With more than 400 million native speakers, Spanish is the world’s second most-used first language. It’s also one of the biggest contributors of loanwords to the English language, thanks in part to ...

Today I came across a Spanish idiom that is a lot of fun to say. The idiom is "Thinking about the immortality of the crab" and in Spanish: "Pensando en la inmortalidad del cangrejo." The Wikipedia ...

I first lived in Spain, and learned the language, more than 30 years ago. IT DIDN’T TAKE LONG to realize that what I’d learned in high school and subsequent classes in Barcelona and Madrid was only ...

The first time a Costa Rican said to me, “Estoy orinando” (I am peeing), whoa! I couldn’t help myself. I jumped back and looked down. What I subsequently found out was that this is the way to say “I ...

From William Shakespeare to Seamus Heaney, figurative language such as idiom, metaphor, symbolism and allegory all function to make a poem sound more colourful and appealing to the reader. But are we ...

Language processing encompasses the mental mechanisms by which individuals decode, interpret and produce language, while idiom comprehension focuses on understanding fixed, culturally embedded ...

Frank Boers receives funding from the Social Science and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Western University provides funding as a member of The Conversation CA-FR. Western University provides ...