Beam me up Scotty.

Unintentional blended idioms and phrases - It's the cream of the cake!

In 2013, at a conference on endangered languages, a retired teacher named Linda Lambrecht announced the extraordinary discovery of a previously unknown language. Lambrecht – who is Chinese-Hawaiian, 71 years old, warm but no-nonsense – called it Hawaii Sign Language, or HSL. In front of a room full of linguists, she demonstrated that its core vocabulary – words such as “mother”, “pig” and “small” – was distinct from that of other sign languages. The linguists were immediately convinced.

Small Adventures in Language with Helen Zaltzman.

A plagiarism. By Jonathan Lethem.

The following map shows the language families of Europe (distinguished by colour) and languages within those families. Please note:

The sounds of languages that died thousands of years ago have been brought to life again through technology that uses statistics in a revolutionary new way.

Historian Michael Landis writes that vocabulary like “compromise” or “Union” shape how we view our past

Where is your mind? Where does your thinking occur? Where are your beliefs? By Keith Frankish.

Signs are meant to warn you about potential hazards or identify certain things but the task of translation may instead leave you crying from laughter or scratching your head in confusion.

'The Left-Handed Gun' is not a film that many people will have heard of, let alone seen. It’s a 1958 Western, starring Paul Newman and directed by Arthur Penn.

A member of the Frisian national party – Fryske Nasjonale Partij – has caused shockwaves by suggesting the party drop...

Geometric signs on cave walls and ancient artifacts may be some of humanity’s earliest graphic communications. By Heather Pringle. (May 29, ’16)

The Local looks at some key unique words in Basque you can try out during your next visit to northern Spain.

Québec is bilingual, but reluctantly. As a French province with small pockets of English, and a few larger pockets that will willingly use both languages, the signs, by law, are in French. The language on the street is French. Ordering food or browsing a store will likely involve some amount of standard conversational French, and should you get in trouble with the law, it's going to be time to find a Francophile lawyer. The profanity, though, is pure Québec.

Can a food with skyward-facing meat really be a sandwich?

We can never fully access another person’s perspective, but to what extent do our individual private experiences matter when it comes to language and shared understanding? According to the early 20th-century Austrian-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, the answer is ‘not at all’.

Most of us have found ourselves in the awkward situation of trying to communicate in a foreign language. But thanks to a new translation device that neatly fits into your ear, the days of struggling to speak the local lingo might soon be a thing of the past.

Anyone familiar with "The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy" will know about the Babel fish, the fictional creature that lets aliens of all races communicate in the same language.

Something has been mysteriously absent from many of my recent emails: me. "Hope all is well with you," I write, conveniently erasing myself as the subject of the sentence. "Agree with Bob’s critiques." "Would love to read a post on this." "Can do in an hour." "Look forward to reading." Wherefore the shyness, the equivocation?