How do linguists reconstruct dead languages? How do they recover how words sounded thousands of years ago, before writing was even invented?

How did writing systems evolve? Why are there so many different writing systems around the world? Did they all come from the same place? If so, where? The Duolingo blog looks at the places where writing began, and the different writing systems across the world: blog.duolingo.com/evolution-of...

For generations, the Fulani have lived across Africa’s Sahel region, a semiarid belt stretching between the sands of the Sahara in the north and the continent’s forests farther south.

Animals can’t talk like humans do, but why? Recent research suggests that other primates possess an important ability for language called compositionality—the ability to combine words and phrases together into complex expressions. But this alone doesn’t seem to be enough for language.

The Rosetta Stone blog answers a question as old as the Roman Empire itself: Is the Latin language alive, dying, or dead? blog.rosettastone.com/latin-dead-l...

Is Latin a dead language? What defines a dead language anyway? Is a language dead if millions of people still use it every day?

Keeping kids interested in science is a matter of language As children get older, their understanding of science and being a scientist changes. The words adults use are a critical part of keeping them engaged in discovery www.scientificamerican.com/article/keep...

An endangered language is one that is spoken by fewer speakers than previous generations. There are varying degrees of endangerment, but by one rating system, over 3,100 of the world’s 7,164 languages are endangered today.

Mark W. Post explains how historical reconstruction of languages works in this great article for The Conversation: theconversation.com/hindi-greek-...

Hindi, Greek and English all come from a single ancient language—but how do linguists know this?

Louder for the people in the back! @colingorrie.bsky.social It’s almost comical how frequently people tell me or claim online that a word comes from an acronym, when acronyms are actually a fairly new source of words. www.deadlanguagesociety.com/p/acronym-et...

Can you distinguish a Victorian from a Queenslander? How Australian accents change from state to state theconversation.com/quiz-can-you...

Did you know that there are hidden word order rules for adjectives in English? blog.duolingo.com/adjective-or...

Why traffic lights in Japan are blue instead of green www.slashgear.com/1870884/japa...

A neat look at counting systems in the world’s languages indepthnh.org/2025/05/31/s...

The lonely life of a glyph-breaker: The heroic days of deciphering hieroglyphics and cuneiform make for great stories, but will we ever see that happen again?

Can AI decode undeciphered languages? It really depends on the size of the corpus, and whether there are bilingual texts or other context to provide the meanings of words. Absent that, no matter how advanced AI gets, it can never decipher ancient scripts.

Which are the most spoken languages in the United Kingdom? There’s more linguistic diversity in the country than you might think! www.babbel.com/en/magazine/...

It might sound counterintuitive, but this article argues that we shouldn’t let ancient languages die—they illuminate our own blind spots. unherd.com/2025/01/dont...

“Learning to read in a foreign language has taught me to embrace ambiguity” www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle...

Millennial or older? Here’s the slang that define Gens Z and Alpha www.scmp.com/lifestyle/ar...

Smart dogs have a humanlike knack for naming new objects In games with toys, “gifted” dogs can extend names to new objects with the same purpose as known ones www.science.org/content/arti...

Neanderthals had their own language—but was it like ours? And could our linguistic differences have led to their extinction?

And the following graph shows some semantic changes in the aggregate. For example, *article* originally meant ‘an object’ (an article of clothing), but shifted to mean ‘a news/literary item’ (a news article). You can see this shift happen over the period of years examined in the corpus.

Here’s a neat graph showing how some specific representatives decreased their use of *outstanding* to mean ‘still remaining’ (as opposed to ‘standing out’) over their careers.

How speaking in a second language directly affects your moral judgement “Ιf you asked a multilingual friend which language they find more emotional, the answer would usually be their mother tongue—the one they used while growing up and probably still use at home. [...]

The remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages Vaughn Smith speaks 8 languages fluently and another 25 to varying degrees of proficiency. Of the 37 total, he can carry on length conversations in 24 of them. www.washingtonpost.com/dc-md-va/int...

Just added another podcast to the Big List of Podcasts on Linguistics! “Butter No Parsnips” @butternoparsnips.bsky.social is a weekly podcast that takes you on an adventure through the weird, wacky, wonderful, and sometimes wicked history of one wayside word.

Chicago’s hidden etymologies, from @etymologynerd.bsky.social Adam doesn’t mention it in the infographic, but the word “Chicago” may be distantly related to the word “skunk”, both coming from an Algonquian root meaning ‘smell bad’.