Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, ...

An international research team from Fudan, Harvard, and Stony Brook has identified shared statistical patterns in the evolution of 22 languages, using centuries of linguistic data and AI-powered ...

An international team from Fudan, Harvard, and Stony Brook has identified shared statistical patterns in the vocabularies of ...

Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, ...

Why do we talk the way we do? It might trace back to when our ancient ancestors left the jungle for the open savanna. Somewhere between 5.3 million and 16 million years ago, Africa's landscapes ...

Example of recurrent change. Still images from video dictionary entries that illustrate the phonological pattern of thumb extension. Both signs are produced with four fingers extended, but the sign ...

A photo by Seán Roberts on a recent hike near his house in Wales, which prompted him to recall the conclusion of a research paper he co-authored on the impact of environment on language. "Ultimately, ...

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 ...

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