Taking selfies while twerking off the food baby

It's new words time for Oxford Dictionaries Online and that means lots of media coverage for the new(ish) words that have been added to the dictionary. This is one of those areas of language change that often gets a good press (unlike other changes which tend to cause snorts of derision the press).

Here, Oxford Dictionaries Blog explain some of their new words, while The Guardian picks a few of them up in this piece and The Daily Telegraph has a look too. Elsewhere, twerking - recently popularised by Miley Cyrus, but disputed by several commentators - gets a more in depth look. My personal favourite so far (probably because I have developed a summer one of these) is food baby, which is defined as "a protruding stomach caused by eating a large quantity of food and supposedly resembling that of a woman in the early stages of pregnancy". Excuse me while I go and twerk it off.

Accents and dialects

Welcome back to blog followers from last year and hi to new people starting the course this year. I've tried to keep regular tweets going from the @EngLangBlog account over the summer holiday in place of blog posts and I've rounded up a few of the most interesting ones about accent and dialect here for you.

These should be particularly helpful if you're doing ENGA3 this year, especially those Colchester 6th Form College students doing the summer assignment in the packs from last term.

Lucy Mangan on accent adaptation and prejudice

A guide to Nottingham accent and dialect

A piece on the changing nature of the Leicester varieteh