Topic description and stories

Cambridge app maps decline in regional diversity of English dialects

26 May 2016

Regional diversity in dialect words and pronunciations could be diminishing as much of England falls more in line with how English is spoken in...

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Conversations

Opinion: Speaking dialects trains the brain as well as bilingualism does

23 May 2016

Napoleon Katsos (Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) discusses why speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with...

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Conversations by Steve McClanahan via Flickr

Speakers of two dialects may share cognitive advantage with speakers of two languages

27 Apr 2016

The ability of children to speak any two dialects – two closely related varieties of the same language – may confer the same cognitive advantages as...

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Screen grab of one of the app's questions

Do you say splinter, spool, spile or spell? English Dialects app tries to guess your regional accent

11 Jan 2016

A new app which tries to guess your regional accent based on your pronunciation of 26 words and colloquialisms will help Cambridge academics track...

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Welsh Twitter

Welsh Twitter: capturing language change in real time

29 May 2013

A database of Welsh tweets is being used to identify the characteristics of an evolving language.

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Trabzon area of Turkey

Against all odds: archaic Greek in a modern world

01 Jul 2010

An endangered Greek dialect spoken in Turkey has been identified by Dr Ioanna Sitaridou as a "linguistic goldmine" because of its closeness to a...

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River Dicle from Hasankeyf

Endangered dialects of Aramaic

01 Sep 2008

Current estimates suggest that a language dies every two weeks. Here, Geoffrey Khan describes the documentation of a group of dialects before they...

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