The 'myth' of language history: languages do not share a single history but different components evolve along different trajectories and at different rates.A large-scale study of Pacific languages ...

The world today has about 7,500 spoken or signed languages. Yet this number could be much lower than what was observed over ...

Scientists have discovered that a language's grammatical structures change more quickly than vocabulary, overturning a long-held assumption in the field. The study analyzed 81 Austronesian languages ...

Today, people speak or sign around 7,500 languages. Yet this figure provides only a snapshot of a constantly changing history ...

Where lies the origin of the Indo-European language family? Ron Pinhasi and his team in the Department of Evolutionary Anthropology at the University of Vienna contribute a new piece to this puzzle in ...

Corrections & clarifications: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate or incomplete facts about the history of language. Language is an essential part of human communication, allowing ...

Rosina Lozano, associate professor of history, researches Latino history with a focus on Mexican American history, the American West, migration and immigration, and comparative studies in race and ...

The approximately 400 languages of Aboriginal Australia can be grouped into 27 different families. To put that diversity in context, Europe has just four language families, Indo-European, Basque, ...