linguistlaura

Apologies to everyone who's sick of everyone banging on about Line Of Duty. But I like it, so.  Much has been said about the mis-spellin...

 A tweet from last week about London children's accents sparked a bit of twitter fuss and made me think about how the identity of the op...

Starbucks is featured on this blog often enough lately that I'm starting to think I should ask for a promotional fee (for the record, I ...

One of my favourite writers is Justin Myers, who among other things writes The Guyliner. He reviews the Guardian Blind Date every week and I...

That surprising claim comes to you direct from the Dean of the University of Buckingham school of education, Barnaby Lenon . I've cut it...

A friend posted this photo on facebook the other day: A number of highly intelligent people then missed the point of the joke and began ...

I watched ITV's Harry Price: Ghost Hunter  over the Christmas break, which starred Rafe Spall as the eponymous psychic investigator/fake...

For some reason, the other day I remembered a thing that happened on TV years ago. Frank Skinner had a chat show at the time, and Britney Sp...

Esperanto has certain suffixes for various grammatical purposes, and others that add some extra meaning. One of the latter is - a ĵ , which...

[This relates to my recent post about 'cheeky Nando's'. If you want to take the survey, do so here . We'd be really gratefu...

It's no surprise when a newspaper publishes an article about language and fails to ask a linguist. They rarely do. It's even less of...

This is an open question, or an idle wondering, depending how you view it. I've noticed a particular variety of English which I'm ...

I moved to Kent two years ago now, or very nearly, and we've been properly living in Margate for just over a year (I semi-commuted for t...

I now call the southeastern corner of England my home. Down here, they have a funny thing called 'l-vocalisation', which means that ...

The diver Tom Daley posted a video on YouTube in which he told his viewers that he has a boyfriend (if he made any more revelations in the ...

Linguists have to spend quite a lot of time explaining that they don't correct people's grammar, and trying to prevent people from j...

I couldn't sleep a few nights ago and watched a truly horrific programme called 'The Call Centre'. It's a 'structured re...

OK, tell me this: can you translate the following conversation, in a language that you almost certainly speak? Jon do? A dee nah.  Answer...

Ian McMillan, the poet, does a lot of stuff on the radio about language. He's keen on accents, particularly Yorkshire ones, and recently...

You might have seen that Joey Barton has been filmed speaking English in what sounds very much like a French accent (he's playing for a...