News

There are thousands of languages which span across nations and time–an estimated seven thousand known so far. UNM Linguistics recently hired Assistant Professor Joshua Birchall is one of the many linguists working tirelessly to understand, document and...

Me-muh-ry or mem-ry (memory), fa-muh-ly or fam-ly (family), ce-luh-ry or cel-ry (celery), and so on – there are different ways to pronounce words. Across languages, linguists spend a lot of time figuring out what it is about the way that we use...

Whether it’s another language, how you pronounce pecan, or using the word ‘y’all’ instead of ‘you guys’, where you live has an impact on how you speak.   That’s a cause and effect we’ve only scratched the surface of, according to new research from...

Two professors of Linguistics have identified the "primal consonants" of human languages ̶ a small set of five consonant types that most likely were the original consonant sounds in early, even pre-human, communication, and subsequently underwent change...

Protecting an endangered language is just as consequential as safeguarding animals on the verge of extinction. The Navajo language faces threats to its vitality just as imperiled animals do. Like protecting the planet, preserving a language, and the...

When traveling through Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas, a request for chile on a cheeseburger will yield three different types of flavors. In the same way, a UNM graduate student is doing trailblazing research showing dialectic varieties of sign language...

In 2019, Graduate Studies at The University of New Mexico celebrated its 100 years of graduate education at UNM with its annual Shared Knowledge Conference and popular LoboBITES competition. Students, faculty, staff,...

Sherman Wilcox, center, with two Chinese students, in front of the gates to the Forbidden City.Sherman Wilcox, professor of linguistics, has been asked to deliver a series of 10 lectures, two per day, this week at Beihang University in Beijing, China.The ...