Languages are living systems, constantly shifting with culture, technology, and human connection. From hidden grammatical universals to the rise of new words, change is both inevitable and patterned.

A massive new analysis of over 1,700 languages shows that some long-debated “universal” grammar rules are actually real. By using cutting-edge evolutionary methods, researchers found that languages ...

Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, cultural, and societal shifts. Studying the evolution of languages can thus ...

Throughout human history, there have been many instances where two populations came into contact—especially in the past few thousand years because of large-scale migrations as a consequence of ...

Like spoken languages, sign languages evolve organically and do not always have the same origin. This produces different ways of communication and annotation. This is the subject of Manolis ...

When speakers of different languages meet, their words, sounds and even grammatical structures mingle in surprising ways. Ketchup, for example, may be an American staple today, but its name entered ...