Linguistics

Some dogs can remember the names of hundreds of objects.

Seemingly meaningless adolescent slang isn’t “brain rot,” it’s linguistically normal, developmentally appropriate and a way of belonging.

From Pig Latin to Punch Buggy, kids have long used nonsensical language, gestures and games to carve out cultures of their own.

Artificial brains, humanoid robots and ‘assistants’ are misleading myths – and they directly affect how we use AI.

The search for Apongo is a small part of historians’ ongoing work to recreate the lives of Africans taken in the transatlantic slave trade.

Esol education has become politicised as part of the wider discussion on migration.

Here are five practical, research-informed tips to help families build kids’ skills in their home language.

Significant time is spent on tracking the usage of words throughout the year before making decisions on contenders.

Idioms are an often invisible barrier to understanding and inclusion for second-language speakers because their meanings rely on shared culture as well as language.

Elphaba’s insistence on correctness speaks to a broader challenge facing anyone positioned as an outsider: having to work that much harder to be accepted.

Many Native American languages only have a few native speakers left.

AI-fueled technologies make communicating in other languages easier than ever, but it still can’t replace the transformative value of learning a new language.

The language you learn as a child becomes the lens through which you understand the world. A team of researchers from over 30 countries has found it also affects how you read in your second language.

Why is your ankle named after a Greek hero and your uterus after a Renaissance anatomist? The answer says as much about power and memory as it does about medicine.

Puerto Ricans like Bad Bunny complicate the administration’s campaign to portray America as an English-speaking, homogenous nation.

The findings of a new study about communication between birds also offer key insights into the origins of language.

This now-extinct tongue was probably spoken somewhere in Eurasia as many as 8,000 years ago. But how do we know Proto-Indo-European must have existed?

Metaphors help us understand complexity, but they can also be dangerous, or even misleading.

Using the term ‘war’ when fighting alleged drug traffickers or terrorists serves to justify killing them without proof they’ve committed any crimes.

The ‘moral foreign language effect’ makes you more rational, and less emotional.

Bitch is a slur – and a powerful symbol – that continues to divide us. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely to ever be fully reclaimed. Here’s why.

Migrants with dementia who’ve acquired English later in life may revert to their childhood language – and many rely on family members to interpret.

How do we make a complex piece of tech easy to understand? An analogy helps – as long as it’s not misleading.

The fact that animals don’t use words makes it hard to decode their communication. But technology is starting to make it easier.

Kids have a lot to say. Sometimes they just need a little help to feel confident speaking up.

Unusual words or punctuation may serve as ‘tells’ that something has been written by a chatbot. But even with that knowledge, most people struggle to discern human writing from AI-generated text.

A new study shows large language models find it much harder to understand the nuances of Indian, British and Australian English.

Whether reading a book or listening to a podcast, the goal is the same: understanding. But these activities support comprehension in different ways.

An expert in American dialects explains how a ‘health drink’ from the early 1800s spawned so many names and variations.

Australians are outdone by Americans and Brits, both in how often they swear, and in how many users swear online.