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 ...

RESEARCH on the evolution of language suggests that our communication is largely about cooperation. When we speak with each other, the idea goes, we do so to help coordinate our actions. Antelope ...

Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, ...

The evolution of human speech was far more complex than is implied by some recent attempts to link it to a specific gene a professor of computational linguistics. Some researchers in recent years have ...

Cognitive and computer scientists at the University of Toronto, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies have found child language development and the ...

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 ...