New research is helping scientists around the world understand what drives language change, especially when languages are in their infancy. The results will shed light on how the limitations of the ...

When an exam board for England, Wales and Northern Ireland recently clarified that students are now permitted to use gender-inclusive or gender-neutral forms in French, Spanish and German exams, it ...

The 19th-century Swiss philologist, Ferdinand de Saussure, is widely acclaimed as a founder of modern-day linguistics—and semiology, for that matter. One of his more interesting theories is that we ...

We learn about how and why languages change. Language is constantly changing. Today’s small changes could lead to entirely new dialects or languages in the future. We learn about how and why languages ...

All human societies use language. As far as we know, they always have. Over the course of history, humans have written nearly 130 million books, containing over half a trillion words. The average ...

The dramatic changes in technology over the past 20 or so years, from the internet to the smartphone and digital assistants like Alexa, have made communication more accessible than ever before. We ...

Youth language and slang are well-known and frequently discussed examples of language change. In 2025, I took part in a radio debate about the decision to include Gen-Z slang words like “skibidi”, ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. When an exam board for England, Wales and Northern Ireland recently clarified that students are now permitted to use ...