A great deal of communication is based on metaphor.

Words are ever evolving – but not without controversy. From creative applications of an apostrophe to the overuse of literally, what makes you rage?

More than 1,000 years ago in Spain’s La Rioja region, monks made notes in the margins of Latin texts. These are believed to be the Spanish language’s first steps onto the page.

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

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.

I knew I’d never sound like a native. But shouldn’t I be much better than this?

With the increasing role of Whatsapp, Twitter, and Instagram as our primary communication tools, one might wonder if good writing is still necessary for a leader. After all, a picture is worth a thousand words, and a lengthy message is too much to afford. Elon Musk, one of the most iconic business visionaries, often tweets out of compulsion, resulting in regrettable events like legal tangles with the SEC. And the most powerful man on earth, Mr. Donald Trump, constantly tweets incoherent sentences with grammar mistakes.

We think that everything can be talked about. Yet, from metaphors to the mystical, there are many things we seem unable to directly express. Should we accept that some things transcend our conceptual grasp? Are the most important things in life beyond language? Or can we find the right words for everything, even if we don't yet know what they are?

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.

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.

As reference books go, the thesaurus, these days, is one step up in respectability from the rhyming dictionary. To use one is to betray something embarrassing about yourself. To be accused of using one is to be accused both of pretentiousness and of using words whose meaning you don’t really know. (For instance: I originally wrote “accused of malapropism” in that previous sentence, but then checked the dictionary and discovered this refers to mistakes based on sound.) One goes to the thesaurus to find, as they say, a “ten-dollar word.”

feel that this award was not made to me as a man, but to my work – a life’s work in the agony and sweat of the human spirit, not for glory and least of all for profit, but to create out of the materials of the human spirit something which did not exist before.” As I read this extract – from William Faulkner’s Nobel prize acceptance speech – I hand a plastic spoon to my voice coach every time I arrive at an important word.

As our ancestors began eating softer agricultural foods, the shape of the human jaw and the sounds we make may have changed as well

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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.

A new study “The effect of accent exposure on children’s sociolinguistic evaluation of peers” from the American Psychological Association and published in Developmental Psychology says that kids tend to befriend other kids who speak like them. This proved true even in diverse communities. The researchers say this shows that our tendency to discriminate based on the way others talk is rooted in the preferences we have as children.

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

Benjamin Dreyer sees language the way an epicure sees food. And he finds sloppiness everywhere he looks.

Newborn babies are born with the innate skills needed to pick out words from language, a new study published in Developmental Science reveals. Before infants can learn words, they must identify those words in continuous speech. Yet, the speech signal lacks obvious boundary markers, which poses a potential problem for language acquisition.