Speaking, writing and reading are necessary to everyday life, where language is the major tool for expression and communication. Studying how people use language — what words they unconsciously choose and combine — can help us better understand ourselves and why we behave the way we do.

Linguists try to decide what is unique and universal about the language we use, how it is learned and the ways it changes over time. They consider language as a cultural, social and psychological phenomenon.

“Understanding why and how languages differ tells us about the range of what is human,” said Dan Jurafsky, chair of the Department of Linguistics at Stanford.

Standford linguists and psychologists study how language is interpreted by people. Even the slightest differences in language use may show the biased beliefs of the speakers, according to research.

For example, a relatively harmless sentence, such as “girls are as good as boys at math,” because of the statement’s grammatical structure, suggests that being good at math is more common or natural for boys than girls, the researchers said. Language can play a big role in how we and others see the world, and linguists work to discover how words and phrases can influence us, unknowingly.

People speak about 7,000 languages worldwide. Although there is a lot in common among languages, each one is unique. Jurafsky said it’s important to study languages besides our own and how they develop over time because it can help linguists understand what lies at the foundation of humans’ unique way of communicating with one another.

Linguists analyze how certain speech patterns influence particular behaviors, including how language can influence people’s buying decisions. Jurafsky said. “Understanding what different groups of people say and why is the first step in determining how we can help bring people together.”

Facebook has developed a kind of AI (人工智能) translating between any pair of 100 languages without depending on first translating to English.

Facebook’s system was trained on a data set of 7.5 billion sentence pairs collected from the web across 100 languages, though not all the languages had an equal number of sentence pairs. “What I was really interested in was cutting out English as a middle man. Globally there are plenty of countries where they speak two languages that aren’t English,” says Angela Fan of Facebook AI, who led the work.

For some language pairs, the new system shows prominent improvements in translation quality. For example, translating from Spanish to Portuguese is extremely strong because Spanish is the second-most spoken first language worldwide, meaning the researchers can get a lot of data. Translation between English and Belarusian (白俄罗斯语) also is improved because the AI can translate Russian into English, which shares similarities with Belarusian.

While the system isn’t in use on the social network site, Facebook plans to put it to work soon to manage the 20 billion translations made every day when people click “Translate” on posts (帖子) written in more than 160 languages. “Future work will be done on other languages,” says Fan, “especially for languages where we don’t have a lot of data, like South-East Asian and African languages.”

The work “breaks away from the English-centric models and tries to build more different models,” says Shelia Castilho of the ADAPT Centre at Dublin City University, Ireland. “That’s pretty new and different. But it’s hard to know if the AI does a right translation work,” says Castilho. “The users may not know the other language, so they cannot judge the correctness of the translation.”

There can be a lot to deal with when you visit a new country. There are the airports, the time zones, the language and when you travel to the UK: the humour difference. Visitors are often not sure what to do while the British burst into laughter. So if you’re travelling to the UK and want to be telling jokes, not guessing when to laugh, then read on.

The British have the habit of deprecating themselves. They will often make fun of themselves or their life choices to get a laugh. If a British person is going to create a funny Facebook post about going to the gym, he will be sure to mention the seven bags of potato chips that he is going to eat afterwards. And this doesn’t just happen to one or two persons; British companies are also interested in it — BBC has created a show to make fun of itself and it spreads nationally.

This is similar to self-deprecation. Except instead of making fun of themselves, they will do it to each other. It’s often the case that if a British person likes you, he/she will try and make fun of you, but without being serious. So don’t be surprised if someone tells you that your new jacket looks like it was picked out of trash — nine times out of ten that is a joke to make you laugh.

A British person will often say the converse of what they mean to make someone laugh. If it’s raining outside, for example, they’ll cheerfully point out: “What good weather we’re having”. Some British TV shows like Blackadder and Fawlty Towers are founded on this principle, and there are many fake newspapers and websites trying to present daily British life in a sarcastic way.