language
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Countries, Languages, and Writing
But what about those writers who move to another country and do not change language, who continue to write in their mother tongue many years after it has ceased to be the language of daily conversation? Do the words they…
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The Fine Point of Communication
At Aeon, Thom Scott-Phillips compares words and images, literature and visual art, to reveal their complementary nature in getting to the point.
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The Person to Whom Things Happen
The question of what posture to take toward our own pain is unexpectedly complicated. How do we understand our own suffering—with what words and to what ends? For the New York Times Magazine, Parul Sehgal questions the terminology we use…
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Language as Both Salve and Poison
What I have seen, what we have seen, is language forced into the service of violence. A rhetoric of desperation and devastation molded into the incomprehensible, then vomited out in images and words that we cannot ignore though we have…
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The Prison House of English
For the NYRB, Tim Parks meditates on writing in English through investigating various authors who made switches from native tongues to the more economically viable lingua franca, like Nabokov and Conrad—or who did the exact opposite, like Jhumpa Lahiri—all in effort to…
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A Poet’s Arrival
The New Yorker profiles Ocean Vuong, who muses on the English language, growing up around women, Frank O’Hara, and the vestigial nature of clichés. And with his first book of poetry published just last week, he addresses the feelings of strangeness…
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The Rumpus Interview with Miroslav Penkov
Miroslav Penkov discusses his debut novel, Stork Mountain, Balkan history, and the difficulties and rewards of being a bilingual writer.
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Losing Language
At JSTOR Daily, linguist Chi Luu looks at language loss in victims of trauma, specifically trauma in wartime. Luu’s case studies range from a monolingual teenaged prisoner isolated in Guantanamo Bay to POWs in Russia isolated from their native cultures…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Idra Novey
Swati Khurana talks with novelist and translator Idra Novey about the challenges and joys of translation, the idiosyncrasies of language, the inextricable reception of women’s writing and women’s bodies, and much more.
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Just Wing It
Robert Minto examines selections from Homer’s Iliad to discover why some language and rhetoric misses its mark while other characters’ “winging words” achieve their purpose.
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Hello! Bonjour! Hola! Hallo!
Interpreting someone’s utterance often requires attending not just to its content, but also to the surrounding context. What does a speaker know or not know? What did she intend to convey? Children in multilingual environments have social experiences that provide…
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The Language of Invention
Fantasy author Sofia Samatar (The Winged Histories) speaks to Kati Heng at Weird Sister about world building and invented languages, as well as the often forgotten history of non-white, non-male fantasy writers.