Dell H. Hymes, a prominent anthropologist, linguist and folklorist whose work mined the rich, often overlooked territory where language and culture intersect, died on Nov. 13 in Charlottesville, Va. He was 82.

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What is a theory and how do you prove it? This article gets at the the underlying language of science and its philosophy.

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Asking them to hold onto languages they no longer want is more for the linguists' sake than for the communities themselves.

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NEW YORK - IF YOU want to be a great conversationalist, whatever you do don't use the word 'whatever'. It topped a US survey as the most annoying word.

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"The Chronicles of Ehav Ever: Episode 22 In this episode I go through a very brief overview of the Yisraeli (Israeli) National Language, Ivrit (Hebrew). I also talk about a number of dialects that came later in Yisraeli/Jewish history. "

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Cumbrians lobby for Celtic nationhood through internet network

It's known as the Celtic fringe; the six regions on the fringe of Europe which have maintained enough of their ancient Celtic languages and culture to be recognizable today.

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The National Science Foundation has awarded Kevin Knight and collaborators $1.6 million to develop computational tools to analyze texts in now-unreadable writing systems. Knight, a senior research scientist in the Information Science Institute's and a research associate profes …

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After a couple of lessons it was clear what was going on. It was a sex / nationalism thing. Señora H got her kicks from linguistically humiliating foreigners in their own language and paying for it. I was an English as a Foreign Language hooker. She was my john.

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In the last few months, a number of pundits have been analyzing the language of Barack Obama in an attempt to uncover who he really is.  The words that are attracting the most attention is his use of first person singular pronouns, or I-words.  As Mark Liberman and many others  …

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The main syntactic problem is to determine whether the @!$%# is being used as an pleonastic (semantically empty) direct object of shut or as a pre-head modifier of the preposition phrase (PP) headed by up. (Yes, the up of shut up is a one-word PP.

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Humans communicate with one another using a dazzling array of languages, each differing from the next in innumerable ways.

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John Miller ... asserts that every time a language dies, it's time to celebrate because it means another 'primitive' tribe has joined the modern world. Although Miller fails to mention what's so great about the modern world, he does have a point.

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Malaysia will revert to using its national language, Bahasa Malaysia, to teach science and math starting in 2012, abandoning a six-year English policy that the government said had failed to improve student grades.

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When Does Life Begin? A Quick Etymological Analysis

The question of when life begins is certainly a fraught question. Politicians have offered their opinions on the issue for decades.

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Next time you're driving along Italy's Amalfi coast and you select "English" as the language on the car's GPS navigation system, there's every chance you've used Dr Julie Vonwiller's technology.

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The biggest thesaurus in the world will be published this autumn after a labour of love spanning five decades. Work on the Historical Thesaurus of the Oxford English Dictionary began in 1965.

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When police inspector Garry Weddell learned that his wife, Sandra, was having an affair, his revenge took the form of what he hoped would be the perfect crime.

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Two more universities look set to close their languages departments just a week after a damning report highlighted the risks of language decline to British research and the economy.

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Television reduces verbal interaction between parents and infants, which could delay children's language development, says a U.S. study that challenges claims that certain infant-targeted DVDs actually benefit youngsters.

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Grammar is back in fashion. Everyone wants grammar back in our schools but that's as far as the consensus goes.

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Do people know more words than they actually use? And is having a large vocabulary something you learn or have a natural ability for?

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The national English curriculum will include a grammar guide setting out a systematic course of study to be taught in schools and the concepts students should learn.

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Sound Sensations: My Week as a Deaf Person

Last week life decided to give me a practical lesson in communication. After swimming regularly at the pool, one afternoon my ears blocked up. I couldn't hear a thing and spent the next couple of days understanding first-hand what it was like to be deaf.

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They're a firm part of our language and even speak to us of our national culture — but some words aren't quite as English as we think.

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"I began to realize that I was living in a completely different culture. There is the illusion that we speak the same language, but we really don't."

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