It’s well established that children have an easier time learning second languages. In recent years, scientists have studied ...

If language is what makes us human, what does it mean now that large language models have gained “metalinguistic” abilities?

The dictionary publisher's annual pick, based on spikes in search data, reflects the themes and anxieties that shaped 2025.

Human languages are complex phenomena. Around 7,000 languages are spoken worldwide, some with only a handful of remaining ...

For many African languages there are few written resources online that can be used to train AI. The African Next Voices project is trying to change that by recording underrepresented languages and ...

Language shapes our thoughts—or does it? Decades of research on aphasia, the loss of language following brain injury, ...

If you are fluent in any language other than English, you have probably noticed that some things are impossible to translate ...

The pattern is clear: many of us still rely on simple words, easy number strings and familiar keyboard patterns.

There's a secret list of words you can't say on social media – at least, that's what everyone seems to think. Perhaps you've noticed that people avoid certain words on social media. They'll say ...

Puma Tzoc was living in New York a decade ago when a friend asked him to help a client who had spent three months in jail. The client spoke only K’iche’, an Indigenous language from his native ...

In the Swiss Alps, a plan to tidy up Romansh—spoken by less than one per cent of the country—set off a decades-long quarrel ...

The viral "six-seven" meme, dismissed as "brain rot," is interpreted as an unconscious global ritual by Gen Alpha. Numerology suggests the chant, a fusion of "old order" (6) and "new mystery" (7), ...