Language, culture, and place—through linguistics, heritage language learning, and community-based education.

Why is English spelling so strange? Words such as queen, ship, and house preserve traces of the Norman Conquest, medieval scribes, and centuries of changing pronunciation. Explore how English evolved from Old English through the Great Vowel Shift, and discover why its spelling is difficult, but far from random.

Why does blick sound like it could be an English word, while bnick sounds impossible? The answer lies in phonotactics—the hidden rules that determine which sound combinations are allowed in a language. Explore how languages such as Hawaiian, Japanese, English, and Georgian organize their sounds in different ways, revealing that every language follows its own beautifully consistent system.

Languages have family trees, but they also have friend groups. Discover why English is Germanic, how Greek and Aramaic became closely connected, and why both ancestry and contact matter in historical linguistics.

When people think about language documentation, they often imagine word lists, sound recordings, or grammatical descriptions. These are all important—but they are only part of the picture. To understand a language as it is actually lived, we also need to pay attention to how speakers manage reference, relationships, and social meaning . Pronouns sit right at the center of this work. In many languages, pronouns encode distinctions that are invisible in English: respect, kinshi

When we study writing systems, it’s tempting to focus on classification: logographic, syllabic, alphabetic. These labels are useful, but they can also flatten what writing systems really are. In a recent Language & Heritage Institute class, we explored logographic writing through the example of Egyptian hieroglyphs . What quickly became clear is that writing systems are not just methods for recording speech. They are cultural archives —systems that encode how a society organ

Pronouns are some of the smallest words in a language, but they often carry some of the heaviest cultural and grammatical information. In a recent Linguistics Club session at the Language & Heritage Institute, we explored pronoun systems across languages to see how communities encode meaning, social relationships, and history into these seemingly simple forms. We worked with real data from three very different linguistic contexts: Torres Strait Creole , the Jungiau dialect o

When we study writing systems, it’s tempting to focus on how they represent sounds on the page. But writing systems are much more than technical tools. They are cultural artifacts.

The world is unjust, and language has a part in it. This is how Quentin Williams, Ana Deumert and Tommaso M. Milani start their book...

Review of Warrior Scholars & Bridge Builders: Civic Dreaming in ELA Classrooms by Nicole Mirra, Jerica Coffey, and Ashley Englander in...

I met Anna Marie Trester, the founder of Career Linguist, years ago when I was interviewed for her "Stories around the Campfire" series....