It's a captivating idea: build an interstellar ark, fill it with people, flora, and fauna of every kind, and set your course for a distant star. The concept is not only science fiction gold, it's been the subject of many scientific studies and proposals. By building a ship that can accommodate multiple generations of human beings (a generation ship), humans could colonize the known universe.

They all originate from one language, Latin. Yet, the Romance languages differ in grammar and structure from classical Latin. How?

Even though the Spanish language is the most widespread in Mexico, there are many other indigenous (native) languages spoken in the country to this day.

Springfield's Merriam-Webster has added new words with unprecedented speed.

Sign languages emerge through a natural process in deaf communities just as verbal languages do, after a language community is formed, according to a linguist. “Sign languages are perceived as the translated language of verbal language, on the contrary, they are independent,” Zeynep Acan Aydin, a linguist at Hacettepe University, told Anadolu Agency, as the […]

Waubgeshig Rice, host of CBC Sudbury’s afternoon show, Up North, interviews Indigenous language speakers from northern Ontario to celebrate the United Nations International Year of Indigenous Languages.

The Auditor General’s report on education in the territory released in February painted a dismal picture of Indigenous language education. “After our audit in 2010, the department acknowledged its need to review its policy for Indigenous language and culture-based education. It completed this review in 2014, which found that its model was not leading to […]

Wanna talk like a New Yorker? Then you gotta know the lingo, wise guy. flying rat (n.): A pigeon.hun (n.): hundred. As in, “I’m going to a party up on a hun

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.

The history of the printed word is full of bibliographic twists and turns, major historical moments, and the significant printing of books now so obscure no one has read them since their publication.

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.

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.

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?