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, ...

New research shows that wherever human populations mix, their languages blend as well ...

How you say something matters as much as what you say. At least that’s the opinion of many grammarians, who have been quibbling about Americans’ use of language for as long as there has been an ...

Over the last few decades, there has been a tremendous increase in the production of descriptive grammars for languages that had previously been poorly described or lacked description altogether. In ...

The bases of the human language faculty are now being investigated by means of highly specialised measurement techniques and with increasing success. Why can we understand complex sentences, while our ...

At least some birds can learn a pattern once proposed as unique to the grammars of human languages, say researchers. Starlings trained in a lab have learned to distinguish between sounds strung ...

I'm attempting to write a Textmate language grammar and have run up against my own ignorance. In the language, some of the keywords start with a '#', for example #hide, #show, etc. My first was along ...

One characteristic that clearly distinguishes us from non-human primates is our ability to understand and produce language. In particular, the human ability to apply complex linguistic rules has been ...