linguists have chosen “they” as their word of the decade, recognising the growing use of third-person plural pronouns as a singular form to refer to people who identify their gender as neither entirely male nor entirely female.
The American Dialect Society also bestowed its word of the year honours on the increasingly common practice of introducing oneself in correspondence or socially by the set of pronouns one prefers to be called by – declaring in an email, for example, “pronouns: she/her”.
Continue reading...Brexit, millennials, binge-watching… every word in the English language was coined by someone. What’s it like to be an accidental wordsmith?
Are we living through a golden age of linguistic inventiveness? Buzzwords and neologisms – from office jargon to the lexicons of democratic chaos in Britain and the US, as well as the ever-expanding culture wars – rain down on us every day, and can gain global currency at the speed of fibre-optic cable. Many, of course, fail – like “Brixit”, an early rival to Brexit, or “Generation Me”, one proposed label for what we now call millennials. Others rapidly become part of the modern conversation. Why, for example, do critics call young, supposedly over sensitive and easily triggered people “snowflakes”? Because in Chuck Palahniuk’s 1996 novel Fight Club, Tyler Durden says: “You are not special. You are not a beautiful and unique snowflake.”
Palahniuk’s contribution, however, was accidental. He later explained: “Back in 1994, when I was writing my book, I wasn’t insulting anyone but myself… My use of the term ‘snowflake’ never had anything to do with fragility or sensitivity.” Instead, he was using it as a means of “deprogramming himself”, so he didn’t believe in his own praise. But the point is that you can’t control what usage will do once it’s out of your hands: a much wider uptake can shift the meaning. The term “woke”, for example, is now used mockingly for a kind of overrighteous liberalism; but its first recorded use, by the African-American novelist William Melvin Kelley, was meant to indicate an awareness of political issues, especially those around race, a positive usage that still also persists.
Continue reading...Linguists find use of vernacular expressions aligning east-west 30 years after Berlin Wall fell
Thirty years after the fall of the Berlin Wall, an invisible border running through Germany continues to resist all efforts to make the country truly whole again. However, this dividing line is not about attitudes to democracy, refugees or Russia, but something more elementary: how to tell the time.
In the northern half of the old West Germany, from Flensburg in the north down to Heidelberg in the south, people use the expression viertel nach zehn (“quarter past ten”) if their clock reads 10.15. Yet in a tract of land that covers the old socialist GDR as well as parts of Bavaria and Baden-Württemberg, the same time would be described as viertel elf or “quarter eleven”.
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