Gill Plimmer of The Financial Times interviews Professor Graham Jones about how social media has influenced how people gossip. “English speakers are increasingly talking not just about what other people say and do, but about the thoughts and feelings behind their words,” writes Plimmer.
The Economist covers Professor Joshua Hartshorne’s ‘Which English?’ quiz, which aims to gauge where the user learned English. The quiz uses grammar-focused questions and gives three guesses as to the user’s native language.
Live Science reporter Tanya Lewis highlights Shigeru Miyagawa’s work exploring the origins of human language. Miyagawa's hypothesis, “could explain how human language, which can theoretically produce infinite meanings, developed from the limited forms of communication seen in the rest of the animal world,” Lewis reports.
Institute Prof. Sheila Widnall, the first woman to lead the Air Force, and Linguistics alumna Jessie “Little Doe” Baird, an indigenous language preservationist, are two of the 10 accomplished women chosen to represent Massachusetts in USA Today’s Women of the Century series, reports Nicole Simmons. Baird was also included in the paper’s nationwide list of 100 Women of the Century.