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The impact of technology and migration is shaking up the face of Europe in unprecedented ways. The knock-on effect has been keenly felt in the individual languages spoken in the EU member states. Many...
READ MORE | 8 Feb 2017
Are emojis the new universal language?
This week, Oxford Dictionaries have chosen the new Word of the Year 2015: the ‘face with tears of joy’ emoji. Inspired by the increasing popularity of emojis amongst digital users of all a...
READ MORE | 20 Nov 2015
Technology, Speech and Language
A recent article ‘Natural language processing: is this the end of the written word?’ on TechRadar trumpets the latest developments in the ability of smartphones to process search queries t...
READ MORE | 5 Aug 2014
Language is hardwired to be optimistic, even if people aren’t
Is English a perversely positive language no matter what is going on in the world? i09.com reports on a new study by mathematicians at the University of Vermont that analyzed millions o...
READ MORE | 13 Jan 2012
Nice piece on Language Johnson, an Economist blog dedicated to language use, on the recent influx of 'Britishisms' into American English. Apparently, 'kerfuffle', 'snog', 'nick' and 'c...
READ MORE | 15 Nov 2011
Cracking the code of machine translation
An amazing step forward in the translation of languages has been made thanks to human and artificial intelligence working together. According to an article in this week's New Scientist, treating langu...
READ MORE | 22 Jun 2011
Evolution of Language Takes Unexpected Turn
April's Wired Science article announces that the notion of there being a universal way in how languages evolve, affected by place, culture and the common linguistic structures in our brain might be ch...
READ MORE | 2 Jun 2011
Pimp your vocab...the handbook of student slang
Helpful article from the Guardian on how to decode the latest Student-speak argot. You probably feel, like me, too "Teek" to understand "Wagwan"!...
READ MORE | 22 Apr 2010
Can You Guess Where My Accent Is From?
Here's a fun quiz for Friday brought to you by the Language Trainers Group. The quiz features 16 people reading a few lines from Rudyard Kipling's famous poem "If". All you have to do is listen to the...
READ MORE | 16 Apr 2010
Foreign subtitles improve speech perception
Foreign subtitles improve speech perception for second langauge learners according to a new study by the Max Planck Institute for Psycholinguistics. The research suggests that foreign language acquisi...
READ MORE | 24 Feb 2010