The Best Articles in Language

“OK” is thought to be the most widely recognized word on the planet. We use it to communicate with each other, as well as our technology. But, it actually started out as a language fad in the 1830’s.…

Classical music mastermind Benjamin Zander concluded his 2008 TED Talk by recounting the heartrending story of an Auschwitz survivor and her brother. This short animated piece highlights that story,…

This conversational habit seems like interrupting but it's actually not.

Solve these puzzle questions to level up your Wordle game.

From "unabridged" to "slanguage," Madeline Kripke's library is a logophile's heaven (or hell).

The slurs are just the beginning.

Large language models (LLMs) can utilize 'encoded reasoning,' a form of steganography, to subtly embed reasoning steps within their responses, enhancing performance but potentially reducing…

“That one in there—he just sits and hisses.” The school caretaker pointed to a hole underneath the old building. I crouched down, peered in, and said, “Hello there,” to the dirty, scrawny little ca…

How the right words can have the wrong meanings, and the best translations lead us to an understanding that's way deeper than language.

Noisy. Hysterical. Brash. The textual version of junk food. The selfie of grammar. The exclamation point attracts enormous amounts of flak...

Brain development is a highly complex process that is strongly influenced by the environment in which a child is raised, with the earliest years of life being especially important for the emergence of…

«Research shows that young children who are exposed to high quality language and more child-directed speech will have larger vocabularies and better language processing skills later on.»

Researchers uncover striking parallels in the ways that humans and machine learning models acquire language skills.

The very short story can conjure a fiction out of almost nothing.

Language develops in different areas of the brain. Researchers have been able to show that the way these are linked varies according to the respective native language – knowledge that could prove…

The meter-tall stone that has come to be called the Mesha Stele, its smooth, black basalt carved some sixteen centuries before it was unearthed from the packed, red sand of Dhiban, Jordan in 1868, …

Sleep has a more powerful role in language-learning than was previously thought. What does this reveal about our night-time brain?

Making a new paragraph is as easy as drawing a thin line in the margin.

«I propose that we treat the “rules” of Bain and company, particularly those designed to promote coherence, like these ruled lines—as elected parameters from which we may deviate as needed.»

“Creative fantasy, because it is mainly trying to do something else (make something new), may open your hoard and let all the locked things fly away like cage-birds.”

On the unexpected joys of Denglisch, Berlinglish & global Englisch. « My own language, made camp. »