This post contains a selection of links related to language and words in the news. These can be items from the latest news, blog posts or interesting websites related to global English, language change, education in general, and language learning and teaching in particular.
Feel free to contact us if you would like to submit a link for us to include, or just add a comment to the post, with the link(s) you’d like to share.
Global English
It’s Not Just a Dublin Accent, It’s a Dublin Dialect
The phrase “Dublin accent” belittles how I speak. This is because it’s not just an “accent”, it’s a dialect.
Language change and slang
A Zen koan from Google
This outdoor ad is composed of simple English words, 10 of which have only one syllable. And yet it’s enigmatic nearly to the point of unintelligibility.
Improve your English
Why are efforts described as “last-ditch”?
From the dry moats dug around castles to the trenches of the First World War, warfare was long fought in the trenches – or ditches.
Words, books and language
Julian Barnes remembers his friend Anita Brookner: ‘There was no one remotely like her’
Novelist Julian Barnes reminds everyone that the late Anita Brookner was much more than the chronicler of the lives of sad middle-aged women in cardigans.
Every Meal In Wuthering Heights Ranked In Order Of Sadness
Sometimes they have tea, but more often they are merely offered it, and decide they are too furious to have tea, and die instead.
Podcast
Who Gets to Name Continents?
If you have a high tolerance for a somewhat discursive style of delivery and don’t mind the occasional underwear ad there’s a lot to enjoy in this conversation about how continents got their names. (44 minutes)
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