Jesús Romero-Trillo

The vocabulary and grammar of spoken South African English are coated in a fine layer of Afrikaans dust. It’s been there so long that most of us no longer notice The first English lesson I ever gave was in a little language school in a sprawling Taiwanese city. The theme was Fruit, a subject about […]

The people who brought us jeggings, skorts and coatigans have decided the letter S is no longer fashionable I love fashion. I mean really love it. I can become obsessive about the cut of an ankle boot, I dream of one day hunting down the perfect silk blouse in just the right shade of oyster, […]

For a supposedly dead language, Latin exerts an enduring appeal. You can even make love in it That a journalist’s knowledge of Latin enabled her to break the news of the pope’s resignation suggests reports of its death may have been exaggerated. A BBC article, Who speaks Latin these days?, quickly returned to the default […]

A riposte to homophobia from the poppy end of hip-hop may be the most profound song either genre has produced I was never one of those “I’m, like, so cool I listen to bands that haven’t even formed yet” types. It was pop all the way – camp, often ridiculous and always cheesy. This left […]

Sometimes only cockney rhyming slang will do. But get it wrong and you can end up looking a berk Among the hundreds of languages and dialects spoken in east London, there is one that should have a preservation order slapped on it. Spoken by a small and dwindling minority, surely it must be eligible for […]

A little-known American headmaster deserves to be remembered for his tongue-in-cheek grammar lessons Research for a book I’m writing has taken me down some obscure linguistic byways, the latest of which has been the discovery of Andrew Ingraham, an American teacher and writer of whom I’d never heard until stumbling across a brief mention in […]