Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Whether someone's speech is a language or a dialect is a matter of both linguistics and politics ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a ...

What does it mean to learn the Chinese language? Schools across the globe have generally presumed a consistent, straightforward answer to this question: it would mean learning standard Mandarin, ...

The languages we speak and the words we use not only dictate who can understand us but also how we are perceived. Particular word and dialect choices can offer the listener insights into the class, ...

When you meet someone new in person, one of the first things you notice is how they speak – if they speak the same language as you or have a different accent. You’ll also notice if they use different ...

SAN ANTONIO – When I was younger, I spoke with a true Texan drawl, a product of my upbringing in West Texas. Somewhere along the way, for better or worse, I lost that accent. Language, dialect and how ...

If you need to hit a nail, what tool do you ask for? If you say “hammer,” do you pronounce the “r”? Do you drop the “h”? Different people pronounce the same English words in different ways. People ...

A stranger I will call DL recently emailed me an odious screed pouring contempt and disgust on nonstandard dialects of English. “Speaking broken English is often a sign that the speaker is monolingual ...

All children are born with the same kind of brain wiring, so at the outset, we are all equally adept at learning any possible human language. For a newborn, any language is, in principle, as easy or ...