Languages in the News: January 2017

As it's the end of the month, it's time to look back at some of the best language stories from around the web.

Our first two articles are from the Oxford Dictionaries blog. There was a fascinating article on how current languages affect dead languages, which you can read here.

The second article from Oxford was on mistakes made by those learning English as a foreign language. If you're looking for ways to improve your English and avoid some of these mistakes, read the article here.

Our next stories are from The Guardian. The first is a fascinating podcast on universal grammar which you can listen to here.

There was also an interesting piece on some English words that you either really hate or use all the time. For Justin Myers' list of words that he thinks should be banned, click here.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Did you really think we'd get to the end of the month without a story about the new US president? Vox reported on a linguistic analysis of how President Trump speaks during press conferences. If you want a better understanding of his speeches, read the article here.

Atlas Obscura had a fantastic article on Canadians and the word "eh". If you'd like to find out what "eh" does, why Canadians use it, and where it comes from, you should read the article here.

The BBC also brought us an article on how babies can remember their birth language. If you'd like to find out more, you can read the story here.

The last two articles we loved were from Fluent in 3 Months. You should definitely check out some excellent reasons to get involved with the German language here. Finally, there was a great article about spies and languages! If you ever wondered how spies get so good at an accent so that nobody knows they're foreign, read the article here.

Was their any other language content this month that we missed? Tell us about them in the comments below!