As you watch your children open their Christmas presents this morning, you might be pondering these linguistic questions: Why do the boxes on toys always read “SOME assembly required,” even though you ...

And I'm Robert Siegel. P: Phonetics, Phonology and Sound Change. He calls it a snapshot of our rapidly changing language, mergers of sounds that used to be different, splits of sounds that used to be ...

Why is the English language so jacked up? Why do sometimes we pronounce "i" as "i" and other times as "e"? I'm thinking of starting a language where no "i" can be pronounced "e." It's just disrespect.

Let’s dig deep and find out why certain names simply fall out of fashion. When you hear names like Gladys or Herbert or Doris, you probably automatically think of old people, but why is that?

I was in a bar in Beverly, watching the Bears play the Jaguars. After the Bears went up 13-0 on a Conor Barth field goal, a gray-haired gentleman shouted across the room, “Hey, what are da squares for ...

, Labov spends a great deal of time discussing a riveting linguistic change that’s occurring in the northern region of the U.S. clustering around the Great Lakes. This dialect region is called the ...

Edsol Crowder thinks he’s hearing a new crop of mispronunciations and wonders whether others are hearing the same sounds. For instance, he says, a conservative radio talk-show host repeatedly says ...

The old vowels are ’oot’: Canadians are changing how we speak, though none of us are noticing. Linguists might know why. Out with “oot.” No more “aboot.” Canada is talking with a New Speak. In a ...

Want to catch an Inland North accent? Maybe head to da bar in certain parts of Chicahhgo. Trent Sprague/Chicago Tribune The Midwestern accent is well worth studying, because there’s more than one.

A, E, I, O, U and sometimes Y is not all you need to know about vowels. There's more to these workhorse members of our linguistics inventory than you might think. The most common vowel sound in ...