Machine learning algorithms are picking up deeply ingrained race and gender prejudices concealed within the patterns of language use, scientists say

President Nazarbayev has laid out a timeline to switch the country's writing system over from the Cyrillic to the Latin alphabet. The change should be fully effective by 2025.

Rai Favela | 13 Abril 2017, 10:06

Get ready for a master class in conlangs.

Much ink has been spilled recently about how the lack of a comma could cost a local dairy millions of dollars in overtime pay. Among language aficionados, much of the coverage was gloating, as in “Nyah, nyah! We TOLD you the Oxford comma should rule!”

Wink wink. By Amelia Tait.

Have you ever been called mardy, been mithered, complained of someone being nesh, labelled them a numpty or had people look at you blankly because a word you have used since childhood does not form part of their vocabulary? If any of the above sounds familiar then congratulations: you are living proof that the death of dialect is greatly exaggerated.

Our perceptions of the culture associated with a given language can impact our behavior.

Rather than jumping headfirst into the limitations of reason, let us start by just getting our toes wet and examining the limitations of language. Language is a tool used to describe the world in which we live. However, don’t confuse the map with the territory! There is one major difference between the world we live in and language: Whereas the real world is free of contradictions, the man-made linguistic descriptions of that world can have contradictions.

“It is a sharp contrast to our society, based on globalized languages and all manner of communication translated into nothing but numbers—endless streams of 1s and 0s.” By Claire Cameron

Language immersion environment best for young children, the classroom setting is better for early teenagers, while self-guided language learning is better for adults.

The names of stops on the London Underground can seem nonsensical: think Elephant & Castle or Shepherd’s Bush. But they actually hide 2,000 years of odd anecdotes and historic quirks.

The first time Natalie Portman speaks in Jackie, Noah Oppenheim’s arthouse semi-biopic about former first lady Jackie Kennedy Onassis, is three minutes into the movie. It’s a week after John F. Kennedy’s assassination, and a journalist from Life magazine has come to the Kennedys’ home in Hyannis Port, Massachusetts, to interview her. He offers his condolences. Portman, a startling amalgam of cheekbones, sharp brows, and a thicket of root beer-colored hair, lets out a breathy, biting rebuke.

German is a wonderfully inventive and bold language, full of gloriously long compound words for emotions and ideas that most languages struggle to allow us to express.

Joan Acocella reviews “What the F: What Swearing Reveals About Our Language, Our Brains, and Ourselves“ by Benjamin K. Bergen and “In Praise of Profanity” by Michael Adams.

In 1872 a British general named Alexander Cunningham, excavating an area in what was then British-controlled northern India, came across something peculiar. Buried in some ruins, he uncovered a small, one inch by one inch square piece of what he described as smooth, black, unpolished stone engraved with strange symbols — lines, interlocking ovals, something resembling a fish — and what looked like a bull etched underneath. The general, not recognizing the symbols and finding the bull to be unlike other Indian animals...

We humans are capable of vocalising many different words in a range of languages. But what is it that gives us a remakable and variable voice?

I took on Noam Chomsky’s ideas about language and unleashed a decade of debate and ridicule. But is my argument wrong? By Daniel Everett.

For decades, scientists thought that most primates could not produce vowels, sounds fundamental to human speech. That’s because nonhumans supposedly lacked the necessary vocal anatomy. But now, researchers report that Guinea baboons, monkeys that inhabit the forests and savanna of West Africa, make five vowellike sounds similar to those used by humans. The findings bolster a recent study showing that Japanese macaques are also anatomically capable of speech.

The story behind Canada’s most distinctive verbal tic.