News

A ground-breaking policy workshop aiming to break the “vicious circle of monolingualism” in the UK was held at Cambridge University, featuring representatives of government, education and key organisations including the British Academy and the British Council.Slides from this event can be viewed via the Language Sciences and Policy tab on this webs…

As children around the country go back to school, a new comparative study of spoken English reveals that we talk about education nearly twice as much as we did twenty years ago. The study, which compares spoken English today with recordings from the 1990s, allows researchers at Cambridge University Press and Lancaster University to examine how the …

The Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, University of Cambridge, looks forward to welcoming Professor Ianthi Maria Tsimpli from 1 July as the newly appointed Chair of English and Applied Linguistics.Professor Tsimpli has previously held the positions of Professor of Multilingualism and Cognition at the School of Psychology and Clinic…

“No, here you mean that you swept only the house and nothing else,” Mark explains. Mark is one of the Luganda language consultants in Masaka that Dr Saudah Namyalo and myself are working with in our Alborada project. During three weeks fieldwork we describe and analyse particular syntactic aspects of this language, and today we are trying to discov…

The following news item is from the Cambridge Enterprise website.New software developed by a University of Cambridge spin-out aims to transform voice recognition with technology that allows a more natural level of communication between people and their personal electronics.New software that interprets the spoken word is poised to revolutionise voic…

In an interview published in The Guardian, the previous Vice-Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, spoke of his personal experience of growing up bilingual, and of the important benefits of bilingualism for individuals and for society.The Vice-Chancellor,whose parents arrived in Britain in the 1940s, spoke Pol…

A record number of organisations now use Cambridge English exams as proof of English language ability. Figures show that 15,000 organisations now recognise the tests, an increase of 36% since 2011.Organisations that rely on Cambridge English exams include companies, education institutions and immigration bodies. Recent names to join the list includ…

 The Chancellor of the University of Cambridge, Lord Sainsbury of Turville, and the Vice Chancellor Professor Sir Leszek Borysiewicz, both paid a visit to the Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics on 20 March to learn more about cross-disciplinary research in language sciences at the University. The two-hour discussion with members of the la…

Linguists working at Cambridge and Newcastle have discovered that a certain combination of words is impossible in all languages, despite it being quite easy to understand what it would mean.Linguists have known for many years that, among the world’s languages, roughly half are like English in that they put the object of the verb after the verb in a…

Research by Dr. Bert Vaux (Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics) into regional variations in American English as part of the 2003 Harvard Dialect Survey has been used as the basis for a short film called Soda Pop Coke. Find out more here.http://www.theatlantic.com/video/archive/2013/11/soda-vs-pop-vs-coke-mapping-how-americans-talk/281808/Y…

A film based on a 2003 survey of U.S. dialects by Dr. Bert Vaux in the Dept. of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics has just been published. The film uses heat maps to show the distribution of regional variants in pronounciation and vocabulary (for example, the differnt ways to prounce the word 'pecan'; 'soda' versus 'pop').

Cambridge English Centenary ConferenceEnglish language learning is experiencing one of its most dramatic periods of growth, and English is now one of the primary curriculum subjects for many children around the world. It is vital that the assessment community understands this landscape so that it can develop the right strategies, content and assess…

Professor Geoffrey Khan in the Faculty of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies is celebrating the publication of the Encyclopedia of Hebrew Language and Linguistics, for which he was Editor-in-Chief. This is now the most authoritative and comprehensive reference tool for research on the Hebrew language.http://www.brill.com/encyclopedia-hebrew-language-…

Following on from the English Profile programme, Cambridge English Language Assessment will fund a new institute to undertake research on Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA), to be launched in October 2013. The institute will be administered by the Computer Laboratory but includes principal investigators from the Department of Enginee…

John Trim, the founder of the Department of Linguistics at the University of Cambridge and its first Director from 1958-1978, died peacefully on 19 January at the age of 88.Among the many achievements in a long and distinguished career he was Director of the Centre for Information on Language Teaching from 1978-1987, and was one of the co-developer…