How do languages balance the richness of their structures with the need for efficient communication? To investigate, researchers at the Leibniz Institute for the German Language (IDS) in Mannheim, ...

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and ...

Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, ...

With help from an artificial language network, MIT neuroscientists have discovered what kind of sentences are most likely to fire up the brain's key language processing centers. The new study reveals ...

Newcastle upon Tyne, UK This can best be answered from a broader perspective on the evolution of complex life and by understanding languages as complex, life-related systems. All life on Earth began ...

Languages like Japanese, Korean, Turkish and the indigenous languages of the Amazon, East Africa, and New Guinea build sentences in a way that lets them grow to enormous length. Our research shows ...

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and ...