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
Do We Talk Funny? 51 American Colloquialisms
Have our regional ways of saying particular things — sometimes in very particular ways — receded into the past? Or do we talk as funny as ever?
Language change and slang
Tin Pots Bells and McDonald’s
I realised that I had been quite casually referring all my life to tin-pot dictators without ever wondering why a dictator would be in a pot at all, and why that pot would be made of tin.
Phablets and fauxhawks: the linguistic secrets of a good blended word
A brilliant word like omnishambles makes blending look easy, but there’s more to it than just jamming words together and cutting off the bits that stick out.
Books, dictionaries, words and language
Ghost Voices
How Yiddish was saved. [From Schwa Fire, a subscription journal with limited free access.]
Infographic
A world of languages – and how many speak them
There are at least 7102 known languages alive in the world today. Twenty-three of these languages are a mother tongue for more than 50 million people.
Video
Fossil
The fascinating origins of fossil.
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