I was recently browsing (I’ll tell you why some other time) in my long-neglected copy of The Basis and Essentials of German by Charles Duff and Richard Freund (Thomas Nelson, London, third edition ...

What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, ...

Do speakers of different languages build sentence structure in the same way? In a neuroimaging study published in PLOS Biology, scientists from the Max Planck institute for Psycholinguistics, Donders ...

Scientists have discovered that a language's grammatical structures change more quickly than vocabulary, overturning a long-held assumption in the field. The study analyzed 81 Austronesian languages ...

‘The’ is the most commonly used word in English. ‘The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog’ uses all 26 letters of the English alphabet and is called a pangram. Most average adult English speakers ...

How do we humans end up using language in a way that conforms to grammatical rules? Recent research, using artificially designed languages, suggests that underneath all the linguistic differences, we ...

Grammar is the system for organising a language. All major languages have a grammatical structure. Grammar allows us to structure our sentences and even our thoughts and ideas. Some experts think that ...

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 ...