Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in London and the south-east, according to the first results from a free app developed by Cambridge researchers.
Napoleon Katsos (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) discusses why speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with speakers of two languages.
The ability of children to speak any two dialects – two closely related varieties of the same language – may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who speak two or more substantially different languages (such as English and French).
A new app which tries to guess your regional accent based on your pronunciation of 26 words and colloquialisms will help Cambridge academics track the movement and changes to English dialects in the modern era.
A database of Welsh tweets is being used to identify the characteristics of an evolving language.
An endangered Greek dialect spoken in Turkey has been identified by Dr Ioanna Sitaridou as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its closeness to a language spoken 2,000 years ago.
Current estimates suggest that a language dies every two weeks. Here, Geoffrey Khan describes the documentation of a group of dialects before they are lost forever.
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