Topic description and stories

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

A new app which tries to guess your regional accent based on your pronunciation of 26 words and colloquialisms will help Cambridge academics track...

Read more
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...

Read more
From Within a Book

Opinion: Speaking in tongues: the many benefits of bilingualism

04 Nov 2015

Dr Teresa Parodi (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) discusses the linguistic, social and cognitive advantages of speaking more than...

Read more
"Maccari-Cicero" by Cesare Maccari. Licensed under Public Domain via Wikimedia Commons

Understanding the ancient world through language

22 May 2015

James Clackson's new book looks at what language use can tell us about ancient societies.

Read more
Strolling, Uganda

"The Professor is World Cup": understanding ‘secret’ urban languages

22 Apr 2015

Research into a ‘playful’ and increasingly popular urban language that grew out of the necessity for criminals to hide their true intent could help...

Read more

Your languages, your future

07 Nov 2014

Research shows that children who speak more than one language have an advantage over their monolingual playmates when it comes to communication...

Read more
Neural Connections In the Human Brain

Presence or absence of early language delay alters anatomy of the brain in autism

23 Sep 2014

Individual differences in early language development, and in later language functioning, are associated with changes in the anatomy of the brain in...

Read more

It’s all (New Testament) Greek to Divinity students

05 Sep 2014

A project and website to help Divinity students (and any other keen language students) learn New Testament Greek will launch this month.

Read more
Himalayan Shaman

Economic success drives language extinction

03 Sep 2014

Thriving economies are the biggest factor in the disappearance of minority languages and conservation should focus on the most developed countries...

Read more

Why teach oracy?

01 Sep 2014

In this article, Professor of Education Neil Mercer argues that ‘talk’ needs tuition; state schools must teach spoken language skills for the sake of...

Read more

Migrant children: the litmus test of our education system

14 Feb 2014

We live in a multilingual society. More than a million children attending British schools speak more than 360 languages between them in addition to...

Read more
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...

Read more

Pages