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With its complex interweaving of symbols, structure, and meaning, human language stands apart from other forms of animal communication. But where did it come from? A new paper suggests that researchers look to bird songs and monkey calls to understand how human language might have evolved from simpler, preexisting abilities. 
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Your personality is revealed in the way you speak, according to new research. Introverts tend to use more concrete words and are more precise, in contrast to extraverts, whose words are more abstract and vague.
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At Discover Magazine, Veronique Greenwood has a really interesting story about a mathematician who is helping to preserve Scottish Gaelic. How? The researcher, Anne Kandler, has put together some equations that can help native language supporters target their programs and plan their goals. Via Bilingual
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A new study published in Science by Carnegie Mellon University's Charles Kemp and the University of California at Berkeley's Terry Regier shows that kinship categories across languages reflect general principles of communication. The same principles can potentially be applied to other kinds of categories, such as colors and spatial relationships. Ultimately, then, the work may lead to a general theory of how different languages carve the world up into categories.
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Change your words to get a different perspective on your problem. The words you use will determine your thoughts.
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It may seem surprising, but in this age where geographic mobility and instant communication have increased our exposure to people outside of our neighborhoods or towns, American regional dialects are pulling further apart from each other, rather than moving closer together. And renowned linguist William Labov thinks there’s a connection between political and linguistic segregation.
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Keith Chen, an economist from Yale, makes a startling claim in an unpublished working paper: people’s fiscal responsibility and healthy lifestyle choices depend in part on the grammar of their language.
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"This article gives us some insight into why, despite being regular clickers ourselves, many of us can’t help but hear African clicks as noise-like when they’re used in words where we expect consonants to be. Our brains have plenty of experience in hearing clicks—just not in that particular role. It may also explain why speakers of click languages are bemused by our inability to hear them as plain old consonants."
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From
io9
Last April, a linguistic study likened the spread of the sounds of language to the human gene pool, and used this information to suggest language arose once in Africa 10000 years ago.
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From
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The way people discuss the future varies from language to language. Some have a well-defined future tense, while others distinguish much between present and future. But does this point of grammar actually affect how we see the world?
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Merritt Ruhlen, a lecturer in Anthropology at Stanford, and his longtime collaborator Murray Gell-Mann, a founder and Distinguished Professor of the Santa Fe Institute, have mapped the evolution of word order in a paper titled "The Origin and Evolution of Word Order," published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).
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In contrast to traditional economic theory, which suggests people are inherently and rationally selfish, a wave of new social science and neuroscience data shows something quite different: that we are a pro-social storytelling species. As language emerged and evolved over the last million years, positive words, it seems, have been more widely and deeply engrained into our communications than negative ones.
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We tend to associate certain vowel sounds like "E"s and "I"s with light objects while "O"s and "U"s suggest heavier things. Could there be some evolutionary reason for this?
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WHERE do new words come from? On Twitter at least, they often begin life in cities with large African American populations before spreading more widely, according to a study of the language used on the social network.
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Cognitive scientists have good news for linguistic purists terrified about the corruption of their mother tongue.Using an artificial language in a carefully controlled laboratory experiment, a team from the University of Rochester and Georgetown University has found that many changes to language are simply the brain's way of ensuring that communication is as precise and concise as possible.
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For all of our capacity for rational, analytical thought, we can have different feelings about the same thing—even make different decisions about it—depending on the language used to talk about it.
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The conceptual metaphor explanation is transformative—it flies in the face of the accepted idea that metaphor is just a linguistic device based on similarity. In an instant, it made us rethink 2000 years of received wisdom.
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Glossolalia or “speaking in tongues” is known primarily from charismatic Christian churches. In that setting it has been studied extensively with some remarkable findings. In Tower of Linguistic Babel, I examined one of those studies and noted some curious features of “tongues” or glossas
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Being bilingual makes you smarter and can have a profound effect on your brain.
Bilingüebabies's curator insight,
April 16, 2013 2:41 AM
I hope my children thank me, I wish my great grandparents knew this! 
Franchie Cappellini's comment,
January 24, 2014 6:14 AM
I had no idea the lasting effects of bilingualism! I also think its so interesting how the view of bilinguals has changed over the years. From this article I can clearly see the benefits of raising your kid bilingually—they are more adept and aware of their environment.
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You don’t have to be a language maven to find the direct object in a basic English-language sentence. Just look next to the verb.
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Research designed to understand the effect of text messaging on language found that texting has a negative impact on people's linguistic ability to interpret and accept words, according to a linguistics researcher.
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Last year, a report claiming to support the idea that the origin of language can be traced to West Africa appeared in Science. The article caused quite a stir.
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The likelihood that a man will match his language to that of a female conversation partner depends on how fertile she is, according to a study published Feb. 8 in the open access journal PLoS ONE.
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Why did language evolve? While the answer might seem obvious -- as a way for individuals to exchange information -- linguists and other students of communication have debated this question for years.
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A new study of how compound word formation is influenced by subtle forms of linguistic pressure demonstrates that words which 'sound better' to the speakers of a language have a higher chance of being created, suggesting that, like biological...
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