InScience: documentary Hacking Hate sheds light on the influence of hate speech on social media
Why do people engage in hate speech online? TalkLing attended a screening of the documentary
What I learned about language development during the COVID-19 lockdown – Part III: Bilingualism is what you make of it
Oh, the lockdowns… Thankfully the last one was more than a year ago (at the time of writing), and although it was challenging being at home so much, it also allowed me to spend much more time with my daughter. In my last two posts, I told you about how my then-one-and-a-half-year-old was starting to understand and produce her first sentences. Now a feisty three-year-old, she is talking nonstop and switching between two languages.
Hot stuff: Talking about temperature
The weather. Ugh, yeah I know, the weather. Possibly the most common thing we all like to complain about and also a (stereo?) typical topic of small talk. In every language course I have ever taken, words and phrases describing weather phenomena are among the first I learned. Speakers of languages all around the world love talking about it and with the UN climate report released recently, I cannot imagine us stopping any time soon. However, we don’t all talk about the weather in the same way.
Music or language? El Silbo Gomero (‘the Gomeran whistle’)
In the misty mountains of the Canary island La Gomera (next to Tenerife) sounds the whistle of a particularly curious bird: humans. On this island, farmers have been communicating by whistling melodies to one another for as long as they can remember.
To put a (fake) smile on one’s face
Spotting a fake smile can be more difficult than you think. Although humans are wired to be social, most people are actually surprisingly bad at recognizing whether a smile is authentic.