Colloquialisms such as barbie and smoko are like accents – part of the glue that sticks Australian English speakers together.

This quote is by the main character in the sci-fi novel The Widening Gyre by Michael R. Johnston. Writers like Johnston who invent alien profanity rely on their intuitions about what sounds offensive here on Earth. We wanted to explore whether there are universal sound patterns in profanity. So we designed a series of studies involving speakers of different languages and found surprising patterns in how swear words sound across the world.

Merriam-Webster has chosen "gaslighting" as its word of the year for 2022.

Advanced technologies like A.I. are enabling scientists to learn that the world is full of intelligent creatures with sophisticated languages, like honeybees. What might they tell us?

Although Cantonese is spoken by 80 million Chinese around the world, its influence is waning due to pressure from Beijing to favor Mandarin as the official language in China. But the decline has stirred some people to try to preserve the language.

According to the projections of The International Organization of La Francophone, the language of Molière will retain its status in the next half-century thanks to the demographic growth of Africa.

Speaking a second or even a third language can bring obvious advantages, but occasionally the words, grammar and even accents can get mixed up.

Geoffrey Khan is racing to document Aramaic, the language of Jesus, before its native speakers vanish

Machine learning algorithms help researchers identify speech patterns in children on the autism spectrum that are consistent between different languages.

Government officials must replace words such as ‘e-sports’ and ‘streaming’ with approved French versions

Essentially, it looks as if the glasses will transcribe speech in real time and display them as subtitles.

In a city where diplomats and embassies abound, where interpreters can command six-figure salaries, where language proficiency is résumé rocket fuel, Vaughn Smith was a savant with a secret.

I have a friend who speaks only in trite, pithy statements — “What goes around comes around.” “You should really think outside the box.” “Maybe you woke up on the wrong side of the bed.” No? “Then it feels like a perfect storm.” God, they’re “such a cliché.”

Canines in the study could differentiate between Spanish, Hungarian and nonsense words

While imprisoned for being a “reactionary,” physicist and engineer Zhi Bingyi began devising a system to help computing machines read Chinese characters.

Geographically, Spain's Val d'Aran should be part of France, but it's neither French, Spanish nor Catalan in culture, history or even language.

Speaking "baby talk" to infants not only helps parents and caregivers connect with the young ones in their charge, but it may also help babies learn to make words, a study published Friday by the journal Speech, Language and Hearing found. Mimicking the sound of a smaller vocal tract clues babies into how words should sound coming out of their own mouths, the researchers said.

Bilingual people engage the same brain region that monolingual individuals use to put together words—even when combining different languages

Los Angeles’s renamed Crypto.com Arena is good news for cryptocurrency fanatics but strikes a blow against the word’s original meaning