In a 2019 sketch from the US late-night comedy show Saturday Night Live (SNL), the actor James McAvoy plays a Scottish air traffic controller attempting to help a US brand integration manager (Mikey Day) land a plane in distress, ...
A young Latina mother I was interviewing once laughed uncomfortably as she described her sons' embarrassment when put on the spot by older Latinos.
Most Americans believe political discourse has grown coarser in recent years, as old taboos against publicly cursing and attacking an opponent's family have fallen away. Politicians and their supporters call critics and opponents ...
The languages in the Indo-European family are spoken by almost half of the world's population. This group includes a huge number of languages, ranging from English and Spanish to Russian, Kurdish and Persian.
Looking for insights into geopolitics? Eager to learn about foreign policy in the Asia-Pacific region? Don't rely on James Bond films for your education.
Today it would seem odd to describe a flower with the word "bastard"—why apply a term of personal abuse to a flower? But in Shakespeare's time, "bastard" was a technical term describing certain plants.
Headlines abound with the plight of endangered minority languages around the world. Read a few of these and you'll see some common themes: the rising number of languages dying worldwide, the distressing isolation of individual ...
Japan's economy is under pressure from rising energy prices and defense costs and the impact of the pandemic. Plummeting birth rates and an aging population further threaten the sustainability of its labor market. A 2023 ...
Painstaking archaeological exploration is a familiar, often widely admired, method of unearthing history. Less celebrated, but also invaluable, is the piecing together of fragments of ancient languages and analyzing how they ...
In South Africa "umlungu" is a word that's commonly used to refer to white people. It comes from isiXhosa, the language of the country's Xhosa people. It's always been a mystery how the word originated or what it actually ...
