Rachel Laudan

Most people in the world are bilingual (though of course famously not English speakers). Among the strong incentives for becoming fluent in two languages are growing up or marrying into mixed communities, seeking an edge in employment, and migration. Is it possible to be bicuisinal? How many people in the world are bicuisinal?   Are the [...]

Linguists group languages into families and subfamilies. Is it possible to do the same with cuisines?  What would those families and subfamilies be? For a linguist, language families are related in just the same way that the human families are: they have a common ancestry. It seems entirely plausible that groups of cuisines have developed [...]

Languages, just like cuisines, come in infinite gradations, each individual speaking or eating his own variant.  So how do linguists decide when two languages really are different? One way of distinguishing dialects from languages  is to ask whether they are mutually unintelligible.  To most English speakers, British English (and its regional dialects), American English, Australian [...]