The Tower of Babel story is a fanciful attempt to account for a very real question: What was the first language and why are there now so many of them? The video below from TED Ed shows a brief history ...

An icon in the shape of a lightning bolt. Impact Link THE Washington Post reports today that linguists have discovered a handful of "ultraconserved" words, some 15,000 years old. These are said to ...

A new linguistic study sheds light on the nature of languages spoken before the written period, using computational modeling to reconstruct the grammar of the 6500-7000 year-old Proto-Indo-European ...

Ancient languages hold a treasure trove of information about the culture, politics and commerce of millennia past. Yet, reconstructing them to reveal clues into human history can require decades of ...

How do we know what ancient Egyptian sounded like, or Old English? Linguistics gives us the tools to reconstruct lost languages from the words we speak today. Here’s how it’s done. The most important ...

Book Extract: Excerpted with permission from the publisher Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global,‎ Laura Spinney, published by ‎ William Collins. Bronze drove the economy and mining was a ...

Hausa is the most widely known Chadic language, spoken by some 80 million people or more. It’s harder to grasp the history of other, unwritten Chadic languages. Irene Becker/Contributor/Getty Images ...