For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

From Spanish and Swahili to Finnish and Filipino, over 7,000 languages are spoken across the world today. Humans are unique in that we are the only species known to use language. However, new research ...

Imagine a world where speech and communication didn’t exist. Daily life would probably be much, much more difficult. This is the value of language. Without it, no higher discussion or discovery would ...

A linguistics analysis shows that language arrived in North America in multiple waves from Siberia. The Americas have half of the world’s linguistic diversity, despite a much shorter human history.

Every boring email we type or moment of small talk we have at the grocery store is part of a historic and mysterious legacy: the creation of language. The kind of languages we speak — from Arabic to ...

IN A CHURCH hewn out of a mountainside, just over a thousand years or so ago, a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him have done, writing the tricky bits in his own ...

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. IN 1786 WILLIAM JONES, a British civil servant in Calcutta, told ...

Are language and mythology linked? Yes, according to French politician Dominique de Villepin (b. 1953): "If we speak our adversary's language, we feed their propaganda and mythology." But can we speak ...

Language is a curious mix of order and disorder. Anyone who has struggled to master English has confronted its baffling assembly of regular verb patterns (Kisha wanted), quirky sub-rules (Pablo rang) ...