For some 2,500 years, residents of this mountainous village have used an astonishing language that only they understand. But there are only six people left who can ‘speak’ it.

Practiced since as long as Hawaiians can remember, hoʻoponopono is necessary on an island where space and resources are limited and the community is key to survival.

How a cheesy joke from the 1830s became the most widely spoken word in the world.

Despite centuries of efforts to make standardised French the language of all of France, Occitan, which is intrinsically tied to the local culture, could not be suppressed.

What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?

Why you should use percentages, not words, to express probabilities.

After Brexit, the use of English is likely to be even more common.

What if walkie-talkie people named everything? A stamp would be called a licky-sticky. A defibrillator would be a hearty-starty. A bumble bee is a fuzzy-buzzy, and a pregnancy test would be a baby, maybe. A bra is a breastie-nestie, and a fork is a stabby-grabby. A hippo is a floatie-bloatie, and a nightmare a screamy-dreamy.

I was walking with a friend recently, and we were discussing the limitations of language, especially in trying to explain complex concepts like philosophy, a deep experience, or a new idea. In short, on the topic of language, what we were discussing was just how clumsy verbal or written communication is in spreading what exists in one head into another — that, instead of transmutation of a concept or idea, like how a cold might spread, communicating an idea or viewpoint through language is actually quite difficult and oftentimes impossible.

Manny Medrano cut loose on spring break by analyzing a set of khipus. By Katherine Davis-Young.

Learn how to wish a "Happy New Year" in German, French, Spanish, Italian and other languages with my neatly coloured map!

With a few minor exceptions, there are really only two ways to say.

The ability to visualise an object associated with a sound was once thought to be unique to humans. But some birds seem to have that ability as well, a study has found.

A significant number of gestures made by chimps and bonobos mean the same thing.

Iceland’s mother tongue and cultural identity is drowning in an online ocean of English

Researchers create a machine translation system that translates sentences of a test set of news articles from Chinese to English as well as a human.

Nomadic horse riders likely opened a “steppe bridge” between Europe and Asia, but recent genetic data raise more questions. By Roni Jacobson.

This piece of pseudo-profanity is what's known as a taboo deformation—a word we say when we don't want to say the word.

Lithuanian, the most conservative of all Indo-European languages, is riddled with references to bees.

Little has changed in the way of tactile reading and writing since Louis Braille published his braille system in 1829. But ELIA has big plans.

Blissymbols was invented by Charles K. Bliss (1897–1985). He wanted to create an easy-to-learn international auxiliary language to allow communication between different linguistic communities. He was inspired by Chinese characters, to create a language that is purely written.

It is fascinating to wonder how these effects might play out in the real world, particularly in international politics. By Christian Jarrett

The English word "Earth", German "Erde", Swedish "jorden", and similar expressions in other Germanic languages come from Proto-Germanic *erþō, which meant, well, "earth". They are shown in brown

The Central Asian nation of Kazakhstan is changing its alphabet from Cyrillic script to the Latin-based style favoured by the West. What are the economics of such a change?

Collaborations among Egyptologists and digital linguistics promise global visualizations of what was written on inscriptions, papyri, wall paintings, and other sources of Hieroglyphs. It may also allow for more popular knowledge of Egyptian Hieroglyphs and encourage its assimilation into popular language-learning apps like Duolingo.

A partnership between Google and Australian linguistic researchers could see AI play a role in digitising and preserving dozens of threatened languages.

All over the country all but 20 of the 250 Indigenous languages are highly endangered or, as some describe, in a deep sleep. But now they are waking up thanks to the word detectives, a dedicated group of linguists and teachers determined to make language revival a success. Desmond Crump is one of them.

The Gorilla Foundation said Koko, the beloved western lowland gorilla that befriended Robin Williams and others, died in her sleep in Northern California.

Bahasa Indonesia was adopted to make communication easier across the vast Indonesian archipelago, but its simplicity has only created new barriers.

Google Translate is moonlighting as a deranged oracle—and experts say it’s likely because of the spooky nature of neural networks. By Jon Christian.

Dr Marcelo Montemurro from the University of Manchester and Dr Damian Zanette from the Centro Atómico Bariloche e Instituto Balseiro, Argentina, claim to have found linguistic patterns in the world’s most mysterious book, the Voynich manuscript.

Fast-accumulating data seem to indicate that our close cousins, the Neanderthals, were much more similar to us than imagined even a decade ago. But did they have anything like modern speech and language? And if so, what are the implications for understanding present-day linguistic diversity?

Doctors are looking into the mystery of an American man who awoke speaking only Swedish, with no memory of his past, after he was found unconscious four months ago at a motel in southern California. Michael Boatwright, 61, woke up with amnesia, calling himself Johan Ek, the Desert Sun reported.

Microsoft Research Asia says they have tested ways the Microsoft Kinect device could translate sign language and help individuals who are deaf communicate.

Language experts at the Oxford English Dictionary said the definition did not change overnight but they will monitor how the word marriage changes over the next year.