Belarus, which has created a political and military alliance with Moscow, is being further Russified as schools ditch the Belarusian language.

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

Kodak. Ikea. Sony. Sometimes, a brand name just sounds like what it represents — even if the name doesn’t actually mean anything at all.

Cherokees Writing the Keetoowah Way provides English translations of historic documents and lessons to help the next generation learn.

But sometimes it's worth sending a reader to the dictionary if the word fits the nuance of the writing.

Workplace writing cannot succeed with a one-size-fits-all approach. Yet most of us enter the workforce having learned exactly that: the essay. Why do we use this approach and how does it limit successful communication? An essay is the perfect writing tool for an education setting. The simple beginning, middle and end pattern helps students tackle the challenging task of assignment writing. And the predictable structure allows teachers to mark dozens of essays more efficiently. But surely more complex writing tasks call for different tools in our writing toolbox? Here are 4 features of essay writing that can slow us down

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

The Z-machine allowed porting from mainframes to TRS-80, Apple II, and others.

The legacy can still be felt today

Research shows people who speak another language are more utilitarian and flexible, less risk-averse and egotistical, and better able to cope with traumatic memories

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

With few experts left in the world who understand this ancient form of writing, can AI step in to save the language?

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.

It was only natural for Alexander Jones to feel thrilled when he saw a sixth-century palimpsest at the Ambrosiana library in Milan for the first time. It happened in 1984 when Jones was working on his dissertation using manuscripts in Italy. With the tools at his disposal, including a portable ultraviolet lamp and microfilm, he could only read a few lines. But Jones’ interest was piqued because there were pages of the text that no one had succeeded in reading.

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.

Let's take this writing bot for a spin down some twisty roads to see if it can pass itself off as a human literary voice. Maybe keep a bucket handy.

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.

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.

Writers Ivo Victoria, Sarah Meuleman and Geert Buelens all found it liberating to move to the Netherlands. But it wasn’t long before they encountered the downsides of their destination country.