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Linguistics
Long before today's debates, immigration was already transforming the American accent into something distinctively its own.
In this excerpt from The Breath of the Gods, Simon Winchester explores how the Sumerians first named the wind and shaped our early understanding of the natural world.
The great books aren’t just classics — they’re cultural Schelling points that give our minds a place to meet up in the world of ideas.
English could settle into a state of "diglossia" where a gulf exists between the written form and its spoken varieties, but the two are bound into a single tongue.
In "Enough Is Enuf," Gabe Henry traces the history of simplified spelling movements and the lessons they teach us about language.
While death-bed utterances are more famous, baby’s first words have influenced us too.
Delirium is one of the most perplexing deathbed phenomena, exposing the gap between our cultural ideals of dying words and the reality of a disoriented mind.
Would you be upset if I called you an eggplant?
For most of human history, babies probably picked up language by overhearing.
Learning to decode complex communication on Earth may give us a leg up if intelligent life from space makes contact.
NuqneH! Saluton! A linguistic anthropologist (and creator of the Kryptonian language, among others) studies the people who invent new tongues.
New radiocarbon dating reveals astonishing insights.
Being bilingual benefits children as they learn to speak — and adults as they age.
Esperanto was intended to be an easy-to-learn second language that enabled you to speak with anyone on the planet.
Even before birth, our brains are taking note of the languages we hear.
Today, the F-word is enjoying a renaissance the likes of which it hasn’t seen since, well, the Renaissance.
Arieh Smith, a New York City-based polyglot who runs the YouTube channel Xiaomanyc, talks language-learning with Big Think.
You can learn an awful lot about people, culture, and politics by studying R.
The tonal Native American language differentiates words based on pitch and makes Spanish conjugation look like child’s play.
After my father died, my journey of rediscovery began with the Czech language.
In Georgia, it's becoming less common to pronounce words like "prize" as "prahz."
Though over three billion people speak an Indo-European language, researchers are not sure where the language family originated.
Language influences how you visually process the world, which in turn influences your memory of it.
It's like combining Google Translate with a time machine.
For linguists, the uniqueness of the Basque language represents an unsolved mystery. For its native speakers, long oppressed, it is a source of pride.
The meaning of the cryptic text has eluded scholars for centuries. Their latest efforts include computational analyses seeking new insights into the medieval enigma.
One from New Guinea rose to the top in a recent study.
In order to figure out how English might evolve in the future, we have to look at how it has changed in the near and distant past.
It may be an advantage in some contexts.