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 ...

Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a ...

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 ...

Using advanced imaging to visualize brain areas used for understanding language in native Japanese speakers, a new study from the RIKEN Brain Science Institute finds that the pitch-accent in words ...

One of the trickiest and most tempting acts of writing is to render a person’s styles of speech. My wife, who grew up in Rhode Island, may have once said to me, “I am going to need a new pattern for a ...

Depending on where you were raised, distinct accents commonly develop. But with millennials who are raised on the web, is it possible to have an Internet dialect? YouTube's PBS Idea Channel uploaded a ...

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 ...