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 ...

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 ...

Humans are the only species on Earth known to use language. They do this by combining sounds into words and words into sentences, creating infinite meanings. This process is based on linguistic rules ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

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) ...