New Zealand English (NZE) is a variety of English which is close to Australian English in pronunciation but has several subtle differences often overlooked by people from outside these countries. Some of these differences show New Zealand English to have more affinity with the English of southern England than Australian […]
Continue ReadingNeologisms
A Neologism is newly created (or “coined”) word. New words often apply to new concepts or inventions, or perhaps when an old idea takes on a new meaning. Some random neologisms: aspirin hyperspace internet Islamaphobia wiki bling wmd phishing Quite simply, these words did not exist several years ago. Trivia […]
Continue ReadingNative Speakers
A native speaker of English is a person who has grown up speaking English as their first language or mother tongue. In terms of English teachers this usually means from one of the major English speaking countries: the USA, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Australia, Canada, New Zealand or South Africa. […]
Continue Readingn-grams and TEFL
In the fields of computational linguistics an n-gram is a sequence of items from a corpus of language. An n-gram could be any combination of letters, phonemes, syllables or words, etc. Looking at n-grams is useful to help work out how language works and is used in everyday situations. Google […]
Continue ReadingMultilingualism
Multilingualism is the ability to speak more than one language. In some definitions this means speaking a language as a native speaker or to native speaker standard, however some definitions are more flexible allowing multilingual to mean being able to communicate in more than one language (though not necessarily to […]
Continue Reading