Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Boas’s observation had swelled to mythic proportions. In a 1991 essay, British linguist Geoff Pullum called these claims a “hoax,” ...

If you’ve spent the weekend enjoying a good book in the May sun, you might not have been thinking about mathematics. But if you were reading a book in a Western language, there’s a good chance that ...

All known human languages display a surprising pattern: the most frequent word in a language is twice as frequent as the second most frequent, three times as frequent as the third, and so on. This is ...

Are acoustic features of music and spoken language shared across cultures? Researchers recorded themselves performing traditional music and speaking in their native language. In all 50+ languages, the ...

The language patterns a person uses in describing their feelings can reveal their true sentiments about other groups of people, researchers report. “There are times when people might lie about how ...