An international team from Fudan, Harvard, and Stony Brook has identified shared statistical patterns in the vocabularies of 22 languages, using AI and centuries of linguistic data. The study found ...

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 ...

A new theoretical paper suggests that human cognitive and linguistic evolution was driven by early humans’ ability to be clever and humorous, an idea dubbed the “survival of the wittiest.” The ...

Wild chimpanzees alter the meaning of single calls when embedding them into diverse call combinations, mirroring linguistic operations in human language. Human language, however, allows an infinite ...

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and ...

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, ...