A wug is an imaginary cartoon creature created and first used by psycholinguist Jean Berko Gleason to test people’s ability to use the English plural morpheme*. The test usually involves two cartoon panels—one depicting one wug with the caption “This is a wug,” and the other depicting two wugs with the caption “Now there is another one. There are two of them. There are […]
Every language has a list of rarely used words that very few people know. They are not commonly known because they are rarely needed. Why bother learning something that you will not use..right? But for us, language nerds, that’s what gives meaning to our lives. Tracking down words and what they mean satisfies a curiosity
30 English Words That Are Rarely Known To Most People. Read More »
As native speakers, we all have assumptions about the particular speed of languages other than our own. And most of the time, our assumptions are correct. Empirically speaking, linguists measure the speed of languages by how many syllables are articulated per second or per minute. Of course, we don’t have data from all the languages of
There are approximately 7000 languages spoken in the world today, the majority of which are spoken by very tiny populations. About 60% of the world’s population, approximately 4 billion people, speak one of the few languages listed below. In fact, only 40 languages are spoken by more than 30 million native speakers. These most spoken languages are
The languages with more than 30 million native speakers. Read More »
Individuals fluent in two languages may possess enhanced abilities in shifting their attention between tasks compared to those who are monolingual, as indicated by a recent study featured in the journal Bilingualism: Language and Cognition. The research, conducted by Grace deMeurisse, a linguistics Ph.D. candidate at the University of Florida, and Edith Kaan, a professor
The Bilingual Brain May be Better at Ignoring Irrelevant Information, Study Finds. Read More »
The International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA) is one of modern linguistics’ greatest and most genius inventions. Besides its usefulness in accurately describing the sounds of every human language, we can use it for more fun stuff, like this article we wrote a while back. Below we have compiled the world’s most famous quotes that not everyone will
If you think that language is just a means of communication, then you are massively underestimating the role that language plays in our lives. We are somehow at the mercy of the languages we speak. They shape and influence our behavior through and through.
The Language You Speak Influences What You Look at, According to Study. Read More »
Language sits deep within every one of us. It influences the way we see the world and guides how we relate to one another and to events happening around us. Studies have long shown that people who speak more than one language may unconsciously change their personality when they switch between the languages they speak.
You are likely to make immoral decisions while speaking a second language, study finds. Read More »
Language is something we breathe in and out every moment of our lives. It is everywhere, everyone is exceptionally good at it. Yet, no one knows how it got into our heads. The number of sentences you can form with any given language is virtually infinite. It makes zero sense to say that we learn
This is how much time it would take to memorize every sentence in a language. Read More »
Proverbs say so much in so few words. How different cultures and languages use proverbs for certain meanings and situations is fascinating. To capture this fascination, artist James Chapman, a designer based in England, brought us a whole bunch of funny and peculiar proverb illustrations and their meanings from all around the world.
Funny and peculiar proverbs from different languages (Illustrated). Read More »
