Research has shown that babies are born with the ability to recognise familiar sounds and language patterns. The study found that in the last 10 weeks of pregnancy, fetuses are listening to their mothers communicate, and when they are born, they can indicate what...

A study published last year by Katarzyna Boduch-Grabka and Shiri Lev-Ari of Royal Holloway, University of London shows that a short exposure to a foreign accent can reduce the bias that causes people to believe information less when it is presented in a non-native...

This article by John McWhorter points out that the word “racism” increasingly refers both to violent hate crimes and to differences in performance on standardized tests: “One of the thorniest aspects of today’s race debate is that we have come to apply that word to a...

The 33rd International Conference on Foreign and Second Language Acquisition is currently taking place at the University of Silesia in Szczyrk, Poland. Its theme is modern technologies in foreign language teaching, learning and research. La 33-a Internacia Konferenco...

Researchers at the University of British Columbia have discovered a direct link between the tongue movements of infants and their ability to distinguish speech sounds. Esploristoj ĉe la Universitato de Brita Kolumbio malkovris rektan ligon inter la langomovoj de...

Some of the world’s major lingua francas are closely identified with particular religions – Latin and Catholicism, Arabic and Islam, Sanskrit and Hinduism, and so on. This article examines the counterpoint to this pattern offered by Esperanto. Iujn el la ĉefaj...

Have you contributed your voice to Mozilla’s Common Voice project? The aim is to create a free database for speech recognition software. There is now also a forum for collaborating on, among other things, getting funding for specific language communities. Ĉu vi...

The journal Philosophical Psychology announces the Lex Academic Essay Prize, to be awarded to the author of the best essay on the understanding of linguistic discrimination. La revuo Philosophical Psychology (Filozofia Psikologio) anoncas la Esean Premion Lex...

The US organisation NJTESOL/NJBE (New Jersey Teachers of English to Speakers of Other Languages / New Jersey Bilingual Educators) uses email discussion lists and local workshops to promote the voices of teachers, and of ESL and bilingual students, about legislation...

In 1975, the Dutch mathematician, poet, linguist and Esperantist Dr. W. A. Verloren Van Themaat wrote to Sir Bernard Crick about the possible influence of Esperanto on George Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four. This article explores the subject. En 1975, la...

This article in the magazine Wired asks: how do you communicate with an intelligent entity you know nothing about? Humans are the only species on Earth endowed with advanced mathematical ability and a fully fledged faculty of language, but are these hallmarks of...

While English is the language of science – precise and succinct – the flowery nature of Spanish contributes to a culture that supports emotional expression. In doing so, it can help its speakers manage the responses to stress. A therapist in this article uses...

Researchers at the University of Copenhagen trawled through 3.5 million fiction and non-fiction books published in English between 1900 and 2008, to see if there is a difference between the types of words used to describe men and women in literature. They confirmed a...

OpenAI’s GPT-3 and other neural nets can now write original prose with mind-boggling fluency – a development that could have profound implications for the future, as discussed in this fascinating article in the New York Times. Neŭraj retoj kiel GPT-3 de OpenAI nun...

A relatively recent study shows that apes and monkeys can track relationships between sounds in the same way as humans, indicating that this ability predates the evolution of language itself by at least 40 million years. Relative lastatempa studaĵo montras, ke...

An International Colloquium on language interactions in the classroom and on the construction of knowledge in school subjects will take place on 6–7 October 2022 at the University of Lille on the Pont de Bois site, in Villeneuve d’Ascq. Internacia Kolokvo pri lingvaj...