CHINA, Kagoshima Prefecture--The dominance of standard Japanese in colloquial speech across the archipelago has obvious advantages. But it comes at the risk of killing off rare dialects spoken on ...

Geordie is one of the oldest and best loved of Britain's dialects. But modern times mean that some Geordie words are dying out and North Easterners are changing how they speak. Inside Out gets ...

In 2022, after the start of the war in Ukraine, the number of people studying Ukrainian on Duolingo, a language learning website and mobile app, increased by more than 500%. Most of those who have ...

Part of the fun of getting to know an English speaker from somewhere else—be it a different U.S. region or a whole other country—is debating how to say certain words. To you, pecan is “pih-KAHN.” To ...

What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a quasar and a pulsar, or between a rabbit and a hare? Faced with the ...

If you speak English with a California accent but you want to learn to speak Sindarin like a native — that is, like a Middle Earth elf — where do you start? Begin with vowel sounds, said Leith ...

A new book on American English in the Midwest makes Chicago seem exotic. It’s certainly not the title: “Language Variation and Change in the American Midland: A New Look at `Heartland’ English” (John ...

Many of the northern Lincolnshire dialect words have Scandinavian origins "I am proud to be called a Yellowbelly," Loretta Rivett declared in an emphatic voice. By using this slightly puzzling, ...

Geordie is one of the oldest and best loved of Britain's dialects. But modern times mean that some Geordie words are dying out and North Easterners are changing how they speak. Inside Out gets ...