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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

Nancy Hopkins-Davisson never really heard herself until she heard herself on television. The year was 1975, and Nancy — then just Hopkins, a high-school student born and raised on the island of North ...

This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated. INDIANAPOLIS — Do you say pop, soda, or coke ...

Don't speak perfect Oxford English? In 2024 researchers from the University of California, Berkely, tested ChatGPT's responses to several varieties of English dialects from places like India, Ireland, ...

Congruity is important in fiction. Trust and verisimilitude are the first casualties when breaches of the unspoken contract between creator and audience occur. Each of us has our own limits on what we ...

GUANGDONG, South China — For three centuries, quiet Zurong Village at the southernmost tip of China’s mainland hasn’t had much to offer visitors, aside from tropical fruit. But that all changed when a ...