Language is one of the few faculties that still seems to be uniquely human. Other animals, like chimpanzees and songbirds, have developed elaborate communication systems, but none appears to convey ...

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 ...

The Museum of Word celebrates the evolution of language through digital exhibits, sound, touch and immersive technology.

The mystery of the origin of human language has captivated scientists for centuries, and it remains one of the most intriguing problems in the field. How did humans manage to progress from simple ...

What makes the human brain distinctive? A new study published in Cell identifies two genes linked to human brain features and provides a road map to discover many more. The research could lead to ...

From "yeet" to "social distancing," new words and phrases constantly emerge and evolve in American English. But how do these neologisms—newly coined terms—gain acceptance and become part of mainstream ...

You have this slowly brewing linguistic and cultural diversity,” says the paper’s lead author Damián Blasi, who studies language evolution at Harvard University. Because most ancient languages left ...

A superb fairy-wren calls to a Horsfield's bronze-cuckoo. Brood parasites like cuckoos lay eggs in other birds' nests and leave them behind for the host birds to raise. David Ongley / Cornell Lab of ...

We will never know who spoke the first sentence or what they said, but we can have some fun speculating. Perhaps it came out of the mouth of a Stone Age man who hoped to defeat a rival and win the ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...