In the era of Donald Trump and Brexit, Oxford Dictionaries has declared “post-truth” to be its international word of the year. Defined by the dictionary as an adjective “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less influential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief”, editors said that use of the term “post-truth” had increased by around 2,000 per cent in 2016 compared to last year. The spike in usage, it said, is “in the context of the EU referendum in the United Kingdom and the presidential election in the United States”.

Oxford Dictionaries has selected "post-truth" as its 2016 international word of the year.

A painstaking investigation of Europe’s cave art has revealed 32 shapes and lines that crop up again and again and could be the world’s oldest code

Babies first learn to recognize the rhythm and intonation of language. The process begins in the womb, where the intonation patterns are transmitted to the baby through the fluids.

Last July a German doctoral student named Matthias Weßel made a remarkable discovery: a copy of the German manuscript of Arthur Koestler’s masterpiece. The implications are considerable, for Darkness at Noon is that rare specimen, a book known to the world only in translation. By Michael Scammell.

On a bright fall morning at Stanford, Tom Mullaney is telling me what’s wrong with QWERTY keyboards. Mullaney is not a technologist, nor is he one of those Dvorak keyboard enthusiasts. He’s a historian of modern China and we’re perusing his exhibit of Chinese typewriters and keyboards, the curation of which has led Mullaney to the conclusion that China is rising ahead technologically while the West falls behind, clinging to its QWERTY keyboard.

It was just one word in one email, but it triggered huge financial losses for a multinational company. The message, written in English, was sent by a native speaker to a colleague for whom English was a second language. Unsure of the word, the recipient found two contradictory meanings in his dictionary. He acted on the wrong one.

A new project is trying to crack the code of what different meows mean. By Cari Romm. (Apr. 27, 2016)

The show just tipped its cards for a second. By Andrew Burmon.

I had no idea there was a specific order for adjectives until I read a viral post. It was a side-of-the-mallet moment

In treating the nation’s founders as holy relics, America forgets they were revolutionaries and risk-takers. By Caroline Winterer.

How the English language has changed over the past 1000 years.

For hundreds of years, the world’s best cryptographers have dedicated their lives to solving the mystery of the Voynich Manuscript - a 15th century book written in a mysterious coded language that no one has ever managed to crack.

In a study that shatters a cornerstone concept in linguistics, an analysis of nearly two-thirds of the world’s languages shows that humans tend to use the same sounds for common objects and ideas, no matter what language they’re speaking. Published today in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences the research demonstrates a robust statistical relationship between certain basic concepts – from body parts to familial relationships and aspects of the natural world – and the sounds humans around the world use to describe them.

What defines who we are? Our habits? Our aesthetic tastes? Our memories? If pressed, I would answer that if there is any part of me that sits at my core, that is an essential part of who I am, then surely it must be my moral center, my deep-seated sense of right and wrong. And yet, like many other people who speak more than one language, I often have the sense that I’m a slightly different person in each of my languages—more assertive in English, more relaxed in French, more sentimental in Czech.

Two dolphins have been recorded having a conversation for the first time after scientists developed an underwater microphone which could distinguish the animals' different "voices". Researchers have known for decades that the mammals had an advanced form of communication, using distinctive clicks and whistles to show they are excited, happy, stressed or separated from the group.

In the upcoming sci-fi drama "Arrival," several mysterious spacecraft touch down around the planet, and humanity is faced with how to approach—and eventually communicate—with these extraterrestrial visitors. In the film, a team of experts is assembled to investigate, and among the chosen individuals is a linguist, played by actress Amy Adams. Though the story is rooted in science fiction, it does tackle a very real challenge: How do you communicate with someone—or how do you learn that individual's language—when you have no intermediary language in common?

His white suit unsullied by research, Tom Wolfe tries to take down Charles Darwin and Noam Chomsky. Rejecting evolution, Wolfe proposes his own theory of the creation of human language.

'Aphantasia' describes a phenomenon neuroscientists have only been studying for a few years: the inability to "see" images in the mind.

This is what English sounds like to Italians.