Nearly 7,000 different languages are spoken across the world. But how these languages evolved has long been a source of debate. Now, a group of German researchers has uncovered exactly how language ...

Among the many ways you can define language differences, one of the easiest is by the use of tone. For some languages (like English), the differences between words that are pronounced similarly has to ...

Janina Brutt-Griffler says she's always been interested in the interaction of different cultures and languages. "I grew up in a bicultural context," says Brutt-Griffler who joined the UB faculty in ...

I prefer to keep to what is actually understood about evolutionary biology and not indulge in what evolutionary biologists dismiss as 'just-so' stories... stories we invent... 'maybe it happened this ...

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 ...

We argue that language evolution started like the evolution of reading and writing, through cultural evolutionary processes. Genuinely new behavioural patterns emerged from collective exploratory ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It’s relatively easy to trace a written linguistic history—there ...

Language is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey ...

The Oxford comma. “Ask” instead of “aks.” There, their, and they’re. The legitimacy of “ain’t” and “y’all.” These are familiar, if sometimes contentious, issues in the usage of the English language.