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101translations, London (2026)

20/08/2026

Language under Anaesthesia

If you’ve ever had major surgery, you have probably had a general anaesthetic and, thankfully, don’t remember anything about it. The experience feels as though the brain is just ‘switched off’ for the period of the operation.

But new research shows that, although we are unconscious under general anaesthetic, parts of the brain are still active. Patients under anaesthesia were shown, under research conditions, to respond to sounds. If they were hearing podcasts, they responded to the speech they heard in real time, recognising and responding to individual words, and even using prior knowledge to predict what the speaker was going to say next. Although the patients were unconscious, their brains were displaying similar sorts of neural activity to those of people who are awake.

Language, it seems, is so ingrained in us as a species that we just can’t turn it off, even when we are knocked out. These discoveries highlight fascinating research pathways for the role of language for people who are asleep or in comas.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-group-of-doctors-performing-surgery-on-a-patient-ZuIucrhwHvA

18/08/2026

Australian Swearing

Australians tend to pride themselves on their plain-talking and the gusto with which they use swearwords in their everyday English.

As well as the usual swearwords shared throughout the English-speaking world (we’ll assume you know the basics), Australians have their own array of profanities and vulgarities that are very distinctive. They can use these not just to hurl insults, but also to implicitly say something about what it means to be Australian.

To the alarm of purists, however, younger Australians today are tending to use fewer Australia-specific swearwords in favour of more generic terms understood throughout the anglosphere. ‘Political correctness’ and exposure to international media – especially African-American slang, popularised via hip hop and rap music – have been blamed for this lamentable decline in profanity diversity.

We’re all terribly polite at 101translations, but we also regret this decline in distinctively Australian swearing. The words we used to blow off steam are deeply rooted not just in emotion, but also in the history and experience of the place they come from.

A language without swearwords is, as an Australian might say, about as useful as an a**ehole on an elbow.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/kangaroos-on-grass-field-yLxQRYpuwqg

16/08/2026

Basque Language in Idaho

The Basque language is spoken in parts of Spain and France, places from which, historically, many migrants left to start new lives overseas. As a result of this, there are small pockets of Basque speakers around the world, particularly in North America.

Minority languages often struggle to survive, surrounded by majority languages that give advantages in commerce and the wider world. But Basque is surviving surprisingly well, perhaps partly because Basque speakers in Spain and France were already used to managing two or more languages in their daily lives.

Like many others, Basque fortune-seekers flocked to California during the gold rush in the nineteenth century. Most of them, of course, failed to make their fortune panning for gold, but they tended to go into other sectors, including mining and herding sheep, in various parts of the United States. Their friends and relatives joined them, and gradually a sizable Basque community took root in America, with an area of Idaho noted for its large Basque population.

For a while, it looked as though Basque was losing out to English, but it has witnessed a surprising resurgence. Basque-Americans get together to play and sing traditional music and songs, to eat Basque meals, and to speak Basque, showing that they have no problem with being Basque and American at the same time.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-rocky-area-with-trees-and-mountains-in-the-background-B3X6bxDHDvQ

12/08/2026

Laughter and the origins of language

We’ve written before about the different types of communication animals use, and what these have in common with human language. Primates – apes and monkeys – which are so close to humans, give us some clues about how human language originated.

A new theory is coming out of research carried out at the University of Warwick, England, led by Chiara de Gregorio. It suggests that human language may originate in laughter. Primate species, including humans, chimpanzees, and gorillas, all enjoy a good laugh and laugh in response to various stimuli, including being tickled – and our laughs are remarkably similar, with rhythmic intervals between successive sounds. To the researchers, this suggests that we all share a common ancestor species that liked to laugh too, and that laughter has remained essentially the same for about 15 million years!

Humans’ laughter differs from that of other apes – we are able to use it politely in response to social cues, whereas they do not. This indicates a greater awareness and control of delicate social situations. At some point in our evolutionary history, this may have been the change that sparked the development of human language.

And that’s no laughing matter.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-person-sitting-on-a-couch-with-a-laptop-X1GZqv-F7Tw

08/08/2026

Bonobos

Regular readers of our blog know that while our business is facilitating communication between humans, we’re very intrigued by how animals communicate too.

Recent research by scientists from the University of Zurich and Harvard University explored vocal exchanges between bonobos in the Democratic Republic of Congo. They found out that the bonobos – which are similar to chimpanzees – string together different sounds into phrases and, further, that these phrases seem to communicate specific meanings. For example, one sound, which showed that the animal had an intention, could be connected with another, which meant that the group needed to stay coordinated, to give a combined meaning like: ‘Let’s all do this thing together.’

While bonobo communication falls sort of being an actual language, it is essential for the well-being of the social groups they live in. They inhabit dense forested areas and often cannot see the other members of their group. By communicating as they do, they can ensure that they all stay together and direct each other towards certain common goals.

This research into the communication style of an animal with which we humans share a relatively recent common ancestor provides insights into how our language may have evolved, and that the complex sentence structures we use today are likely to have started with simpler building blocks.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-couple-of-monkeys-playing-in-the-grass-E81QVHjlh3M

05/08/2026

Spanish in the US

The speaking of Spanish in the US has become a focus of the culture wars, with some Americans seeing it as an assault on ‘American values’. When Bad Bunny, a rap artist, performed in Spanish at the Super Bowl, Donald Trump complained that nobody understood a word he was saying.

That wasn’t true, though. Not even close. In fact, America has almost as many Spanish speakers as Spain – about 40 million – with many more studying Spanish at school or college and speaking it well as a second language.

At the same time, however, families who move to the US from Spanish-speaking countries tend to assimilate quite quickly, becoming primarily English speakers within a couple of generations, and finding out, when they visit their countries of origin for their holidays, that it’s hard to have a conversation with their Abuelita. And Spanish speakers in the US, and to some extent in Latin America, make abundant use of loanwords from English, like ‘picop’ (pick-up truck] and ‘jaiscul’ (high school), and even import grammatical structures from English.

We’ve said it before, and we’ll say it again: linguistic diversity is beautiful, and there’s no reason why people can’t happily speak two or more languages. The more communication the better!

We’re sure that Abuelita would agree.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-flag-on-a-pole-JPNh_hW_SPk

30/07/2026

Sámi

Sámi are an indigenous culture living across the northern parts of Norway, Sweden, Finland, and Russia. There are nine Sámi languages with North Sámi the most widely spoken, with around 20,000 speakers.

One of the challenges with preserving the use of Sámi is the fact that the speakers live in different places, with different levels of official recognition.

In Sweden, it is recognised as a minority language and officially children have the right to be taught through it, but in practice often there aren’t enough teachers, local areas don’t implement the law, or the number of speakers is too low to provide classes. Over the generations, this has led to the current situation, which is that only a small percentage of Sámi people speak their own language fluently enough to effectively pass it on to their children. There are also strong folk memories of earlier times, when Sámi children were punished and made to feel ashamed for using their mother tongue.

Today, experts point out that, while it is very important for minority groups to speak the majority language fluently, there’s no reason why they can’t also speak their own language. The human brain evolved to manage more than one language, and the benefits of bilingualism are very well-known.
Younger generations of Sámi speakers are increasingly creating online content in their native tongue, providing some hope for a brighter future for a language under pressure.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/woman-in-red-coat-and-black-pants-sitting-on-snow-covered-ground-beside-black-and-brown-vfaD7bscm7I

28/07/2026

Bouba, Kiki and Chickens

You may have come across the bouba/kiki question before. This is the fact that, the world over, people from all sorts of linguistic backgrounds feel that ‘bouba’ sounds “round” and ‘kiki’ sounds “spiky” and, more broadly, that certain sounds should ‘look’ a certain way.

That might sound funny, but it offers some insights into the origin of language, and how it may have developed.

A researcher in comparative psychology, Maria Loconsole, explored whether other species make similar associations. She tested newly hatched chicks, whose birdbrains had not yet been influenced by their experience of the world. She placed chicks in front of images of round, blobby shapes and of sharp, spiky shapes, and then played them recordings of human voices saying ‘bouba’ and ‘kiki’. The results were amazing: 80% of the chicks approached the round shape when they heard ‘bouba’, and the same percentage approached the spiky shape when they heard ‘kiki’.

What does it mean? Given that the ancestors of humans and the ancestors of birds parted evolutionary ways about 300 million years ago, it’s suggestive of a perceptual bias that dates very far back in our evolutionary history. One theory suggests that this instinctive bias might relate to the physical properties of moving objects and may have provided some evolutionary advantage in terms of helping animals to avoid predators in their environment.

In humans, who have developed language, the bouba/kiki effect has had many impacts on how we talk and perceive the world around us. It might sound funny, but this is a very important area of research.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/white-chick-on-persons-hand-0R2lOqibKgA

24/07/2026

Stone Age Language

We know that humans started using language more or less as we do about 100,000 years ago, but what did they sound like? And what about the precursors of modern humans, who must have incrementally moved closer to using language much as we do today? What sort of noises did they make?

It may be impossible to reconstruct a whole language or communication system with the few artefacts we have from the extremely remote past, but the fossilised bones of our ancestors provide some clues about what they sounded like. They can tell us about the position of the vocal tract, the structure of the brain and the size of the spinal cord and how these gradually evolved over time to what we see today. If, as researchers believe, the gradual development of language provided our ancestors with an evolutionary advantage, this will have impacted on how the human body developed over time.

About 27 million years ago, an ancestor we have in common with various monkey species was the first to be able to make some vowel sounds, a necessary precursor to language. 3.2 million years ago, Australopithecus Afarensis could make some vowel sounds, but not ‘i’, and probably communicated with a limited number of distinctive sounds. 1.6 million years ago, Homo Erectus walked much as we do, might have cooked food, and was able to use a wider range of sounds, perhaps employing onomatopoeia to create simple words. 50,000 years ago, when Neanderthal people had spread across Europe, they had the cognitive capacity for language, but probably sounded quite different to us, with more nasal sounds, like in modern-day French. Their complex behaviours suggest that they had language, as we do, and used it to organise activities such as hunting, discussing abstract concepts, and teaching skills to each other.

40,000 years ago – very little time, really, when you think about it – Cro-Magnons, early modern humans, were not speaking the same languages as we do now, but they were speaking in the same way. Their vocal tracts, brain structure, and the size of their spinal cords were the same as they are now.

Check out The Language Puzzle – a fascinating book by archaeologist Steven Mithen – if you’d like to know more! https://profilebooks.com/work/the-language-puzzle/

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-stonehenge-in-a-field-with-the-sun-setting-behind-it-GyH_N1UPXco

21/07/2026

Socotri

Socotri is the native language of Socotra, an archipelago that’s part of Yemen. Most of the approximately 50,000 inhabitants are Socotri people from the Al Mahrah tribe. Their language is one of the oldest in southern Arabia.

Socotri is a semitic language related to other languages spoken on the Arabian mainland, including Mehri. It is used not just for everyday communication, but also for the rich tradition of poetry on the island.

Of course, as is the case with so many minority languages, today Socotri is under threat. Recognising its importance, in 2026, the Socotri Language Center for Studies and Research, supported by UNESCO, held a special day dedicated to the language and its cultural and intellectual importance.

One of the most hopeful signs for the future? A new digital platform with keyboard layouts for laptops and mobile phones, making it easier to integrate the use of Socotri into an increasingly globalised world, and into formal educational curriculums.

And in case you were wondering – yes, 101translations can also translate into Socotri.

We speak just about every language imaginable here at 101translations. Get in touch to learn how we can help you with your translations needs at 👉https://101translations.com/

Photo Source: https://unsplash.com/photos/a-tree-with-a-mountain-in-the-background-REwZEYzw19g

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