Australia’s 460 First Nations’ languages see the world in unexpected ways, revealing perspectives on the natural and spiritual worlds.

Larry Schneider shares his thoughts on the importance of learning cursive writing.

Over the millennia, human language has produced a variety of beautiful, unusual, and weird forms of writing. Here are 7 of them.

Technological advances notwithstanding, advocates give a long list of reasons for teaching students cursive.

Some argue that bots should be entitled to ingest any content they see, because people can.

As elephants wander the African savannah, they might keep in touch with relatives by calling out their individual 'names'.

Mithu Sanyal never learned her father's native language, Bengali, as a child. Is it too late to reclaim it?

You know instantly when someone is speaking to an infant or small child. It turns out that dolphin mothers also use a kind of high-pitched baby talk.

Cursive is making a comeback. Relegated in 2006 to an optional piece of learning in Ontario elementary schools, cursive writing is set to return as a mandatory part of the curriculum starting in September.

Explore the debate surrounding ChatGPT and Noam Chomsky's linguistic theories on the acquisition of language. Discover how language models raise questions about the nature of human language and its innate properties.

Learning a language can be frustrating. There are many phone apps that promise to teach you a language but, for the most part, they really just teach you words. That’s useful, but to be conversational, you really need something better. There’s no shortage of quick introduction videos on YouTube and grammar lessons that can get you a crude start on a language, but it is a long way to get to conversational.

Columnist Charita Goshay writes about phonics making a comeback in Ohio.

In the Middle Ages, the Roman alphabet and Norse runes lived side by side. A new doctoral thesis challenges the notion that runes represent more of an oral and less of a learned form of written language.

From ELIZA onwards, humans love their digital reflections.

Colloquialisms such as barbie and smoko are like accents – part of the glue that sticks Australian English speakers together.

This quote is by the main character in the sci-fi novel The Widening Gyre by Michael R. Johnston. Writers like Johnston who invent alien profanity rely on their intuitions about what sounds offensive here on Earth. We wanted to explore whether there are universal sound patterns in profanity. So we designed a series of studies involving speakers of different languages and found surprising patterns in how swear words sound across the world.

Merriam-Webster has chosen "gaslighting" as its word of the year for 2022.

Advanced technologies like A.I. are enabling scientists to learn that the world is full of intelligent creatures with sophisticated languages, like honeybees. What might they tell us?

Although Cantonese is spoken by 80 million Chinese around the world, its influence is waning due to pressure from Beijing to favor Mandarin as the official language in China. But the decline has stirred some people to try to preserve the language.