Peter Trudgill
15 October 2025
A French connection in the American midwest
How 17th-century French pronunciation was taken across the Atlantic Ocean from northern and western France to North America
Read the full article08 October 2025
The wright way to signify your trade
Where does the common name Wright come from? The answer has its roots in work
Read the full article01 October 2025
When learning languages becomes a stress test
Our English orthography gives no assistance at all to help readers tell where the emphasis should be placed
Read the full article24 September 2025
Why tennis still speaks medieval French
The sport’s familiar – but often baffling – terminology has its origins in Anglo-Norman instructions, Old French numbers and Arabic palms
Read the full article17 September 2025
The perils of diplomacy in a second language
How many native English speakers would be entirely comfortable conducting a press conference in some language other than their own?
Read the full article10 September 2025
Who knew algorithms had been around so long?
The word algorithm would appear at first sight to come into the same Arabic-loan category as algebra, and it does indeed have an origin in the Arabic language
Read the full article03 September 2025
A generous interpretation of an ancient practice
The one French word my Mum knew was largesse, which can be translated into English as “generosity”. But why did she, and other country children of her generation?
Read the full article27 August 2025
The Gaelic roots of a French football star
Sandy Baltimore’s name has surprising links to Gaelic-speaking Ireland, colonial plantations and Caribbean migrations
Read the full article13 August 2025
Guadalcanal, the Spanish village that became a Pacific battlefield
The etymology of the name of the Spanish village, and thus of the island, is of considerable linguistic interest
Read the full article06 August 2025
Why does English have Tchaikovsky off to a tee?
We usually transliterate the composer's name so as to have it beginning with the letter T. But why?
Read the full article30 July 2025
We’ve been living in a fantasy world for centuries
The meanings of fancy and fantasy have diverged rather considerably over the centuries, just as the spellings have also changed
Read the full article23 July 2025
Becoming vexed by vanishing vocabulary
Spelling pronunciations in general are steadily becoming part of our linguistic landscape
Read the full article16 July 2025
The long forgotten words that live on undercover
Though the word ‘swain’ may itself be obsolete in English today, there are still traces of it hanging around in our modern English language
Read the full article09 July 2025
Are Reform UK ‘dumb’ or just plain stupid?
The party’s ex-chair used the word ‘dumb’ to describe a colleague’s comments. But the word is usually employed in Britain to mean ‘unable to speak’
Read the full article02 July 2025
Ange Postecoglou: a moving family history
The Australian football manager's name tells of his family’s history of relocating
Read the full article25 June 2025
Claret: clearly not French
Claret really is an English word, not French. The best French translation of English claret is probably vin rouge de Bordeaux.
Read the full article18 June 2025
When deft turned daft: the mysteries of semantic shift
How can it be that if we go far enough back in the history of the English language, these two words were originally one and the same word?
Read the full article11 June 2025
A weak and feeble woman
Why did Queen Elizabeth I, in her famous speech at Tilbury in 1588, use two words with almost identical meanings to describe herself?
Read the full article05 June 2025
When the Great Heathen Army came to Norfolk
A large Scandinavian Viking army landed on the East Anglian coast in 865, giving places names which remain to this day
Read the full article28 May 2025
Why learning language is child’s play
Children have an innate ability to learn foreign accents that is lost as they grow up... but is it always an advantage?
Read the full article21 May 2025
Going ballistic in the Balearics
The original inhabitants of the popular Mediterranean archipelago were renowned for their use of catapults and slingshots as weapons
Read the full article14 May 2025
Heathens and pagans
Both terms were applied to people living in rural settings, outside urban Christian religious communities
Read the full article07 May 2025
Trump’s war on language
A respected linguistic society has hit back at Donald Trump’s attempt to make the US a monolingual country
Read the full article30 April 2025
Reaching out to loved ones
Is the increasing influence of American linguistic usages in Britain making us stiff-upper-lip types more ‘touchy-feely’?
Read the full article23 April 2025
Never have I heard such nonsense
The relationship of English to the Germanic language family meant that we once used the ‘verb-second rule’, now only rarely used
Read the full article09 April 2025
An evocative call to arms
While English does not use the vocative case, many other languages do
Read the full article02 April 2025
The history of giving it some welly
Just because a phrase is relatively recent doesn’t mean it doesn’t have a long or distinguished history
Read the full article26 March 2025
Scotland’s most valuable ashet
The country has long had strong political and cultural ties with France, which are reflected in the language
Read the full article19 March 2025
Swearing on the Bible: where ‘bigot’ comes from
While the UK has its own home-grown bigots, the word itself may have come to England from France in the 16th century
Read the full article12 March 2025
Why being a convicted felon sucks
Felony has meant many things in the past, from crime, wickedness and sin to deceit and villainy. Just ask Donald Trump
Read the full article05 March 2025
A linguistic hat-trick for Woakes, Foakes and Stokes
How the world of cricket promises another pleasing rhyming headline in the not-too-distant future
Read the full article26 February 2025
The Prayerbook Rebellion: How Cornwall’s language was lost
Cornish was doomed after Latin was banished from church services in favour of English during the 1500s
Read the full article