Peter Trudgill
03 July 2024
The long and the short of it
The addition of suffixes to indicate a change in size is a common feature of many languages – but the word ‘cello’ is a unique example
Read the full article26 June 2024
Hello from the other side
The use of the word ‘hi’ as a greeting in Britain began in the early 1960s – probably influenced by American TV programmes and films
Read the full article19 June 2024
Language on the move
The geographical spread of Romansh in Switzerland is shrinking as speakers start to use the German of their near neighbours
Read the full article12 June 2024
Me, myself and muggins here
Its origin is uncertain, but the term ‘muggins’ is one of the very few alternative first-person pronouns to ‘I’ and ‘me’ in the English language
Read the full article05 June 2024
Hispaniola: an island divided
Most people in Haiti speak Kreyòl, while their eastern neighbours speak Spanish
Read the full article29 May 2024
How old is language?
Even the world’s most prominent linguistics experts cannot agree on when humans first acquired the capacity for language
Read the full article22 May 2024
A sea change in language
Between 350AD and 600AD, ‘boat people’ took Brittonic Celtic across the Channel from south-west England to Normandy and Brittany
Read the full article15 May 2024
Standing out in Central Asia
The word is linguistically Persian, but most of the ‘stan’ nations are now inhabited by speakers of Turkic languages
Read the full article08 May 2024
A peach of a soprano
How Australian singer Nellie Melba – born Helen Porter Mitchell – took her new surname from a mill stream in Derbyshire
Read the full article01 May 2024
The language suffering from excess passion
The word now used to denote enthusiasm has come a long way from its early days when it was most often used in connection with Christ
Read the full article24 April 2024
No rest on top of the world
It sits on the border between Tibet and Nepal, but Everest is best known by its English name – given in honour of a Welsh geographer
Read the full article17 April 2024
How it could have been MacGregor’s, not Grieg’s, piano concerto
Edvard Grieg may have been Norway’s greatest classical composer, but he actually inherited his name from his Scottish forebears
Read the full article10 April 2024
Language tied up in knots
People may assume that the word ‘cravat’ comes from French, but its ultimate linguistic origin is much more complicated
Read the full article03 April 2024
Bohemian rhapsodies
Why the ‘father of Czech classical music’ switched from a German Friedrich to a Czech Bedrich
Read the full article20 March 2024
A question of emphasis
A meeting with Kim Cattrall conjures up thoughts of Anne Boleyn, and a shift in stress in the syllables of their surnames
Read the full article13 March 2024
Playing havoc with tenses
Are devastation and destruction wreaked or wrought? And why did the word havoc change from ‘havot’ in the first place?
Read the full article06 March 2024
The ballad of a refugee poet
Norwich’s literary legacy is a surprising one – both Meir of England and Jan Cruso were important poets from the city but neither wrote in English
Read the full article28 February 2024
Italy’s Austrian national hero
Italian tennis star Jannik Sinner’s home region of South Tyrol is still largely German-speaking despite being in Italy for over 100 years
Read the full article21 February 2024
How my mum lighted the way
A look at eight decades’ worth of a parent’s diaries shows how our use of language has changed in unexpected ways
Read the full article14 February 2024
The law of possession
How we say and write the name of Newcastle United’s home ground is a lesson for those who worry about apostrophes
Read the full article07 February 2024
The talk of a land of unrest
Sadly, the main four branches of the Iranian language are synonymous with areas currently involved in political and ethnic conflicts
Read the full article31 January 2024
Roots of the two Dylans
Both Bob Dylan and Dylan Thomas had interesting linguistic backgrounds, which may have contributed to their creativity with words
Read the full article25 January 2024
The origins of your Burns Night haggis
These are the roots of the traditional feast to celebrate Rabbie Burns
Read the full article24 January 2024
For old times past, my dear
The works of Robert Burns are known the world over, but many English speakers only have a vague understanding of the language he used
Read the full article17 January 2024
Want a digestif with that?
Words can take on a whole new meaning when adopted into another language; French vocabulary is particularly susceptible
Read the full article10 January 2024
Boris should have twigged
There are not many Gaelic loanwords in English, and the most common ones refer to specifically Scottish phenomena. But not all
Read the full article03 January 2024
Taking a shufti at English slang
The adoption of some Arabic words into colloquial English came from British soldiers stationed in the Middle East and north Africa
Read the full article20 December 2023
The origins of the Windrush
The name of the ship is well known these days, but the etymology of the Cotswolds village from which it took its name is less certain
Read the full article13 December 2023
The Euro roots of a US holiday
The Americans have already had their big turkey meal of the year – and Thanksgiving owes a debt to Greece and to harvest festivals
Read the full article06 December 2023
The United States of East Anglia
New England has many place names that must have been taken across the North Atlantic by homesick English people in the 1600s
Read the full article29 November 2023
The land of one direction
Small islands have evolved vocabularies based on topography – including one place where you can go ‘east’ while heading west
Read the full article22 November 2023
The fine art of having a dekko
English has a number of words borrowed from Urdu-Hindi, many of which arrived when British Indian Army soldiers returned to ‘Blighty’
Read the full article