Month: December 2025

Almost 50 years after his death, the cultural and linguistic impact of Elvis Presley continues to be felt.

Elvis is considered to have been a true revolutionary. From the mid-1950s, before the concept of cultural appropriation had been coined and debated, he integrated diverse musical genres, including country music, rockabilly, gospel, and the blues. 

Alongside his music, Elvis’s image and his public persona penetrated the consciousness of the world, driving youth culture as an entire generation of young people emulated his hairstyle, dress sense, and signature moves. Teenagers integrated the words and phrases he used into their own language (referring to someone as a ‘hound dog’ and so on). Often, these words and phrases originated in the African American musical culture that Elvis often tapped into. In his own words, he said: ‘[They] been singing it and playing it just like I’m doin’ now, man, for more years than I know. They played it like that in their shanties and in their juke joints and nobody paid it no mind ’til I goosed it up.’ 

While in more recent years, Elvis has been retrospectively criticised by some for the ways in which he used African American music, at the time white racists were horrified by the fact that he was helping to make African American music and language commercial and mainstream. His massive popularity made the music business see that all these genres could make lots of money and laid the ground for generations of singers to come.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-man-dressed-in-elvis-clothing-holding-a-microphone-NGY_fydnUIo

Whistled speech, which is found in more than 80 languages around the world, is a way to communicate using whistling. It is heavily influenced by landscape and is typically found in areas such as dense forests, where using whistles to communicate makes it easier to be heard across a greater distance. 

Whistled speech generally coexists alongside spoken language – it is more common alongside tonal languages – and it is just as complex. Whistled languages generally follow the sounds and intonations of spoken language, so that listeners who are familiar with both can understand what is being said. 

Examples of whistled language include Sfyria, which was in use on the Greek island of Euboea until the 1980s; Sochiapam Chinantec in Mexico – where men can be fined if they are not sufficiently competent to carry out particular jobs in whistled speech – and the Tsonga whistle language in southern Mozambique. 

While in some cultures whistled speech is used in certain contexts only and is therefore more limited in expression than spoken language, in others full, complex conversations can be held. 

Most interesting of all, the presence of whistled speech in any given culture is generally much more closely related to the natural features of the landscape (dense forests and the like) than to contact with other cultures that practice this form of speech.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/person-standing-beside-a-brown-tree-trunk-5T3kINGpWcA

We all know jazz as a music genre, but is it a language too?

Some experts think it is. They point to the fact that jazz has its own vocabulary that has been expanding since the musical genre first emerged from African American culture and started spreading around the world. Every jazz musician has used this musical language to build upon the work of their predecessors.

Thus, each generation uses aural communication to pass down their language, with jazz developing and evolving organically, just as language does.

But unlike a language, there’s no dictionary of jazz, and although there are cultural and musical norms, there are no rules, either. Each musical jazz artist is free to draw on what they’ve learned from previous generations, but also to create their own musical vocabulary and to borrow and create their own musical grammar.

Whether or not you think jazz is a language, it’s certainly an interesting concept to riff off.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/person-playing-saxophone-dBWvUqBoOU8

Researchers have known for some time that learning a new language as an adult can help to prevent or delay the onset of age-related cognitive decline. But now new research, carried out in partnership by Trinity College Dublin, the Basque Center on Cognition, Brain and Language in San Sebastian, and the Latin American Brain Health Institute in Santiago, Chile suggests that being multilingual has far-reaching positive health effects that go far beyond keeping the little grey cells fit and active.

In fact, the researchers have discovered that the more languages people speak the more they are protected against health decline relating to age. Even after factoring in issues such as education, overall health, and lifestyle, it turned out that people from countries where being multilingual is the norm were 2.17 times less likely to experience accelerated ageing compared to people living in monolingual cultures.

The researchers further believe that incorporating language acquisition into public health plans will result in healthier, happier populations into old age, with huge positive benefits at individual, community, and societal levels.

At 101translations, where language is our first love, we’re not even slightly surprised.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/students-talking-and-studying-in-a-lecture-hall-wAgfqXpYqug

If you’re interested in European military history, you may have come across the word ‘Huns’, as in the context of war, it was often used as an anti-German slur. 

But who were the Huns really?

The Huns were nomads who lived in Central Asia, the Caucasus, and Eastern Europe between the 4th and 6th centuries CE. By 430, they had established a vast, but short-lived, empire on the Danubian frontier of the Roman empire in Europe. Under their king, Attila, they made many destructive raids into the Eastern Roman Empire.

Scholars once believed that the Huns originated from Turkic-speaking groups, but recent linguistic research has shown that they had Palaeo-Siberian ancestors, the Xiognu, and spoke a language that belonged to the Yeniseian language family, a subgroup of the so-called Palaeo-Siberian languages which were spoken in Siberia before the invasion of Uralic, Turkic and Tungusic ethnic groups. By studying placenames, scholars have also been able to learn much more than was known before about how these fascinating people ended up settling in Europe.

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/two-yurts-in-a-grassy-field-with-mountains-behind-trees-sPA6pypQRFk

The Acadians are people descended from French settlers in New France in the seventeenth and eighteen centuries. At that time, New France was located in what today are parts of Canada’s maritime provinces, parts of Quebec, and parts of Maine. In the late 1700s, a large number of them were displaced and moved to Louisiana, where they are often referred to as Cajuns; the anglicised term for ‘Acadian’. In parts of Canada, having intermarried with native populations, they also have Indigenous heritage, notably Mi’kmaq. 

Today most Acadians speak English but many also speak local dialects of Acadian French. In parts of Canada, such as New Brunswick, Acadians have some autonomy from the federal government, particularly in terms of overseeing their own education system, which is often provided through French. 

The complex history and heritage of the Acadian peoples has meant they’ve often been viewed with suspicion during periods of conflict, with the authorities doubting their loyalty to whatever government they happened to be living under at the time. Today, modern Acadians work to preserve their language, culture, and identity. 

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/iTek2vG3cAA 

For many years, the prevailing wisdom was that the pyramids of Egypt were built with slave labour.

Recently, however, a team of archaeologists led by Dr Zahi Hawass have studied ancient inscriptions that suggest they were actually built by paid workmen.

These inscriptions take the form of ancient graffiti left by the gangs of men whom the researchers believe to have built the pyramids. This graffiti refers to the groups of builders with names like ‘Khufu gang,’ ‘friends of Khufu’ and ‘Drunkards of Menkaure’ and suggest a spirit of friendly camaraderie, rather than the misery of being part of a slave gang.

Together with evidence that indicates that some of the pyramid builders who passed away were buried with full honours, and were ethnic Egyptians, the data points to the builders having been highly respected members of society. Further archaeological evidence reveals their rich diet, with freshly-baked bread and plenty of meat – not exactly slave rations.

What do you think future scholars will learn from the graffiti of today?

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/landscape-photography-of-pyramid-3lliBG4a5sI?utm_source=unsplash&utm_medium=referral&utm_content=creditCopyText

The term ‘vocal fry’ refers to that rather croaky, slightly breathless-sounding way of talking that, in English, became widespread from the 1990s, initially particularly among younger females in the US. In US English to this day, women much more widely use vocal fry than men. 

Technically, vocal fry is a low vocal register that occurs when the speaker partly closes their throat, causing the vocal cords to compress, becoming relatively compact and lowering the speaker’s voice. 

Vocal fry is also present in other languages. In Finnish, the use of vocal fry can indicate that it’s someone else’s turn to talk, and in Jalapa Mazatec, a minority language from the Mexican state of Oaxaca, the presence or absence of vocal fry changes the entire meaning of the word. In fact, two words that otherwise sound the same can have completely different meanings, depending on whether or not they are pronounced with vocal fry.

Perhaps because it came to be associated primarily with young women in America from the 1990s onwards, and because men are still often seen as having more authority, vocal fry in English is often interpreted as making the speaker sound weak and hesitant. But in Finland, people of both sexes who don’t use vocal fry come across as less eloquent than those that do.

Whatever you think of vocal fry, it certainly hasn’t held back Lady Gaga, whose pronouncements often bear all of its hallmark characteristics. 

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/people-laughing-and-talking-outside-during-daytime-nF8xhLMmg0c