Dialect

About that “Negro dialect”…

Arts, Culture & Media

Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid is in political hot water this week for past remarks he made about President Obama’s race. According to the new book Game Change, Reid encouraged Obama’s run for the White House, in part, because he was “light-skinned” and had “no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.’ Long […]

The phrase ‘Wha gwan’ (whaa gwaan) means ‘what’s going on’ in Jamaican Patois. The spelling varies but the meaning does not change.

Pidgin, patois, slang, dialect, creole — English has more forms than you might expect

Culture
Images from the Tumblr, “This Could Have Been Frozen”

No room for African or Indian languages in Disney’s multilingual version of ‘Let It Go’

Arts, Culture & Media
Gu Hangyu, sits with his grandmother Wang Yufang, at her home on Chongming Island near Shanghai. She speaks the Chongming dialect, but not standard Chinese.

Hundreds of millions of Chinese stubbornly resist speaking the ‘common tongue’

Development & Education

A Dictionary of American Dialect

iPhone App Helps With Incomprehensible Dialect

Arts, Culture & Media

The Geo Quiz visits a town only about 30 miles from Manchester, yet the local dialect can be pretty incomprehensible to the folks in Manchester.

The World

Linguistic surrealism from China to Belgium

The World in Words

On the World in Words podcast, the trials, tribulations and silliness of living in Belgium, where most people define themselves not by nationality but by mother tongue. Also, arrested Chinese artist Ai Weiwei wrote a blog that was, if anything, even more provocative than his art. We hear from his English translator. And the latest […]

The World

Documenting India’s languages

Arts, Culture & Media

India has hundreds of languages and dialects. Audio recordings were made a century ago in an attempt to document them and they have just come to light. Bruce Wallace reports.

Dictators with dialects, finger spelling and universal Inuit

The World in Words

Napoleon, Hitler and Gaddafi all grew up speaking a distinct dialect of their native tongue. Coincidence? Dialects are the languages of outsiders, at least until they are co-opted by people, or governments, trying to standardize the language. That’s what’s happening right now in northern Canada, where with the dialects of the Inuit. The hope is […]

The World

Emerging Science Note/Regional Quacks

A British study finds ducks develop different dialects depending on where they’re born and bred.