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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

YESTERDAY'S post on Cantonese touched a few nerves. A blog post is a very compressed medium, and I said some things briefly that I still stand by but which deserve a bit of elaboration. My calling ...

Language forms the backbone of communal existence. It doesn't take long to discover this if you've ever traveled to a place where you don't speak the language. "Where is the nearest bathroom?", "How ...

People across the world describe their thoughts and emotions, share experiences and spread ideas through the use of thousands of distinct languages. These languages form a fundamental part of our ...

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 ...