linguistics

Tom Di Mino, a self-taught AI engineer and an amateur linguist, claims to have accomplished a feat that has eluded linguistics experts for over a century: deciphering a Bronze-age Minoan writing system known as Linear A. His claims are currently being reviewed by linguistics experts at Rutgers and Cambridge. While I’m caveating, I will also mention that I know Tom socially. Di Mino, who is based …

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 15 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02488-3 Languages exhibit striking regularities in how meanings are mapped to word forms, yet analogous patterns at the subword level remain under-explored. This study fills the gap with a large-scale cross-linguistic analysis of regularity at and below the word level, drawing on data from over 1,900 languages.

Nature Human Behaviour, Published online: 15 June 2026; doi:10.1038/s41562-026-02493-6 Languages often co-express related meanings, either reusing words or combining parts of words. It is poorly understood when each strategy is favoured. Across 1,982 languages, Brochhagen et al. find the ease of disambiguation of co-expressed meanings to predict the strategy used, which suggests that co-expressio…

These 23 words link modern and extinct languages. You would have been understood if you used them 15,000 years ago.

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 13 June 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07873-x Language planning and identity construction in postcolonial educational policies: a comparative analysis of Portuguese-speaking countries

A linguist lays out what communicating with aliens could actually involve—and what that tells us about human language

Suryansh Bisht, Law College Dehradun Ms. Purnima Tyagi, Law College Dehradun ABSTRACT Language is an essential component of cultural identity and constitutional pluralism in India. The Himalayan regional languages of Garhwali, Kumaoni, and Jaunsari represent rich linguistic traditions of Uttarakhand, yet they face gradual decline due to migration, urbanization, dominance of Hindi and English, and…

I wonder how native speakers would perceive the style of this sentence and how they would react emotionally to it: He threw stones and then punches at the protesters. How acceptable and idiomatic is ...

Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, Published online: 06 June 2026; doi:10.1057/s41599-026-07818-4 Is rows a rose in Chinese? A meta-analysis on the role of phonology, orthography and semantics in early Chinese character processing

This word for outdoing or outshining others originated in the manosphere, but is now thoroughly mainstream. Why is it so popular – and should we be worried about slang that arises from toxic subcultures? Until recently, if someone had said “mog” to me, I probably would have assumed they were talking about the children’s book cat created by the late great Judith Kerr. If asked about “mogging” or b…

The Vocabulary of Violence: Inside the Language That Divides the World Why do some words wound more deeply than weapons? Why can a slur, a slogan, a tweet, or a political speech ignite hatred, inspire violence, or reshape entire societies? In Obscenity and Hate Speech, the fifth volume of The Tower of Babble and a crucial installment of Peter Ayolov’s Miscommunication Trilogy, language itself bec…

This paper proposes the concept of “Present Chinese” as a theoretical framework for understanding how contemporary Chinese language is continuously produced through symbolic institutions, platform media, and AI-mediated corpus circulation. Rather than treating Chinese as a naturally unified language, the paper approaches “Chinese” as a Master Signifier that temporarily sutures heterogeneous lingu…

In the book Ségou, by Maryse Condé, we find the following song of benediction that is sung at marriages: Que ce mariage soit heureux ! Qu’il en sorte pieds et mains ! Que dure le feu de cette union ! ...

The Disappearing Complexity: Simplicity, Speech and the Planned Obsolescence of Language What if the greatest crisis of the information age is not misinformation, censorship, or technological disruption, but the gradual decline of language itself? Simplicity of Human Speech, Part 25 of The Miscommunication Trilogy: The Entropy of Communication, Vol. II, explores one of the most overlooked transfo…

The Complex Nature of Language: Meaning, Mind, and the Architecture of Communication Language is humanity’s most remarkable invention and its most enduring mystery. In The Complex Nature of Language, the twenty-fourth volume of The Miscommunication Trilogy: The Entropy of Communication, Vol. II, the intricate structures, hidden mechanisms, and evolving dynamics of language are examined through an…

IntroductionLinguistic choices rapidly evoke social meanings, that is, information related to social identities, group membership, and social evaluations of the speaker, the hearer, and their relationship, but this activation is influenced by the linguistic domain. Moreover, social meaning and language attitudes are shaped by the societal context, but most previous studies focused on monolinguall…

Nature Microbiology, Published online: 26 May 2026; doi:10.1038/s41564-026-02348-w Public trust and policy impact depend on communication in local languages. Nonetheless, one language, English, dominates scientific publishing. Multilingual science communication is not outreach — it is part of research responsibility.

A paper by MA student Brandon Osgan, "Vowel reduction is conditioned by quality and quantity interactions: Evidence from Bolognese," has appeared in the current volume of the Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America. The open-access paper is available ... The post Brandon Osgan in Proceedings of the Linguistic Society of America appeared first on Department of Linguistics .

Faculty member Misha Becker has been named as the next Editor-in-Chief of the journal Language Acquisition, effective as of July 2026. Congratulations, Misha! The post Misha Becker named next Editor-in-Chief of Language Acquisition appeared first on Department of Linguistics .

The parliamentary rule that only English – and not Jamaican – is allowed has reignited debate about language, legitimacy, and postcolonial identity When MP Nekeisha Burchell stood up to give her maiden speech, she was keenly aware of how much Jamaica’s parliament mirrored the Westminster version, thousands of miles away in London. As in the UK, the session on 12 May had started with the arrival o…