In the fields of computational linguistics an n-gram is a sequence of items from a corpus of language. An n-gram could be any combination of letters, phonemes, syllables or words, etc. Looking at n-grams is useful to help work out how language works and is used...
ESOL is an acronym meaning English to Speakers of Other Languages. It is all about people who do not have English as a mother tongue, learning English. A more common term to ESOL is ESL which means English as a Second Language and refers to people learning English to...
What is the difference between Accent, Dialect and Language? This article looks at the differences between the three terms. People often confuse them and there is a certain degree of overlap (even linguists don't always agree on what the difference is between them)...
A new study has mapped the global influence of different languages and as a surprise to absolutely no one, English comes out as the most important and influential language. Russia, somewhat more surprisingly, comes in second with other languages following up well...
When you teach English as a foreign language you don't just teach "English". No, you teach a specific type of English depending on your class: different people need different English. You can view this in the same way as dance. If you go to a dance class you don't...
A Lexical Chunk is a unit of language which is made up of two or more words. Here are a few examples of lexical chunks: Good morning. Nice to see you! What's the time? Other lexical chunks can include phrasal verbs, idioms, collocations and so on. Lexical chunks...
How many Tenses are there in English? It sounds like a simple question, but, unfortunately, it isn't. This is because different people - including both students and TEFL teachers - have different definitions of what a tense actually is and there is no single, accepted...
Voiced and Voiceless (sometimes Unvoiced) describe the two different ways we can make sounds in our mouths. The basic difference is this: voiced sounds occur when the vocal chords vibrate voiceless sounds occur when the vocal chords are still An Example of Voiced...
Monolingualism is knowing and using just one language. This language will be the speaker's mother tongue. Contrast this with bilingualism. where someone knows and uses 2 languages as mother tongues and also multilingualism where someone has more than 2 languages...
The pictorial language of Ancient Egypt.
Japanese is an East Asian language spoken by about 125 million speakers, primarily in Japan, where it is the national language. According to recent research by the FSI Japanese is the hardest language for English speakers to learn and, presumably, Japanese speakers...
A semantic field (sometimes known as a lexical field) is a group of words related by meaning. In teaching a semantic field could be: animals verbs of perception foodstuffs ... In practical terms the definition is quite loose and general. Sometimes a word will belong...
Persian - article coming soon.
Finnish is spoken by the majority of people in Finland (92%) and ethnic Finns outside of Finland. It's one of the two official languages of Finland (along with Swedish). It is related to Estonian and a few other minority languages in the region. Finnish uses the Latin...
¿Hablas español? About 470 million people do! In fact Spanish is the second most popular first language in the world (after Mandarin; English is third) and also the third most popular language on the internet (after English then Mandarin). As a first language it is...
Simply put, Corpus Linguistics is the study of language using computer programs which analyze millions of lines of texts held in a corpus (pl, corpora). To begin with masses of samples of language are collected: from newspapers, books, transcripts of the spoken word,...
Applied Linguistics is all about using the results of language study in real life teaching. Linguistics is the formal study of language. When the results of these studies are applied to TEFL at the chalkface, then this is applied linguistics. It is a relatively...
Semantics is the study of meaning. This can include the meaning of individual words and also the way in which their meaning may have changed over time. Meaning in languages is mainly studied by linguists. In fact, semantics is one of the main branches of...
In linguistics, a filler is a sound or word in speaking used by someone to show that they haven't finished speaking yet but are either forming their thoughts into speech or mentally searching for the right word. Common fillers in English are: um - /um/ er - /ə/...
Converse Terms are pairs of words which refer to the same thing but from opposite sides. Take for example the picture on the right. There is one action taking place here: a balloon is being passed between two people. However, we can describe this action in different...
Stress is used to talk about the emphasis given to certain sounds, words or phrases when we speak. In English there are basically 2 times we talk about stress: on words in an utterance; and on syllables in a word. Stress on Syllables Take the word, august, as an...
The Rosetta Stone is an ancient Egyptian inscribed stone from about 200 BCE. It was inscribed with a decree issued on behalf of King Ptolemy V. What is important to linguists is that the same decree appears in 3 different languages. The top is in Ancient Egyptian...
Runes are the letters in the runic alphabets. Runic alphabets were alphabets used by various Germanic tribes not only to write their own languages but also in divination and magic. They were used throughout northern Europe, Scandinavia, the British Isles, and Iceland...
Latin was the language spoken by the Ancient Romans around 2,000 years ago. It developed in the Italian peninsula specifically in Latium, the region of central western Italy, in which the city of Rome was founded and grew to be the capital city of the Roman Empire....
Frisian refers to a closely related group of Germanic languages: West Frisian spoken in the Netherlands Saterland Frisian spoken in Lower Saxony, Germany North Frisian spoken in Schleswig-Holstein, Germany East Frisian Low Saxon, the dialect of East Frisia in Lower...
At its simplest, Computational Linguistics (or CL) is all about trying to create a computer which uses language in the same way as a human does. The Holy Grail would be a human having a conversation with a computer but thinking they were talking to a another human....
The English language was heavily influenced by French in the past and there is a great deal of overlap between the two languages, both in terms of vocabulary and grammar. However there are a number of major issues that French native speakers have when they learn...
Azerbaijani or Azeri Turkish has over 30 million speakers based in both Azerbaijan and the surrounding countries. It's closely related to Turkish and is, to a certain extent, mutually understandable. Although there are a couple of major varieties (Northern...
There is not one single Chinese language as such but several varieties of Chinese which are more or less mutually understandable; the language is spoken by over 1 billion people (making is more popular than English). Of the different varieties Mandarin is the most...
Vowels and Consonants are the sounds which go to make up the English language. If air passes straight through the mouth without being stopped or constricted anywhere, this forms a vowel sound. If the air is stopped at any point or the mouth is constricted somehow,...
