Languages, like genes, are also ‘documents of history’. Abstract Historical inference is at its most powerful when...
Linguistics
After the Norman invasion of 1066, English went into decline as a written language. English is full...
A proto-language is a linguistic reconstruction formulated by applying the comparative method to a group of languages...
As of the 2000s, a total of roughly 7,000 natively spoken languages existed worldwide. Curated/Reviewed by Matthew...
Research into the development of human language. By Matt Phillips Introduction Picture a human being before the...
The inscription hence records the construction of the tunnel in ancient Jerusalem. Introduction The Siloam inscription or Shiloah inscripti, known...
English sentence structure or grammar has been extraordinarily impacted by the ancient Greek and Latin models. By...
Neanderthals had the capacity to perceive and produce human speech. When the ancestors of anatomically-modern non-Africans came...
Western modern historical linguistics dates from the late-18th century. It grew out of the earlier discipline of...
English has been portrayed as the language of opportunity. It has more advantages than other languages in...
Remember the ‘peanut gallery’ from ‘Howdy Doody’? That term, like many others we commonly use, has surprisingly...
Writing is one of the activities that makes us humans so unique. For thousands of years, the...
Writing is the most important invention because it makes all the other innovations possible. While researching a...
By the sixth century gossip and defamation were viable and even preferable weapons against one’s political adversaries....
From 16th-century playwrights to ‘The Good Place,’ wordplay has found clever ways to get around uttering profane...
Exploring the medieval roots of the now-obsolete meaning of the word ‘Twitter’. Does Twitter have its origins...
The languages they spoke are usually divided into three branches: East, Central, and South Semitic languages. Introduction...
Etruscan was a relatively isolated language not connected with the Indo-European languages of Italy. By Mark CartwrightHistorian...
The truth is that entering an intimate relationship with a new language often colors everything. Learning a...
By the time the Declaration of Independence was signed in 1776, did colonial Americans still sound like...
Researchers say it’s time to finally discard a decades-old theory about the origins of human language. Introduction...
Which of these trends will stick around, and which are passing fads? Introduction Social media has created...
Words change their meaning over time, but it can be hard to keep up, especially when some...
Better job prospects and richer lives are among the many reasons to learn a foreign language. Half...
A linguist considers whether saving languages is sentimental or critical. I met the last speaker of Naati...
Ethnographer Daisy Bates recorded many Aboriginal languages in the early 20th century, which would otherwise be lost...
Linguists are using new technology to return decades-old recordings of near-extinct languages to the communities where they...
No one in history has ever, based on their adopting a sea-going profession, talked like Robert Newton’s...
While we’re losing biological diversity, we’re also losing linguistic and cultural diversity at the same time. This...
Webster saw himself as a saviour of the American language. In the United States, the name Noah...