Add Popular Science (opens in a new tab) More information Adding us as a Preferred Source in Google by using this link indicates that you would like to see more of our content in Google News results.

Why did humans start speaking? Scientists suggest genetics played a big role – and they say the evolution of this singular ability was key to our survival. A new study links a particular gene to the ...

A computational analysis has highlighted the poorly understood relationships and elusive histories of modern sign languages worldwide, revealing two major sign language families shaped by geopolitical ...

An international team from Fudan, Harvard, and Stony Brook has identified shared statistical patterns in the vocabularies of 22 languages, using AI and centuries of linguistic data. The study found ...

A photo by Seán Roberts on a recent hike near his house in Wales, which prompted him to recall the conclusion of a research paper he co-authored on the impact of environment on language. "Ultimately, ...

The global distribution of grammatical complexity (fusion). Closely related languages resemble each other's scores. Credit: Science Advances (2023). DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adf7704 Languages around the ...

An international team of linguistics experts has traced the origins of the most common modern sign languages using a computer model to compare them against one another. The research is published in ...

A new study links a particular gene and a protein variant found only in humans to the origins of spoken language. Researchers used CRISPR gene editing to replace the NOVA1 protein found in mice with ...