There has been a lot of research to back up the idea that people who use two or more languages everyday experience significant advantages. The brain training involved in having to use a different ...

Like humans, parrots have distinct vocal dialects and, like humans, they learn those dialects from their family and friends, so those dialects change when they relocate to a new area. Yellow-naped ...

Europe is unusual because it isn’t home to any native parrot species. But despite this, there is a rather large and diverse crowd of parrot species that have established naturalised populations after ...

Linguists are always taken aback by the overwhelmingly negative and sometimes virulently expressed reaction they get when stating something that every linguist believes (and linguists do not agree on ...

Often looked down upon as "pidgin German," dialects are an important part of cultural memory and diversity. Researchers say the vibrant spectrum of regional variations of German is under threat. One ...

As far back as George Bernard Shaw’s fictional professor Henry Higgins, language experts have argued that low-income students who learn to switch from speaking a dialect to using standard English have ...

No matter where you're from, we're probably all familiar with the fact that different people from different places might speak with a different accent or dialect from our own. But are there Internet ...

Laura Molles is so attuned to birds that she can tell where birds of some species are from just by listening to their song. She’s not a real-world Dr Doolittle. She’s an ecologist in Christchurch, New ...

Linguists concerned as regional languages dwindle amid push to strengthen uniform national identity Two years ago, Qi Jiayao visited his mother’s hometown of Shaoxing in eastern China. When he tried ...

If you need to hit a nail, what tool do you ask for? If you say “hammer,” do you pronounce the “r”? Do you drop the “h”? Different people pronounce the same English words in different ways. People ...