Code-switching during conversation? A new current or a natural tendency?
Code changes are relatively frequent phenomena, especially while speaking at least one foreign language. Code-switching, one of the best-known examples of code alternations, can be explained as a practice of moving between languages or language varieties in a context of a single communication act. Code-switching refers mainly to people who can be classified as bilinguals, […]
Feral children – what would we be like without language?
What is it that makes us truly humans? Is it language? Answer to that kind of questions is certainly much more complicated, but it seems that language is of central importance in who we are and what we can achieve. From time to time the world resounds with news concerning so-called feral (or wild) children […]
Language and culture – are they inseparable?
Imagine trying to learn another foreign language – but this time completely independently from its country’s culture. Is that even possible? No literary references, no history, no knowledge of the local customs and way of life… Can you master a language without all those context information? It may actually seem quite possible, at least in […]
