OU News
News from The Open University
- Home
- Category: Languages
Category: Languages
The language of call centres and why it can “offend the ears”
Most of us dread dealing with them, but call centres are hard to avoid as an increasingly widespread aspect of modern life. Now a new study from The Open University, published in the Journal of Sociolinguistics, has opened up the world of call centres and examined how pressurized call centre agents take short cuts to […]
Read more about The language of call centres and why it can “offend the ears”
Truthiness and alternative facts: meaning is a moveable feast
Sales of George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four have apparently surged since Kellyanne Conway introduced the phrase “alternative facts” into public discourse. For many, the term is reminiscent of Orwell’s dystopian Newspeak, the imaginary language used by the novel’s totalitarian government to control the way the population thinks. It also allows for the doublethink of the slogans […]
Read more about Truthiness and alternative facts: meaning is a moveable feast
The world’s words of the year pass judgement on a dark, surreal 2016
Every December, lexicographers around the world choose their “words of the year”, and this year, perhaps more than ever, the stories these tell provide a fascinating insight into how we’ve experienced the drama and trauma of the last 12 months. 2016 had potential. It was 500 years ago that Thomas More wrote his Utopia, and […]
Read more about The world’s words of the year pass judgement on a dark, surreal 2016
The filter bubble isn’t just Facebook’s fault — it’s yours
Following the shock results of Brexit and the Trump victory, a lot of attention has focused on the role that Facebook might have played in creating online political ghettos in which false news can easily spread. Facebook now has serious political influence thanks to its development from a social networking tool into a primary source […]
Read more about The filter bubble isn’t just Facebook’s fault — it’s yours
Why English language lessons are not the answer to radicalisation
David Cameron used an article in The Times and an interview on Radio 4’s Today show to announce £20m of extra funding to provide English lessons for Muslim women in the UK to prevent them from becoming “second-class citizens”. The prime minister’s announcement has come in for harsh criticism, particularly his implication that not speaking […]
Read more about Why English language lessons are not the answer to radicalisation
Star Wars: Talk like Yoda
How does Star Wars’ Yoda structure a sentence? And how does it differ to the way we tend to speak in contemporary English? This one minute film presented by Fernando Rosell-Aguilar, Senior Lecturer in Languages at The Open University, breaks down the mechanics of Yoda speech in this crash course on speaking Yodish. For more Open […]
Do you speak Star Wars?
Main image: Mark Menzies, CC BY-NC-SA Unless you are C3-PO, fluent in more than six million forms of communication, you may not understand every Star Wars language. I’m not talking about the languages spoken in the saga such as Shyriiwook, Huttese, Bocce or even Binary (beep beep doop!), but the languages into which the Star Wars […]
Bilingual pupils – a rich resource for future says OU academic
There are now more than 1.1 million children in our schools whose first language “is known or believed to be other than English” according to the latest government figures. This confirms a continuous upwards trend that shows no sign of abating. Many of the 300 or so languages spoken in schools have relatively few […]
Read more about Bilingual pupils – a rich resource for future says OU academic
Page 3 of 3
Explore
Undergraduate
Postgraduate
Policy
-
Follow us on Social media
-
