Dolphins name one another, and they click and whistle about their lives or the dangers posed by sharks and humans. They also pass on useful bits of know-how from mother to child, such as how to catch ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

IN A CHURCH hewn out of a mountainside, just over a thousand years or so ago, a monk was struggling with a passage in Latin. He did what others like him have done, writing the tricky bits in his own ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...

This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. IN 1786 WILLIAM JONES, a British civil servant in Calcutta, told ...

Every boring email we type or moment of small talk we have at the grocery store is part of a historic and mysterious legacy: the creation of language. The kind of languages we speak — from Arabic to ...

What is the origin of language? When I was a kid, I was told that Sanskrit — which originated in India — was “the mother of all languages,” including English and most European languages. Not any more, ...

For over two hundred years, the origin of the Indo-European languages has been disputed. Two main theories have recently dominated this debate: the ‘Steppe’ hypothesis, which proposes an origin in the ...