Language

Why are we fascinated by talking horses and chatty cats in fiction?

The word now used to denote enthusiasm has come a long way from its early days when it was most often used in connection with Christ

It sits on the border between Tibet and Nepal, but Everest is best known by its English name – given in honour of a Welsh geographer

Edvard Grieg may have been Norway’s greatest classical composer, but he actually inherited his name from his Scottish forebears

Despite not being a Francophile, post-Brexit Britain pushed me to find work and a future in France

People may assume that the word ‘cravat’ comes from French, but its ultimate linguistic origin is much more complicated

Why the ‘father of Czech classical music’ switched from a German Friedrich to a Czech Bedrich

What happens when a country can’t read its own past?

A meeting with Kim Cattrall conjures up thoughts of Anne Boleyn, and a shift in stress in the syllables of their surnames

According to French linguist Bernard Cerquiglini, the two languages are much more similar than we think

Are devastation and destruction wreaked or wrought? And why did the word havoc change from ‘havot’ in the first place?

Norwich’s literary legacy is a surprising one – both Meir of England and Jan Cruso were important poets from the city but neither wrote in English

Italian tennis star Jannik Sinner’s home region of South Tyrol is still largely German-speaking despite being in Italy for over 100 years

A look at eight decades’ worth of a parent’s diaries shows how our use of language has changed in unexpected ways

How we say and write the name of Newcastle United’s home ground is a lesson for those who worry about apostrophes

Sadly, the main four branches of the Iranian language are synonymous with areas currently involved in political and ethnic conflicts

Residents of one south Italian village are reversing the negative meaning of being a "cuckhold"

Both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas had interesting linguistic backgrounds, which may have contributed to their creativity with words

These are the roots of the traditional feast to celebrate Rabbie Burns

The works of Robert Burns are known the world over, but many English speakers only have a vague understanding of the language he used

Words can take on a whole new meaning when adopted into another language; French vocabulary is particularly susceptible

There are not many Gaelic loanwords in English, and the most common ones refer to specifically Scottish phenomena. But not all

The adoption of some Arabic words into colloquial English came from British soldiers stationed in the Middle East and north Africa

The name of the ship is well known these days, but the etymology of the Cotswolds village from which it took its name is less certain

The Americans have already had their big turkey meal of the year – and Thanksgiving owes a debt to Greece and to harvest festivals

New England has many place names that must have been taken across the North Atlantic by homesick English people in the 1600s

Philosophers have rarely written about swearing - until now

Small islands have evolved vocabularies based on topography – including one place where you can go ‘east’ while heading west

English has a number of words borrowed from Urdu-Hindi, many of which arrived when British Indian Army soldiers returned to ‘Blighty’

The adventures of one carpenter and several British soldiers helped English become the native language on two isolated islands

This term for house or property might sound like it belongs to one region – but like many others, it’s in use across England

The opening of the International French Language Centre embraces the evolution of the language in a globalised world