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 ...

Is saying 'breeks' instead of 'trousers' or 'tatties' instead of 'potatoes' like speaking a different language? New University of Dundee research suggests that dialects are processed differently to ...

A non-programmer friend asked me that question today out of random curiosity. I initially said no, but then I thought about it some more. Many languages have versions, like how C++, PHP, and HTML have ...

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 ...

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 ...

The world today has about 7,500 spoken or signed languages. Yet this number could be much lower than what was observed over ...

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 ...