It's often how you know yoga class is over: The teacher faces the class with their hands together in a bow and says, "Namaste." Maybe you bow and say it back. But that's not the only place you'll encounter "namaste." In the years since yoga became commercially popular in the United States, the word has taken on a life of its own. Namaste has found its way onto T-shirts, welcome mats, mugs, socks, pencil cases, and tote bags.

People who swear like a sailor are more honest and more intelligent, studies show.

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.

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.

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

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!

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.

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.

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....

A majority of Americans believe the First Amendment are willing to crack down on free speech, as well as the press, according to a new poll.

Backpfeifengesicht may join other German words that have found a place in English, like Weltschmerz (world-weariness) and Zeitgeist (spirit of the time).

So said then-candidate Donald J Trump during a US presidential debate in 2015. Trump may have strong feelings on the matter, but he’s not alone. “Dozens of articles are written about political correctness every month in [US-based] media outlets spanning the political spectrum,” note the authors of a new paper published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology.

9. CRUMPSY: Short-tempered and irritable.

By Emma Young. Getting better at a new language doesn’t have to mean hard hours on lists of vocab and the rules of grammar.

Multilingualism alters what you see and hear.

In 1886, the British archaeologist Arthur Evans came across an ancient stone bearing a curious set of inscriptions in an unknown language. The stone came from the Mediterranean island of Crete, and Evans immediately traveled there to hunt for more evidence. He quickly found numerous stones and tablets bearing similar scripts and dated them from around 1400 BCE.

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