Language

The idea England ever spoke no languages other than English is a fantasy with no foundation in reality

Can an alignment of names and occupations ever have involved more than just simple coincidence?

Morphemes are the building blocks essential for the composition of words

Shootings and snakes won’t stop Nicholas Evans’s award-winning work documenting the world’s smaller languages

How 17th-century French pronunciation was taken across the Atlantic Ocean from northern and western France to North America

Where does the common name Wright come from? The answer has its roots in work

Our English orthography gives no assistance at all to help readers tell where the emphasis should be placed

The sport’s familiar – but often baffling – terminology has its origins in Anglo-Norman instructions, Old French numbers and Arabic palms

How many native English speakers would be entirely comfortable conducting a press conference in some language other than their own?

We invented algorithms to sort our words. Now the algorithms are teaching us how to speak

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

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?

Sandy Baltimore’s name has surprising links to Gaelic-speaking Ireland, colonial plantations and Caribbean migrations

The etymology of the name of the Spanish village, and thus of the island, is of considerable linguistic interest

We usually transliterate the composer's name so as to have it beginning with the letter T. But why?

The meanings of fancy and fantasy have diverged rather considerably over the centuries, just as the spellings have also changed

It appears that our vocabulary is entrained with the Zeitgeist, whether we like it or not

Spelling pronunciations in general are steadily becoming part of our linguistic landscape

Though the word ‘swain’ may itself be obsolete in English today, there are still traces of it hanging around in our modern English language

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’

The chancellor's straight-talking has, unexpectedly, boosted his popularity

The Australian football manager's name tells of his family’s history of relocating

Claret really is an English word, not French. The best French translation of English claret is probably vin rouge de Bordeaux.

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?

To be in Europe is to live without boundaries. The Irish have chosen that path, and their national identity has soared

Why did Queen Elizabeth I, in her famous speech at Tilbury in 1588, use two words with almost identical meanings to describe herself?

A large Scandinavian Viking army landed on the East Anglian coast in 865, giving places names which remain to this day

Children have an innate ability to learn foreign accents that is lost as they grow up... but is it always an advantage?

The original inhabitants of the popular Mediterranean archipelago were renowned for their use of catapults and slingshots as weapons

Both terms were applied to people living in rural settings, outside urban Christian religious communities

A respected linguistic society has hit back at Donald Trump’s attempt to make the US a monolingual country

Is the increasing influence of American linguistic usages in Britain making us stiff-upper-lip types more ‘touchy-feely’?