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Is ‘You Guys’ Replacing ‘Y’All’ in the South?
What do you think, guys? Is “y’all” in trouble? For some time, “y’all” has been assaulted by “you guys” aiming to replace it as the go-to second-person-plural pronoun in the South. Is the Solid South...
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Friendly Communication Across Supposed Language Barriers
Across the street from the building that houses the linguists, philosophers, and computer scientists at my university (on the left in the picture above) is the city’s huge central mosque. Hundreds of...
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Where Are You Going? a Bus Ride Through the Languages of Ecuador
Cuenca, Ecuador ¿Adónde van? Asked the bus-station clerk in the port city of Guayaquil, Ecuador, yesterday morning. It’s a reasonable question. Where am I going? A few moments later from a rear seat I...
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Puerto Rican in Spain: 2 Grad Students Reflect on Language and Spanish Higher...
U. of Barcelona Wireliz Soto-González recently completed her master’s in art history at the University of Barcelona. Jorge Fernández de Jesús received a master’s in biology at the University of...
View ArticleShtraight Talk on S-Backing
I believe peak s-backing was reached on August 1, 2018. In a segment of NPR’s All Things Considered that day, the host, Audie Cornish; the NPR correspondent she was speaking with, Ayesha Rascoe; and...
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Chinese Among High-School Seniors (and in the Movies)
Jason Statham and Bingbing Li in The Meg, a bilingual Chinese/American movie. There was breaking news about foreign languages last Thursday afternoon: Chinese has now overtaken German in popularity as...
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The Perennial Difficulty of Defining What ‘Descriptive’ Means in Grammar
“Correct” summerhouse “Incorrect” summerhouse Correct summerhouse Incorrect summerhouse I have a distinguished colleague who unceasingly tries to persuade me to see that my attempts at descriptive...
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How Americans Speak: the Facts
Noam Chomsky: no Philly vowels(Image via Wikipedia) If you really want to know how people use the English language in North America, you will find one consistently reliable peer-reviewed source of...
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Is Donald Trump the Andrew Jackson of Our Time?
Donald Trump has a unique way of speaking and writing. But for a president his language is not unprecedented. Or not unpresidented. In 2004, after considering the speech of all 42 different presidents...
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Why Do I Really, Really Want to Say ‘Had Went’?
Jonah Hill in his younger days Interviewed on NPR’s Fresh Air on October 30, the actor and director Jonah Hill was talking about his childhood obsession with movies. “I had ran through so many films,”...
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