Right before Latin emerged as the dominant language on the Italian peninsula and beyond, Etruscan was one of the major languages in the Mediterranean. …

When I was a child in the mid-90's – before communication over the internet was widespread – I used to be pen pals with …

by Alex Garcia There has been a growing global awareness of the loss of linguistic diversity since the end of the twentieth century. The …

by Gerd Carling   The very concept of ‘secret’ languages appears as if it is taken out of a novel. We automatically think of military …

Languages differ in what information can be conveyed through grammatical rules and what people in different speech communities talk about. While many languages use …

In a previous post I discussed reduplication, with a particular focus on Austronesian languages. If English were to have such grammatical features, it would …

Many linguists are also fan of maps, which can be a very neat tool to illustrate areal phenomena. Many maps are also easily accessible …

Preverbs are a way in which some languages specify various aspects of a verb, e.g. the direction of the action and where it is …

In many languages, English included, there is only one grammatical word class for nouns—namely, nouns. Other languages, however, make more fine-grained distinctions within this …

Laughter is universal – all cultures enjoy jokes and laughter. Sometimes we cannot stop ourselves from laughing, even at a bad pun such as …