Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Whether someone's speech is a language or a dialect is a matter of both linguistics and politics ...

There are, at our best estimate, 7,000 languages in use across the world. That may sound like a linguistic ecosystem in rude ...

Human languages are known to have grown and changed considerably over the course of history, often reflecting technological, ...

Early this month, Hong Kong’s Education Bureau deleted an article from their website after it exposed a legal grey area inhabited by spoken language and attracted much criticism from locals. The ...

Language forms the backbone of communal existence. It doesn't take long to discover this if you've ever traveled to a place where you don't speak the language. "Where is the nearest bathroom?", "How ...

YESTERDAY'S post on Cantonese touched a few nerves. A blog post is a very compressed medium, and I said some things briefly that I still stand by but which deserve a bit of elaboration. My calling ...

People across the world describe their thoughts and emotions, share experiences and spread ideas through the use of thousands of distinct languages. These languages form a fundamental part of our ...

Corrections & clarifications: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate or incomplete facts about the history of language. Language is an essential part of human communication, allowing ...