Language Change
Language Change
Language Change
Over the past few years I’ve taught the Language Change topic at A-level. This page lists various links to relevant articles that I’ve noticed. Twitter users will also find them grouped via the hashtag #LangChange.
UWire: Why English as the dominant world language is bad
Boston Globe: Why we love the language police
Oxford Dictionaries: Five events that shaped English
Mental Floss: Beatnik slang phrases
Independent: top ten eponyms
Video: A brief history of English plurals
BBC: Typos and spelling mistakes don’t matter
Mental Floss: Fifty old British dialect words
Mike Stuchbery: Why I’m banning ‘banter’
Gary Nunn: Why do pigs oink in English?
Lauren Laverne: With expletives, context is everything
Slate: 17thC text on the virtues of tea, coffee and chocolate
History Today: The 17thC birth of the book auction
Slate: Why do Americans say ‘Math’?
Chicago Tribune: Will printed dictionaries survive?
Independent: Top ten words used in 2014
American Dialect Society (Time report): Word of 2014
Video of Webster’s most looked-up word
Website about English/American usage
The bizarre nature of the word ‘moot’
Eight words that demonstrate language change
Slate: Ten grammar myths
Slate: 25 words that are actually acronyms
Mental Floss: American rules on geographical places
OUP Blog: the etymology of ‘threshold’
Independent: Rentoul v Kamm on usage & pedantry
Mental Floss: 25 words that are their own opposites
Vox: 25 maps that explain the English Language
Mental Floss: 10 Gaelic loanwords
Macmillan: Is ‘invite’ acceptable as a noun?
Mental Floss: Product names with plural problems
New Yorker: Exploring ‘No, totally’
OUP: David Crystal on Shakespeare’s False Friends
Independent: 15 words we didn’t know were insults
Mental Floss: 48 things we didn’t know had names
Economist: Happy birthday to Johnson’s Dictionary
TED: 20 words that used to mean something different
i100: 10 Americanisms that were originally English
Mental Floss: 10 Old English words we should bring back
OUP: 16 words from the 1960s
OUP: History of the word ‘bad’
Paris Review: The Great Vowel Shift explained
Trade names that have become general terms
Some of Webster’s spelling changes didn’t catch on
Word ‘roots & routes’
Slang banned from Croydon school
The impact of the printing press
Michael Rosen on word change
New York Times: The Words of 2013
Economist: The Rise of English
American Dialect Society: ‘Because’ is the word of 2013
OUP Blog: The language of WW1
Independent: Top 10 unusual etymologies
Arrant Pedantry: Lynne Truss seeks attention
NYT: Future of Oxford English Dictionary
Mental Floss: 12 shapes that you didn’t know have names
OED: Birthday word generator
84 foreign words with no equivalent meaning in English
Slate: Will we use commas in the future?
OED Editor on vocab size & unexpectedly old neologisms
Mental Floss: examples of broadening / narrowing
OED: historical slang
BBC: List of loan words in English
Economist: Dialect v Language
Indy: Top 10 tautologous abbreviations
Indy: Faroese fight over C, Q, W, X and Z
Huffington Post: 10 words with no English translation
The influence of Celtic
Guardian: Britain’s lost words and euphemisms
Business Insider: Words with radically different meanings
Lexicon Valley: The heavy influence of Latin and French
Oxford Dictionaries: 20 words that originated in the 1920s
BBC: Why did certain words and phrases become insults?
Guardian: Language evolves - studying Russell Brand
io9.com: the origin of the phrase ‘red herring’
Mental Floss: origins of 10 words used in insults
New Republic: How we anthropomorphise technology
Mental Floss: 11 vintage cookbooks, 1861-1920
Telegraph: Why we use ‘so’
BBC: The rise & fall of Australian slang
Boston Globe: Computer metaphors invade our language
OED: 100 words that define the First World War
Telegraph: ‘Countdown’ drops the printed dictionary
Grammar Girl: 10 words from lesser-known languages
New York Magazine: the etiquette of emoticons
Guardian: 11 words that are older than we think
BBC: New words added to OED
The Week: 15 pairs of words that aren’t actually related
Mental Floss: 15 pairs of words from the same source
Tickld: Emotions we feel but don’t know the names of
Mental Floss: 50 collective nouns to bolster your vocabulary
Daily Mail: Giles Brandreth celebrates the quirks of English
Mental Floss: What does ‘the’ mean?
BBC: Where the word ‘tunnel’ comes from
BBC: The peculiar names of punctuation marks
Independent: New words from the year you were born in
BBC: Are we witnessing the death of ‘uh’?
BBC: Why do people use ‘super’ so much?
Independent: the most/least attractive accents
JSTOR: Your fave grammar rule is probably fake
Mental Floss: Words & phrases to describe small amounts
Oxford Words: quarterly update of new words
Independent: University introduces gender-free pronouns
Mental Floss: Aluminum v aluminium: why the difference?
Grammarly: How exclamation marks are like antibiotic drugs
Medievalists: 10 phrases that originated in the Middle Ages
Guardian: an encyclopedia of human emotions
I’m from Yorkshire: a handy guide to Yorkshire sayings
Euro Weekly: why swearing increased in Spain
OUP blog: exploring idioms
BBC: the mysterious origins of punctuation
Lapham’s Quarterly: the language of fashion
Mental Floss: banned baby names
OUP blog: 7 emotions that English doesn’t have a word for
Steven Poole: On the phrase “first world problems”
Collins Dictionary: September 2015 words in the news
Oxford Dictionaries: 9 words that are older than you think
BBC: A journey through London’s many languages
Dictionary.com: 20 words that mean more than they did 20 years ago
Mental Floss: 15 basic words with mysterious etymologies
Wall Street Journal: OED Word of the Year
Steve Pinker: Why ‘cool’ is still cool
Mental Floss: History of the word ‘odd’ (video explanation)
Mental Floss: Full stops in text messages
Guardian: Prescriptivist attitudes - That long-running ad
John McWhorter: On the quirkiness of English
Mental Floss: ‘Washington Post’ accepts ‘they’ as singular
Economist: Do you speak 2016? (language of the young)
Lexicon Valley: The Words of 2015
Business Insider: ‘They’ is the word of 2015
Ben Franklin’s World: How English becomes American (podcast)
OUP Blog: Words of the Year 2015 compendium
Vox: 25 maps that explain the English language
The Atlantic: Differences between a language and a dialect?
The Atlantic: Eskimos don’t have 100 words for snow
Lexicon Valley: The fall & rise of the singular ‘they’
Mental Floss: French phrases hidden in English words
OUP Blog: How English became English, and not Latin
Guardian: How new words are born
Guardian: the Academie Francaise updates French spelling
Lapham’s Quarterly: Anatoly Liberman’s quest for lost words
History Today: A brief history of spelling reform
Mashed Radish: Why is something ‘hermetically sealed’?
Independent: How marketing is using the youth term ‘bae’
Economist: The secret meaning of ‘feisty’
Independent: The blend ‘smombies’
OED: What does the dictionary have so many ‘cow’ words?
The Conversation: A history of English in 5 words
Guardian: Robert Macfarlane on the language of landscape
Lexicon Valley: Origins of the phrase ‘a grain of salt’
The Vocabularist: how we use the word ‘cyber’
Mental Floss: How far back does English stop making sense?
Guardian: ‘From Alright to Zap: an A-Z of horrible words’
Guardian: Eight words that reveal the sexism of English
International New York Times: a ‘yeo-person’?
Business Insider: The Origins of 13 English idioms
Mental Floss: 7 everyday phrases that have been rephrased
Mental Floss: What is ‘gh’ doing in so many English words?
Neatorama: Horrible jargon we’ve got used to
Merriam Webster: A collection of rare insults
BBC Culture: Ten incredible words from other languages
Merriam Webster: New word - ‘merp’
Merriam Webster: The word ‘boughten’ is a word
Michael Deacon (Telegraph): In praise of the split infinitive
Merriam Webster: Eight common English words from Arabic
Mental Floss: Forty opulent O words
Guardian: ‘Grammar snobs’ video
Mental Floss: 31 ‘adorable’ slang terms for sexual intercourse
Independent: the top ten most English words
OUP blog: On spelling reform, the word ‘breast’ and more
HaggardHawks: 10 completely untrue word origins (video)
Guardian: ‘There’s now wrong with dialects’
Blog: Language change and banning slang
Merriam Webster: 10 words that look illegitimate (US)
Guardian: What’s a ‘chuggypig’?
Debuk: The pronoun is political
Guardian: How the BBC taught us to talk proper
Washington Post: ‘Stop. Using, Periods. Period.’
Scientific American: What foreign words say about us
Wordnik: New words to English via novelist George Eliot
Business Insider: Old English words we should revive
OUP Blogs: The history of the word ‘clean’
Independent: 10 words that sound rude but aren’t
iNews: Guess the meaning of these new English words
Guardian: ‘Moobs, gender-fluid & yolo’: new OED words
Observer: How digital life is changing slang
Economist: How the internet has liberated dictionaries
Independent: Collins names the top 10 words of 2016
Oxford English Dictionary: Word of the Year 2016
Dr Claire Hardaker: How do neologisms survive?
Shaundalyn Allen: Ten words that English needs
Guardian: The OED Words of 2016
Guardian: ‘Surreal’ is Merriam-Webster’s word of the year
Mental Floss: Fifteen words that are etymological mysteries
Guardian: Totes annoying: words that should be banned
OED: new words in response to Donald Trump
BBC Future: Words to describe untranslatable emotions
Atlantic: Which is the most efficient language?
Oxford Dictionaries: 7 grammar myths from school
Indy100: 13 words we borrowed from Arabic
Oxford English Dictionary: 500 new words added
Guardian: Celebrating other types of English
Guardian: The Americanization of English is rising
Guardian: So what is Americanization is rising?
Guardian: The words of 2017
Sunday, 31 December 2017