Scientific American reports on recent research showing some support for the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis, or the notion that the language we speak influences the way we think. I'm sure I'm just having a layperson's typical reaction to the picayune sort of refutable, reproducible experimentation upon which scientific progress is built, but it seems to me that the experiments described are pretty far from the heart of Sapir-Whorf.
I'm struck by the mountains of anecdotal evidence for some form of a Whorfian effect, from folkloric attributions of language character ("Spanish is a loving tongue", etc.) to bilingual writers who argue that their choice of language affects their work. Particularly strong, it seems to me, are sociolinguistic arguments about nuances of meaning within a language: as power words like "gay", "feminist", "negro / black / Afro- / African-American" etc. gain or lose pejorative or approbative connotations, surely thought is affected (as any good pollster can demonstrate). I'm not sure why examples like these don't crop up more often in discussions of Sapir-Whorf; perhaps it's harder to design experiments around them, or perhaps linguists feel compelled to search for an effect in the grammar of a language rather than in its slippery social context.
In other intriguing linguistic links: A beautifully done exploration of the Evolution of Writing, showing how media and implements changed the Roman alphabet and created the font styles we know today. Speculation about "Space English", or the linguistic drift likely to happen on a hypothetical multi-generation interstellar flight. A dictionary of prison slang. A review of David Crystal's Language and the Internet (you'll be happy to know that we aren't necessarily going to hell because of smilies and l33tsp33k). Two reports on the necessity and the discontents of international English from a European perspective ("What passes as English in the European institutions bears about as much resemblance to the language of the Anglo-Saxon world as a soufflé to a steak-and-kidney pie"). The Fight the Fog campaign to encourage people in the EU to write more clearly, complete with a song (anybody have any idea what tune that should be sung to?), an obligatory list of badly translated signs, and a self-defeating disclaimer. I'm sure it's all considered very hip in Brussels these days. (Many of these links via Enigmatic Mermaid.)
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