Tag: culture
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Read Across America Week 2025
It’s Read Across America Week! From March 2-8, 2025, communities all over the United States are celebrating one of our favorite things at the MACAW Lab: reading books! Read Across America Week began as a celebration of Dr. Seuss’s birthday on March 2nd. Its goal is to allow others to share a love of books…
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Word of the Week: Sign Languages
Sign languages are languages that use gestures, hand movements, and facial expressions instead of spoken words. They are true languages, more organized and complex than body language or baby signs, complete with their own grammatical structures. Because sign languages do not use sounds like oral languages, aspects like emotion and emphasis are added with the…
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Word of the Week: Lingua Franca
A lingua franca is a common language used between people that do not have the same native language. It can also be used to describe a mixture of languages where words from multiple languages are combined. A lingua franca is often used between people that oversee trade, facilitate business, or communicate information academically, scientifically, or…
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Read: Raising Bilingual Children
There are many reasons to raise a child to be bilingual or multilingual. Some parents do so because their native language, or that of their family, is not the mainstream language spoken where they live. Other parents want their children to be connected to their culture. Others still simply want their child to have more…
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Word of the Week: Idiolect
An idiolect is an individual’s variation of speech and language. Every person has a distinctive combination of word choice, grammar, pronunciation, and style that makes up their idiolect. As opposed to a dialect, which encompasses the language of a group of people, an idiolect is much more narrow—is unique to the individual. It is influenced…
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Word of the Week: Code-switching
Code-switching means changing how language is used depending on social context. This can mean switching between languages (such as speaking English to an English speaker but German to a German speaker) or mixing languages (such as Spanglish). It can also refer to switching dialect (such as African American English to Standard American English) or changing…
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Word of the Week: Dialect
A dialect is a variation of a language shared by members of a region, social class, or ethnicity. Dialects can vary from each other in vocabulary, grammar, and pronunciation. Some also have unique conversational rules. They are often considered to be mutually intelligible: generally, speakers of one dialect can be understood by speakers of another…
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