For many bilingual families, a heritage language is more than a tool for communication. It is a link to the past, a marker of identity, and a way to stay rooted while navigating new worlds. According to Statistics Canada, one in four people in the country now has a mother tongue other than English or French. These languages create [...]
Audiobooks have become a powerful player in the world of creative engagement, and the reason for this might change each time you ask someone why. While it is true that modern convenience, attention span, decoding challenges, and more contribute, it is important to consider whether humanity is simply returning to its roots: oral traditions. Audiobooks: Back to Our Roots [...]
Across the globe, transliteration is meant to bridge languages by carrying sounds across scripts. But that bridge sometimes fractures. Systems clash, errors accumulate, and a name meant to guide or identify becomes a source of confusion, misdirection, or even legal trouble. In this third installment of our transliteration series, we examine how transliteration mistakes disrupt real-world communication. When Sound [...]
So audiobooks are here to stay; what does that mean for reading culture? If you ask book enthusiasts, youโll likely get two answers: that theyโve read more books than ever thanks to audiobooks, or that people who listen to books arenโt โactuallyโ reading them. Is there any truth to this claim? How do audiobooks compare to reading physical media? [...]
Have you read a physical book in the last year? If so, you are increasingly in the minority; engagement with audiobooks continues to rise each year, both by the number of people experimenting with the format and by the number of books โread.โ But what does this mean for culture, knowledge acquisition, and even the human attention span? The Rise [...]
As weโve learned in this sign language series, sign is far from the same everywhere. In fact, itโs just as diverse as the rest of the worldโs languages! However, just as Esperanto was created to be an international spoken language, universal sign language could exist. But how successful has this initiative been, and should it even be a project at [...]
To understand just how important interjections are and why you subconsciously use them as much as you do, itโs helpful to know what role they serve. You likely place them into conversations (at a rate of one every 12 seconds or so!) without much thought, even though they are some of the most impactful utterances. But what do they [...]
Thereโs a funny thing about pop culture: the more fleeting it seems, the more lasting its impact often is. And perhaps nowhere is that more evident than in the words that owe their origins to Billboard-topping, chartbusting numbers. We might forget it, but several of the words we use today started on a lyrics sheet in a studio that [...]
The fact that no one really sits down to read anymore (or, at least, thatโs the way it might seem) is a symptom of many concurrent cultural and societal influences. However, this lack of reading acumen is more than just a change in preference; itโs having real impacts on entire generations, including those who grew up enjoying the earthy [...]
For Deaf individuals, this question is integral to understanding the unique and complex systems at work in the language part of the brain. Sign language is neurological in the same way that spoken languages are. However, the brain processes sign language differently from spoken languages, which can impact the cognitive faculties of a Deaf individual (often for the better!). [...]
