language

Photo of textbooks for various different languages stacked on top of each other.

Efforts To Protect Endangered Minority Languages: Helpful Or Harmful?

Headlines abound with the plight of endangered minority languages around the world. Read a few of these and you’ll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the distressing isolation of individual last speakers and the wider cultural loss for humanity.

2 weeks ago
527
Emoticons

Why Do Swear Words Sound the Way They Do?

The authors explored whether there are universal sound patterns in profanity. So we designed a series of studies involving speakers of different languages and found surprising patterns in how swear words sound across the world.

9 months ago
2302

Public Funding for the Public Good

Two scientists at the Georgia State University Language Research Center argue that their basic research into memory can “yield profound and transformative results” in the study of autism and developmental delay — hardly fitting the description of “trivial, unnecessary, or duplicative” that Senator Jeff Flake labeled it in a recent report.

7 years ago
1414
Steven Pinker

Steven Pinker on Violence and Human Nature

Is the world getting less violent? It seems unlikely. But Steven Pinker has amassed empirical evidence to show that it is. In this interview with Nigel Warburton for the Social Science Bites podcast he explains some of the possible causes of this transformation.

11 years ago
11383
Rom Harre

Rom Harré on What is Social Science?

“Everybody lives in a society…They want to know what it is they’re living in” An exploration of the nature of the social sciences. How do they differ from the physical sciences? What challenges do they face? What is their value?

11 years ago
11062