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.
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Global English
New words from noncelebrity neologizers
Why do some new words take off … and some fail? Neologism expert Allan Metcalf, the executive secretary of the American Dialect Society, gives five factors by which to judge the success of a new word: what he calls the FUDGE scale.
American dialects from A to Z
DARE stands alone as the most exhaustive record of regional speech in America, each page bursting with geographically nuanced information about the country’s diverse lexicon.
Language change and slang
A brief history of speaking about graduation
… just going back 140 years, we’ve seen transitions from graduated at to graduated from to the plain graduated. But there’s an even more substantial change in the history of graduate. Graduating used to be something a school did to its students, not something the students did to the school.
Teens on TV: are they talking your language?
Michael Rosen talks to EastEnders and Skins scriptwriters about how they reflect – and help create – young people’s slang
Language teaching and resources
European stereotypes: what do we think of each other and are we right?
As the European crisis ratchets up antagonism between countries, there has been a rise in name-calling and finger-pointing … The six newspapers in the Europa project were asked to stereotype each other, and then asked cultural commentators in each country to assess how accurate they are.
Books, words, languages, and science
UK: Lack of languages in schools concerns unis
“We believe that knowledge of a modern foreign language and the possession of intercultural skills are an integral part of a 21st-century education,” …
When Does Speaking a Foreign Language Get a Candidate in Trouble?
Every four years, it seems, one of the major issues in the U.S. presidential campaign is how many languages the candidates speak, the implication being: the fewer, the better.
Funny
Awesomely Appropriate (Albeit Alternative) Definition
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