English is the world’s dominant scientific language, yet it has no word for the distinctive smell of cockroaches. What happens though, if you have no words for basic scientific terms?

Ghil’ad Zuckermann has found that resurrecting lost languages may bring many benefits to indigenous populations – with knock-on effects for their health and happiness.

Researchers are hoping a remote Aboriginal community can help them unlock the secrets of language.

No one can agree on what a sentence is. The safest definition is typographic. A sentence starts with a capital letter and ends with a full stop—except that some start with quote marks, and some end with question or exclamation marks, so that doesn’t quite work. Let’s try again. A sentence is the largest domain over which the rules of grammar have dominion. Thus it stands grammatically apart from the sentences around it.

A new look at “the Russian Blues” demonstrates the power of words to shape perception

For a number of years now, the provision of languages in British schools and universities has been in decline. Yet, as Brexit looms largely on the horizon, there has been much talk in the media and from politicians about the need for a “global Britain”. Arguably, a country can only really be global and outward looking if language skills are considered essential for its citizens.

Usually, a minor language will adopt words from a dominant language, but NZ English bucks this trend. It has been borrowing a growing number of Māori words, not always to add meaning but to mark identity.

I recently had the honor of meeting an award-winning literary sort, a man wry and restrained and overall quite utterly mature, who casually referred to having gone through a phase in his 20s when he’d been “pilly”—that is, when he’d taken a lot of recreational drugs. The word had a wonderfully childish sound to it, the tacked-on y creating a new adjective in the style of happy, angry, and silly. My writer-acquaintance, I recognized, was not alone in bending language this way.

In this report, The Conference Board of Canada seeks to build a portrait of bilingual workers in Canada and to quantify their contribution to GDP, with reference mainly to those outside Quebec.

Scott Chacon is CEO of the online language learning company Chatterbug.

The personal papers of one of World War II’s earliest historians reveals an obsession with how Nazis distorted the German language.

Linguist and Because Internet author Gretchen McCulloch asked her Twitter followers to share the words that they can’t actually spell without relying on spellcheck. The answers she got will comfort and edify you....

We ask this question with such regularity that most of us pick from a standard set of responses, with very little thought. Our standard responses? Busy. Fine. Okay. Good.

It's a good idea to keep a dictionary on you. It helps improve your vocabulary and gives you quick reference. Here are the best dictionary apps for Android!

Try to use a language learning app to learn a new language as quickly as possible.

Put your fingertips against your throat and say “abracadabra.” (Don’t whisper; it won’t work. Feign a phone call if you have to.) You should feel a buzzing—that’s your vocal folds vibrating inside your larynx.

Seriously...the English language is insane.

In an essay published on Monday, New Republic Senior Editor Noam Scheiber—who grew up speaking both Hebrew and English—explains why he stopped speaking only Hebrew to his three-year-old daughter. “My Hebrew self turns out to be much colder, more earnest, and, let’s face it, less articulate," he writes. "In English, my natural sensibility is patient and understated. My style in Hebrew was hectoring and prosecutorial.”

Most of the news about minority languages is that they’re endangered or dying off, and the only new languages we hear about are those created for Hollywood sci-fi blockbusters. But sometimes, linguists find a previously unrecorded language — and when they do, it’s a sign language.