“Yo” said, “yo” said…

May 21, 2012 by

“Yo” said, “yo” said…

A recent LotW post discussed a newly introduced gender-neutral third person Swedish pronoun hen. It appears that a similar gender-neutral pronoun is developing naturally in a local dialect of American English. According to a post on...

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Linguistic diversity and time

May 10, 2011 by

The world’s 7,000 or so languages are not distributed evenly over the the world’s landmass. Hotspots of linguistic diversity include such areas as Western Africa, the Caucasus and Papua New Guinea. But what determines...

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Thus spoke Shakespeare! Or did he?

Mar 25, 2011 by

It seems to be a tradition with Shakespearean theater everywhere — even in the U.S. — to think that the bard himself spoke “BBC English” (also known as Queen’s English, King’s English, Oxford...

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OMG, Vikings did it too!

Oct 4, 2010 by

Many of the people concerned about the changes in the English language (allegedly) due to computers and other modern technologies feel especially worried about the proliferation of three-letter acronyms like LOL (“laughing out...

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Lingua Longa Vita e Brevis?

Apr 19, 2010 by

The cartoon illustrates many people’s worry about what the Internet, text-messaging and other modern technologies are doing to the English language. When space (and time) is at a premium, we write U instead of you, NITE instead...

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