linguistic

Canadian writer Sheila Heti’s 2010 breakout novel sought to interrogate its titular puzzler, How Should a Person Be? It’s become a continuing quest, but over the course of a career that now finds her publishing her 12th book, she’s also asked readers to consider again and again another question: how should prose be? Pairing philosophical inquiry with formal experimentation, she’s drawn inspiration from sources as scattered as reality TV, the I Ching and chatbot utterances, expanding our thinking about structure, character…

“Indie” isn’t a new or unique term exclusive to gaming. Music and film in particular have had decades of independent productions that occasionally break through into mainstream success. Indie games have, of course, been around since the advent of the medium itself, but only really came to prominence to the wider public in the late 2000s and early 2010s when digital distribution started becoming a major player. Just like in music and film, indie games drew attention based on that label which implied to the audience…

The African continent is home to some of the world’s most multilingual societies. Credit: Roxane 134/Shutterstock Language is a uniquely human skill. That's why studying how people learn and use language is crucial to understanding what it means to be human. Given that most people in the world—an estimated 60%—are multilingual, meaning that they know and use more than one language, a researcher who aims to understand language…

Credit: Prometheus Books Can the language someone uses be as unique as their fingerprints? As I describe in my forthcoming book, "Linguistic Fingerprints: How Language Creates and Reveals Identity," that was true in the case of Theodore Kaczynski. Kaczynski, who was known as the Unabomber, died in a North Carolina prison on June…

Credit: Unsplash/CC0 Public Domain ChatGPT is a hot topic at my university, where faculty members are deeply concerned about academic integrity, while administrators urge us to "embrace the benefits" of this "new frontier." It's a classic example of what my colleague Punya Mishra calls the "doom-hype cycle" around new technologies. Likewise, media coverage of human-AI interaction—whether paranoid or starry-eyed—tends to…

(left) 5-year-old AAE girl's production of “elephant.” When the /t/ sound in /nt/ is produced the AAE speaker produces less aspiration noise. The /t/ sound exists for a shorter period in time relative to the WAE /t/ production. The duration of the word is 740 milliseconds (.74 seconds). (right) 5-year-old WAE girl's production of “elephant.” When the /t/ sound in /nt/ is produced the WAE speaker produces a lot of aspiration noise. The /t/ sound exists…

Credit: CC0 Public Domain A linguistic arms race is raging online—and it isn't clear who's winning. On one side are social networks like Facebook, Instagram and TikTok. These sites have become better and better at identifying and removing language and content that violates their community standards. Social media users are on the…

Credit: FGC/Shutterstock The way a person speaks is an intrinsic part of their identity. It's tribal, marking a speaker as being from one social group or another. Accents are a sign of belonging as much as something that separates communities. Yet we can probably all think of examples of people who seem to have "lost" their…

Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain At the 95th Academy Awards, Daniel Scheinert and Daniel Kwan's "Everything Everywhere All at Once" took home wins in acting, editing and directing categories, and also won the coveted best picture award. The quirky and expansive sci-fi action film is famed for its absurdist take on the idea of a…

In Charlotte Brontë’s novel ‘Shirley,’ English protagonists Shirley and Caroline use French to resist their patriarchal milieu. Credit: Shutterstock Linguistic diversity, like other types of diversity, can enrich life. It's a truism that languages and cultures are closely allied. Some believe that language imposes its own unique perceptual grid on its users. …