I thought Spanish and Euskera would present my biggest linguistic hurdles here in Bilbao. Turns out, I’m having more trouble with U.S. vs. British English. Students in Spain learn British English, for obvious reasons of geographic proximity, just as students in California tend to ...Read More

Remember the theory of Linguistic Relativity that we talked about a while back? How the language you speak can affect your views of gender, spatial orientation, color, and even your dreams and aspirations? Well, my friend Miles sent me this video that addressed another ...Read More

I read an interesting article published by Idibon, a company that helps other companies analyze their digital language data. I am so far from a techie that this last sentence was even a challenge to type, but it proved worthwhile reading. The author presented ...Read More

            Here on the blog I’ve been chatting away about my current life (premature aging) and my future life (hopefully less so), but let’s get back to talking about language for a moment. I’ve been studying for the GRE, ...Read More

I just finished my last German final, and now I can begin the swift process of forgetting a year’s worth of material. But even if verb order and plural endings don’t stick with me, a recent linguistics study about German articles made quite the ...Read More

Prepositions (those little words like on, at, before, with, as, for . . . ) are often the most difficult part of any language for new learners to grasp. For instance, why do we say “John is waiting for you AT the bus stop,” ...Read More

In my linguistics class this past week we’ve been talking a lot about Language Shift, or how language undergoes changes over time. This normally happens over generations, although sometimes it’s not as slow of a process as one might think. Just look at slang: ...Read More