Breakthroughs, discoveries, and DIY tips sent six days a week. Terms of Service and Privacy Policy. It’s relatively easy to trace a written linguistic history ...

A computational analysis has highlighted the poorly understood relationships and elusive histories of modern sign languages worldwide, revealing two major sign language families shaped by geopolitical ...

Why did humans start speaking? Scientists suggest genetics played a big role — and they say the evolution of this singular ability was key to our survival. A new study links a particular gene to the ...

An international team proposes replacing Hockett’s feature checklist with a model of language as a dynamic, multimodal, and ...

The global distribution of grammatical complexity (fusion). Closely related languages resemble each other's scores. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 Languages around the ...

Example of recurrent change. Still images from video dictionary entries that illustrate the phonological pattern of thumb extension. Both signs are produced with four fingers extended, but the sign ...

A new study links a particular gene and a protein variant found only in humans to the origins of spoken language. Researchers used CRISPR gene editing to replace the NOVA1 protein found in mice with ...