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

Random House’s copy chief confronts three persistent, unnecessary rules about good writing.

Mort Felix liked to say that his name, when read as two Latin words, meant “happy death.” When he was sick with the flu, he used to jokingly remind his wife, Susan, that he wanted Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy” played at his deathbed. But when his life’s end arrived at the age of 77, he lay in his study in his Berkeley, California, home, his body besieged by cancer and his consciousness cradled in morphine, uninterested in music and refusing food as he dwindled away over three weeks in 2012. “Enough,” he told Susan. “Thank you, and I love you, and enough.” When she came downstairs the next morning, she found Felix dead.

A soon-to-be published study found court reporters in Philadelphia regularly made errors when transcribing sentences spoken in a dialect linguists term African-American English.

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.

Each year, dictionaries like Merriam-Webster add a few new words to their lexical listings.

Tablets from some of the world’s oldest civilisations hold rich details about life thousands of years ago, but few people today can read them. New technology is helping to unlock them.

Instead of multiplying the number of gender-neutral pronouns we should decrease their number and stick to a single one creating a gender-free language

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?

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

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

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

What can hyperpolyglots teach the rest of us?

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.

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

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 much do you really need to say to put a sentence together?

Why one syllable spoken at different pitches can have seven meanings

A painstaking investigation of Europe’s cave art has revealed 32 shapes and lines that crop up again and again and could be the world’s oldest code

Their desire for avoidance is a predisposition so common that it’s become hard-baked into Finnish culture.

When Jews fled Spain during the Inquisition, they carried their language with them. Today, Ladino reflects the trajectories of the Sephardic Jewish diaspora, but can it survive?

Hannah Jenkins survived a cycling accident - but woke up no longer being able to understand English.

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.

India has lost around 20% of its languages in the past five decades, a survey by the Vadodara-based Bhasha Research and Publication Centre has revealed.

Apple makes free texting convenient by bundling its own iMessage system with SMS. But there's a dark side.

How might an influx of smart gadgets change the English language?

Language translation is a notoriously difficult task for humans, let alone computers. But in trying to solve that problem Google has stumbled across a clever trick, that involves treating them like maps-and it really, really works.

Coul, coole, koole: How we got from cool temperatures to cool cats.

The question of whether you should put one or two spaces after the period at the end of a sentence elicits strong reactions on both sides. On the one-space side, this 2011 Slate article by Farhad Manjoo (which has over 165,000 Facebook likes) lays out the argument for why "typing two spaces after a period is totally, completely, utterly, and inarguably wrong."

Just because you don’t like someone’s criticism doesn’t mean they’re “shaming” you.