Language (Human)

About English

The Cambridge Online Survey of World Englishes (vocabulary differences)
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Soda vs. Pop vs. Coke: Mapping How Americans Talk (The Atlantic)
Games with Words: Which English? Play the game: Learn about language.
English pronunciation test Once you've learned to correctly pronounce every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.
One Woman, 17 British Accents - Anglophenia Ep 5 - YouTube: Siobhan Thompson performs a tour of the accents of the British Isles - and the celebrities who speak with them! Five lessons to help you do a better British …
North American Dialects
The dude map: How Americans refer to their bros - Quartz: It seems safe to report that dude has supplanted totally as the word most often uttered by American youth, claimed Richard Hill in his 1994 paper on the history of the word ;dude. That might be true, but as it turns out, dude is more popular in some parts of the United States than others…
21 Accents - YouTube. By Amy Walker. Most accents for native-speakers, but a few are illustrative of non-native speakers (e.g., German, Italian). Most are good, a few are overdone.

The History of English - How New Words Are Created
8 pronunciation errors that made the English language what it is today by David Shariatmadari - The Guardian, 2014-03-11.
The Dark Side of Verbs-as-Nouns - blog by Henry Hitchings - NYTimes (tiered subscription model).
Summary: loss of agency
Etymology: Languages that have contributed to English vocabulary over time.
10 Words That Started Out as Errors: Words are often formed by mishearings, inversion of sounds, dropping and adding of sounds, and other all-too-human errors.
Why H is the most contentious letter in the alphabet | The Guardian: While writing my book, Alphabetical, about the history of the letters we use, I discovered that debates about power and class surround every letter — and none more so than the letter H
Why Americans Call Soccer 'Soccer' - Uri Friedman - The Atlantic. Thumbnail: Association was shortened to Soc and slang added er suffix.
What the English of Shakespeare, Beowulf, and King Arthur actually sounded like by James Harbeck - The Week, 2015-03-20

Where the Dollar Sign Comes From: It is not what you would guess (for example, it is not a blending of US)

The study of adjective order and GSSSACPM. It is a lovely warm August day outside, and I am wearing a green loose top. Does the second part of that sentence sound strange to you? Perhaps you think I should have written loose green top. You're not wrong (though not entirely right, because descriptivist linguistics): An intuitive code…