There is a constantly growing issue in the global science education and research community: the problem experienced by non-native speakers reading and/or writing science content in English. How can we better address this current brake on development? English is currently the “preferred” language for international scientific research publications. However, as evidenced crucially in this article, there is widespread proof of operational difficulties — especially slower speeds of reading/understanding — for science content readers who have English as a second language (E2L).

After many years of promoting “plain language” (PL), mainly in the English-speaking world, the organizations behind “official” PL development have been successful in establishing plain language as an ISO standard. It received the label ISO 24495–1 in February, 2023. What could this mean for language accessibility across cultures? …

As we constantly re-evaluate the way languages are used over time, especially on the internet in this generative-AI moment, we encounter two questions: firstly, what can we actually measure productively about a given language or linguistic practice, and secondly what should we be measuring better if we want to leverage…

Back in the hip 1960s, the renegade US writer William Burroughs came out with some sharp commentary on language as a virus and writing as a source of mind control. Contrast these with LLMs. The US “beat” novelist William Burroughs proposed literally to break the word lines — interrupting conventional word combinations that acted as thought viruses to insinuate fixed ideas into our reading practices. …

There’s talk in the air about the Language Singularity (LS), no doubt prompted by recent big-tech advances with LLM-based generative AI services. Not quite the same as the famous technological Singularity mooted back in the 20th century by Mssrs von Neumann, Vinge, and Kurzweil, but certainly inspired by the version suggested recently by Marco Trombetti. — Marco predicted that the time will soon come when measuring the difference in translation quality between human-only and machine-only output becomes irrelevant (in most but not all cases, presumably). …

The Oscar-winning “Everything, etc.” film title tries to cover the whole works. This little commentary aims lower. As we constantly map how languages are used over time, especially on the internet, we run up against two key questions: firstly what can we measure about a given language or quantitative practice…

We are currently bewitched by the belief that “natural” language — a grammatical flow of intentional meaningfulness — can be extracted via statistical wizardry from cohorts of digital words. But it is we humans, of course, that are doing the understanding, not the machine… We want to optimize languaging at…

I want to speculate about the future of language in all its aspects — the tech, the sociology, the politics, and the chat. I’ve spent a long time looking at the evolution of language tech (from ancient scripts via typewriters to LLM language models) and I want to focus on…

Twenty years ago, the French cognitive anthropologist Dan Sperber predicted in L’avenir de la lecture et de l’écriture” that we will eventually give up writing and start using speech to dictate to machines, though reading text will continue. “We have evolved a brain,” he claimed, “specifically prepared for speaking and…