By Amanda Jenkins, Student in Museum Studies, CLM Intern Many plants, animals, and insects have scientific names, but while some people may be able toknow a specific animal’s scientific name off the top of their head, the majority of people only know the common name. So, what’s the point of having scientific name for plants ..read more

By: Nico Mjones, MA Applied Linguistics / Diploma in Curatorial Studies / CLM Intern Statistics Canada recently released the data on language that it collected in the 2021 census. This data is full of new and interesting developments in language diversity in Canada. The release of the language data brings new information about official languages ..read more

By: Christer Oscar Kiselman, Uppsala, Sweden For a full week in August of 2022, eight hundred and thirty Esperanto speakers from allcontinents except Antarctica were welcomed by the City of Montréal in Québec, Canada. An Esperanto congress can perhaps best be described as a forceful eruption ofconferences on a lot of topics, in fact on ..read more

By: Nico Mjones, Student in Applied Linguistics MA and Certificate in Curatorial Studies / CLM Intern June is Pride Month in Canada. As both a student of Applied Linguistics and a member of the LGBT community, I find it important to talk about the ways in which language matters for LGBT people. In this blog ..read more

Canada is home to the largest Ukrainian population outside of Ukraine and Russia. According to the 2016 census, 1.3 million Canadians claim Ukrainian ancestry. In addition to this, there are over 100,000 Canadians who speak Ukrainian as a mother tongue, making it the 20th largest mother tongue language in Canada ..read more

By: Marlène Viardot, Master of Anthropology student / Museum Intern Bonjour, je m’appelle Marlène, and I am a student at the Université de Bordeaux, France. I’m doing my Master’s degree in Anthropologie sociale et culturelle, on the topic of la revitalisation linguistique of Canada Indigenous languages. I have been attracted to working in Canada for ..read more

By: Jingshu Helen Yao, Master of Museum Studies student / Summer Intern at the CLM Language acquisition is my area of interest and I am fascinated by the theories about the connections between language learning and age, language distance, and level of exposure. Sometimes I observe people and ask questions to draw connections between what I learned ..read more

If you couldn’t read the title, don’t worry. It says “Hello” in Klingon, “Welcome” in Sindarin, and “Let’s talk about language” in Esperanto. These expressions may seem to be totally unrelated, but they are all from constructed languages ..read more

I felt lucky to be able to visit the Museum of World Languages at Shanghai International Studies University. The exhibition covered a wide range of topics related to linguistics, including linguistic theories, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, orthography, and translation. The topics are organized under three main themes, 说 “speak”, 记 “write”, and 译 “translate”. The characters for each of these words share the same thematic particle “言”, which is used in the construction of all Chinese characters that relate to language. Not only does the museum have exhibits on spoken and written languages ..read more

I have an accent and I’ve never liked it. I sometimes say “sank” instead of “thank” and “worm” instead of “warm”. If you say “had” and “head” without any context I won’t be able to tell the difference ..read more