Nearly 7,000 different languages are spoken across the world. But how these languages evolved has long been a source of debate. Now, a group of German researchers has uncovered exactly how language ...

of California at Berkeley linguist John McWhorter, who adores metaphors. The one original language, created by the first people 150,000 years ago in Africa, has branched into 6, 000 today, through ...

Janina Brutt-Griffler says she's always been interested in the interaction of different cultures and languages. "I grew up in a bicultural context," says Brutt-Griffler who joined the UB faculty in ...

Among the many ways you can define language differences, one of the easiest is by the use of tone. For some languages (like English), the differences between words that are pronounced similarly has to ...

I prefer to keep to what is actually understood about evolutionary biology and not indulge in what evolutionary biologists dismiss as 'just-so' stories... stories we invent... 'maybe it happened this ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent every weekday. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It’s relatively easy to trace a written linguistic history—there ...

We argue that language evolution started like the evolution of reading and writing, through cultural evolutionary processes. Genuinely new behavioural patterns emerged from collective exploratory ...

Language is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey ...

A new study draws on a rigorous analysis of the Corpus of Historical Japanese to trace the semantic evolution of the verb ...