Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Whether someone's speech is a language or a dialect is a matter of both linguistics and politics ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a ...

Experts say English slang and regional dialect should not be banned from classrooms but when you're getting to grips with a second language how helpful is it to learn non-standard lingo? Experts say ...

Although the terms “language” and “dialect” refer to different things, in real life the boundary between the two is not always clear-cut, and their linguistic definitions are often influenced by ...

In an age of globalisation with unprecedented levels of mobility and communication, the world is often described as a “global village”. But this metaphor has implications for how we understand the ...

What does it mean to learn the Chinese language? Schools across the globe have generally presumed a consistent, straightforward answer to this question: it would mean learning standard Mandarin, ...

A stranger I will call DL recently emailed me an odious screed pouring contempt and disgust on nonstandard dialects of English. “Speaking broken English is often a sign that the speaker is monolingual ...

If you speak English with a California accent but you want to learn to speak Sindarin like a native — that is, like a Middle Earth elf — where do you start? Begin with vowel sounds, said Leith ...

The official language of China is Mandarin Chinese, or Putonghua, which means common speech. It is the standard language for government, education, and media, and is based on the Beijing dialect, ...