They look at the inner workings of language. Why language works like it does, in other words. Think of learning about linguistics in the same way you’d learn how an internal combustion engine works. Linguistics is what’s under the hood… you don’t need to know it to drive a car, but it helps understand what’s going on if you ever break down!
So… TEFL teachers should find these useful in providing more of a background to their teaching and students, too, will find them helpful in understanding language at a slightly deeper level.
Monolingualism is knowing and using just one language. This language will be the speaker’s mother tongue. Contrast this with bilingualism. where someone knows and uses 2 languages as mother tongues and also multilingualism where someone has more than 2 languages as their mother tongues. A person who speaks just one […]
There is not one single Chinese language as such but several varieties of Chinese which are more or less mutually understandable; the language is spoken by over 1 billion people (making is more popular than English). Of the different varieties Mandarin is the most widely spoken version with over 800 […]
Maltese is primarily the language spoken in Malta (alongside English). The language comes from Siculo-Arabic which is the form of Arabic spoken in Sicily about 1,000 years ago. The vocabulary of Maltese is about 50% derived from Italian and Sicilian with around 15% English words.
Here’s a scenario for you: a ship sinks at sea and 10 survivors manage to struggle to a desert island. Each survivor comes from a different country and speaks a different language. And none of them speak any other language other than their own. Ten years later a rescue boat […]
Simply put, a lemma is the base form of a word, typically found in a dictionary where it’s known as a headword. From the lemma we can form many related words. So, for example, here are a few lemmas and their forms: do: do, does, did, doing run: running, ran […]