The study of language change, when viewed through the lens of construction grammar, provides a dynamic framework for understanding how individual linguistic constructions evolve and spread within ...

Throughout human history, there have been many instances where two populations came into contact—especially in the past few thousand years because of large-scale migrations as a consequence of ...

All human societies use language. As far as we know, they always have. Over the course of history, humans have written nearly 130 million books, containing over half a trillion words. The average ...

Theoretical study by Limor Raviv, Damian Blasi and Vera Kempe, argues that children are not likely to be the main force behind linguistic innovation. For more than a century, scholars have repeated a ...

Back in 2011, and again in 2012, I asked whether bilinguals who speak two (or more) languages change their personalities when they change language. In the first post, I gave testimonies from ...

A 2023 YouGov poll found that only 21% of UK adults can hold a conversation in a language other than their mother tongue. About half of the other 79% regretted not engaging more with languages at ...

In this new study, a research group from the University of Zurich is using for the first time genetic evidence of historical mixing between populations to investigate the effects of contact on ...