The Brahmin of Kerala in Southern India are renowned for their ritual of chanting.
Parts of their chants are not in any human language, and yet they still appear to show patterns. But it’s also been claimed that these chants …
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Could language have evolved from birdsong?
A new paper suggests that human language shares features with both the tweeting of our feathered friends, and the buzzing of bees. How might early humans have combined them to make language?
Linguist Daniel …
Children learn language pretty fast.
But a new study shows that babies who are even a few hours old can tell the difference between their mother tongue and other languages. How do they do it?
Linguist Daniel Midgley gets in …
Linguists have always been interested in reconstructing languages from long ago.
By looking at how languages are now, we can work backwards to see how they must have been in the past. But now computer scientists are creating a kind …
In a world of changing values, one set of values has never changed: the point values on Scrabble tiles.
Now word nerd Joshua Lewis has an idea that has some gamers reaching for pitchforks. He suggests changing the scoring values …
Why is language the way it is? Is it in our genes? Or does culture play a role?
Linguists have supposed that we have a language instinct that sets the boundaries on what a possible language is. But the language …
Linguist Daniel Everett has worked with the Pirahã people of the Amazon for decades.
They have an unusual language with no words for numbers or colours. And this language is finding itself at the centre of some explosive claims about …
What’s it like to be a dog?
It’s difficult to say, because they can’t tell us. But recent experiments have shown something about the way dogs group objects into categories, and it’s different from the way human children do it. …
Many of us turn to Wikipedia when learning about something new.
And most major languages have their own Wikipedia. But wikis also come in a few unexpected flavours, including Latin, Old English, and even a few constructed languages.
Linguist Daniel …
Time for our yearly round-up of words that made the news.
Which vocabulary items captured the essence of our time, and which will survive?
Linguist Daniel Midgley brings you the useful, the outrageous, and the awful on this episode of …
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