English language

Topic description and stories

Crowds on Newcastle Quayside for the Great North Run in 2013. Photo: Glen Bowman

Northerners, Scots and Irish excel at detecting fake accents to guard against outsiders, study suggests

20 Nov 2024

People from Glasgow, Belfast, Dublin and the north-east of England are better at detecting someone imitating their accent than people from London and...

Argentina fans at the 2018 FIFA World Cup.

Underdogs, curses and ‘Neymaresque’ histrionics: Cambridge University Press reveals what’s been getting us talking this World Cup

13 Jul 2018

Cambridge University Press has revealed the results of its global study into the language used around the 2018 FIFA World Cup in Russia.

President Donald J. Trump delivers remarks at Yokota Air Base | November 5, 2017 (Official White House Photo by Shealah Craighead)

'Populism' revealed as 2017 Word of the Year by Cambridge University Press

30 Nov 2017

The word 'populism' has been announced as the Cambridge Dictionary 2017 Word of the Year.

Aesthetics over athletics when it comes to women in sport

12 Aug 2016

Men are two to three times more likely than women to be mentioned when it comes to discussing sport and sporting achievement, according to new...

Cambridge app maps decline in regional diversity of English dialects

26 May 2016

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in...

Screen grab of one of the app's questions

Do you say splinter, spool, spile or spell? English Dialects app tries to guess your regional accent

11 Jan 2016

An app that tries to guess your regional accent based on your pronunciation of 26 words and colloquialisms will help Cambridge academics track the...

Winston Churchill’s famous Battle of Britain address, adapted here for a wartime poster, is one example of a remnant of the Verb Second constraint in English, which could hint at the existence of a universal grammar.

“Never was so much owed by so many to so few”: Could phrases like this hold clues about universal grammar?

16 Dec 2015

A new research project examining a linguistic construction called the Verb Second constraint could, academics believe, help to explain how people...

Image from a 14th century manuscript of the Romance of the rose, one of the best-known texts of the Middle Ages

Conquering a continent: how the French language circulated in Britain and medieval Europe

22 Jan 2014

A 13th-century manuscript of Arthurian legend once owned by the Knights Templar is one of the star attractions of a new exhibition opening today at...

What is English?

16 May 2013

English speakers who are 18 or under use the word ‘like’ in conversation over five times as often as speakers who are over 70; ‘because’ is the most...