Bilingual Bonus: How Similar Languages Boost Vocabulary
Raising a child is full of challenges. My brother and his wife recently had their
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
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.
New COVID-19-related words as social antibodies keeping our brain busy.
When facing unexpected world changes, as in the case of the current pandemic, the language system adapts to the challenge to express a new reality. How? By forging new words! Let’s find out how this happens by looking at one of the most powerful engines we can count on: our brain.