Featured series 
Tag: Linguistics
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Campus & Community
Life at a distance
How Harvard faculty and staff continue to adapt to social distancing as they stay the course.
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Campus & Community
What’s in a word? The future history of English
A history of English course hosts its own March Madness-style tournament for newly coined words in the English lexicon.
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Arts & Culture
Decoding languages in the lab
Linguistics lab applies scientific methods to studying and understanding how people communicate.
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Arts & Culture
A sound all his own
Harry Yeff, better known as beatboxer Reeps One, speaks to the Gazette about finding his voice, bringing it to the classroom, and leaving it on the stage.
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Arts & Culture
Unhand that comma!
Harvard wordsmiths Jill Abramson and Steven Pinker answered questions from the Gazette to mark National Punctuation Day.
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Science & Tech
The power of babble
Babies need conversational stimulation for their intellectual development, and a piece published in JAMA Pediatrics hopes to advise parents and pediatricians on how and when to best nurture that development.
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Arts & Culture
From Swahili to Bemba to Twi
With more than 25 languages offered each semester, the African Language Program at Harvard is the world’s foremost.
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Campus & Community
Calvert Ward Watkins
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on November 4, 2014, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Calvert Ward Watkins, Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, Emeritus, was spread upon the records. A larger-than-life Indo-Europeanist, Professor Watkins’s scholarship, including contributions to the American Heritage Dictionary,…
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Campus & Community
Calvert Watkins dies at 80
Calvert Watkins, the Victor S. Thomas Professor of Linguistics and the Classics, emeritus, died March 20 at the age of 80.
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Arts & Culture
Rescuing ancient languages
Harvard Linguistics Professor Maria Polinsky and her lab team work to understand and preserve ancient Mayan tongues, with the help of native speakers.
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Arts & Culture
Theater’s new frontiers
Offbeat Director John Tiffany, whose company stages productions in unlikely locales, is using a fellowship year at Radcliffe to explore the ways that people communicate, complete with tics.
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Campus & Community
Anthropologist Hymes dies at 82
Dell H. Hymes, 82, an influential linguistic anthropologist and folklorist who taught at Harvard from 1955 to 1960, died in Charlottesville, Va., on Nov. 13.
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Campus & Community
Wilga Marie Rivers
At a Meeting of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences on October 21, 2008, the Minute honoring the life and service of the late Wilga Marie Rivers, Professor of Romance Languages and Literatures, Emeritus, was placed upon the records. Rivers was an international authority on language learning and teaching.
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Arts & Culture
Harvard scientists predict the future of the past tense
Verbs evolve and homogenize at a rate inversely proportional to their prevalence in the English language, according to a formula developed by Harvard University mathematicians who’ve invoked evolutionary principles to study our language over the past 1,200 years, from “Beowulf” to “Canterbury Tales” to “Harry Potter.”
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Arts & Culture
Looking for language’s universal logic
To Gennaro Chierchia, language’s innumerable combinations and subtle changes of structure and meaning are a window onto the human mind.
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Campus & Community
Howard Gardner’s ‘quintet of minds’
It’s been more than 20 years since Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner offered up a radical idea: that humans possess multiple forms of intelligence rather than just a single type that is easily tested by linguistic and logical-mathematical parameters.