communication

Somerset House in London is hosting a cultural celebration of the Peanuts comic strip in its “Good Grief, Charlie Brown!” exhibition. It is well worth a visit and there is plenty for the linguist to enjoy. Schulz helped immortalise words such as “Augh”, “good grief, “rats” and “blockhead”. He was…

Wes Anderson’s latest movie, Isle of Dogs is a fabulous stop-motion animation set in a dystopian near-future Japan where the authoritarian regime has banished all dogs to Trash Island in a bid to contain an epidemic of dog flu. A linguistically interesting quirk in the movie is that the dogs…

I sometimes wonder if the Winter Olympics are the sporting event watched by the greatest number of people with absolutely no knowledge of the sports involved. Or maybe this is a peculiarly British perspective because our lack of snow and ice hampers any skiing, skating or snowboarding aspirations. At any…

Is Skype's new Translator service likely to be how we communicate with people in another language in the future? Or is it too soon to be relying on this type of technology? It looks like something once dreamt up in Star Trek - but is it the future? Tech giant…

Have you ever wondered why some languages seem faster than others? And, if this were truly the case, would that mean some languages conveyed more information in the same amount of time than others? In an attempt to solve this spoken mystery, François Pellegrino of the University of Lyon conducted…