A new study suggests that language may rely less on complex grammar than previously thought. Every time we speak, we’re ...

A large-scale study of languages shows that the grammar of creoles - which emerged in multilingual situations of extreme social upheaval, like colonial slaveries - are composed from the grammars of ...

A new world atlas of colonial-era languages reveals massive traces of African and Pacific source languages. A new large-scale database and atlas of key structural properties of mixed languages from ...

The authors do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their ...

Despite the vast diversity of human languages, specific grammatical patterns appear again and again. A new study reveals that around a third of the long-proposed “linguistic universals” — patterns ...

The European starling -- long known as a virtuoso songbird and as an expert mimic too -- may also soon gain a reputation as something of a "grammar-marm." This three-ounce bird, new research shows, ...

At least some birds can learn a pattern once proposed as unique to the grammars of human languages, say researchers. Starlings trained in a lab have learned to distinguish between sounds strung ...

A new large-scale database and atlas of key structural properties of mixed languages from the Americas, Africa and Asia-Pacific has been published by researchers at the Max Planck Institute for ...