The restoration of an 18th century manuscript of liturgical choir songs written in the Abenaki language will be an important resource for language revitalization efforts in Odanak, Que.

Irish, English, Scots, French and Old Norse are just some of the languages that have left a mark.

Here are three well-known philosophical one-liners you're probably using incorrectly.

Improworsement: is an improvement that makes things worse, and Erin McKean knows all about that. She's wanted to create dictionaries since the age of eight and this year she is celebrating the 10th anniversary of Wordnik, an online dictionary she helped create that has grown to 10 times the size of the Oxford English Dictionary. This week Paul and Rich sit down with Erin to discuss the evolution of Wordnik, from its humble beginnings in PHP to developing a full scalable API. Erin shares the challenges she’s faced, both technical and financial, and gives us tips on how to deal with failure. She also helps us expand our vocabulary and answers the difficult question: what is the best word? ...

Goya. A small word, but one that contains multitudes. It is one of those mythic beasts, the “untranslatables,” the foreign words that supposedly lack any equivalent in English. Lists of them spread…

In our exclusive IGN First coverage for Netflix's The Witcher, we spoke to language guru David J. Peterson (Game of Thrones) about how he created the "Elder Speech" language for the series.

What started out as a high school computer science project has grown into the only active Wikipedia in Canada operating in an Indigenous language. Wikipetcia Atikamekw Nehiromowin includes over 1,000 articles, sound clips and photos representing life, history and culture of the three Atikamekw communities in Quebec. “They cover common words, the cities of Quebec, …

Mexico is one of the 10 most linguistically diverse nations in the world but speakers of some of its least spoken tongues say the diversity is under threat.

Migration is not only reflected in DNA, but also in language. By tracing changes in language, we learn more about the lifestyle of the people that speak it. University lecturer Tijmen Pronk (40) conducts linguistic research into (pre)historical migration.

Scott Moncrieff's English translation of Proust's A la recherche du temps perdu is widely hailed as a masterpiece in its own right. His rendering of the title as Remembrance of Things Past is not, however, considered a high point. William C. Carter explores the two men's correspondence on this somewhat sticky issue and how the Shakespearean title missed the mark regarding Proust's theory of memory.

If I asked you to write down the number “ninety-two”, you wouldn’t have to think twice. By the time we’re adults, the connection between numerals and their names is almost automatic, so we barely give them a second thought. Which is why it might surprise you to hear that the English for 92 isn’t a …

A professor makes the case in a new book for the beauty and logic of the language.

What do J.R.R. Tolkien, professional linguists, and a sneaky French teenager all have in common?

In something of a Hotel California of linguistics, once a word has made it into the Oxford English Dictionary, it can never leave.

More than 1,000 years ago in Spain’s La Rioja region, monks made notes in the margins of Latin texts. These are believed to be the Spanish language’s first steps onto the page.

Phrases such as ‘dosh’, ‘notes’ ‘bob’ and ‘dough’ are more commonplace now

Linguists have a lot of largely untested theories. Borrowing a tool from ecology, researchers built a model that didn't look for one worldwide explanation.

What would it look like to convert a year and a half of homepage links totaling more than half a trillion words from worldwide news homepages in 110 languages into ngram datasets with just three SQL queries, an open source language detector, one script and the power of Google’s BigQuery platform?

Experts estimate that a language goes extinct every two weeks. USC student Prim Phoolsombat wants to use a blend of linguistics and computer science to help save them.

Afrikaans into Khmer?

One of the biggest challenges for artificial intelligence is language interpretation and translation. Tech companies look to change that.

Welsh and other smaller language movements on Wikimedia projects suggest there may be ways to train technology to allow for cultural differences.

Some animals, like rats, learn linguistic patterns better than humans can.

Colonial occupation of cities such as Basra in the early 20th century led to some intriguing language swaps

RIA initiative is one of the most ambitious linguistic research projects in history of State

The blog Infotra (University of Salamanca) features a collection of 150 free e-books for translators and interpreters in Spanish and English

A genetic mutation that slowed down the development of the prefrontal cortex (PFC) in two or more children may have triggered a cascade of events leading to acquisition of recursive language and modern imagination 70,000 years ago.

Under certain circumstances, the question of whether a particular string of letters constitutes a word can assume a momentary prominence, with money or honor on the line. Passionate squabbles can erupt over a game of Scrabble or over how Jeff Bezos asserts his right to privacy. In his February online post accusing the National Enquirer of blackmail, the billionaire founder of Amazon used the doubtful word “complexifier,” twice, as in, “My ownership of the Washington Post is a complexifier for me.” Commentators were quick to point out that “complexifier” is indeed a word, although a verb, in French.1 Poor Bezos, they seemed to imply, deserved some linguistic latitude for having employed a combination of letters that constituted a word somewhere, even if not in Los Angeles or London, as opposed to, say, “covfefe.” And who decides, anyway?

The English word translation comes from the Middle English, which originates from the Anglo-French translater. That in turn descends from the Latin translatus: trans, across or over, and latus, which is the past participle of ferre, to carry, related to the English word “ferry.” The translator, then, is the ferry operator, carrying meaning from words on that shore to words on this shore.

Is translation a discipline or a cause? A catalogue sent to me by a small American publisher begins by naming all the translators of the foreign titles the company is offering, inviting the reader to thank and celebrate the people who have made the English versions of these books possible. I go to a university seminar on translation whose program is headed with a quotation from Paul Auster: “Translators are the shadow heroes of literature, the often forgotten instruments… who have enabled us to understand that we all, from every part of the world, live in one world.”

Enrique Jiménez makes use of artificial intelligence to fill in the many tantalizing gaps in the surviving texts written on clay tablets by scribes in early urban societies 3000 years ago.