Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Whether someone's speech is a language or a dialect is a matter of both linguistics and politics ...

Early this month, Hong Kong’s Education Bureau deleted an article from their website after it exposed a legal grey area inhabited by spoken language and attracted much criticism from locals. The ...

There are an incredible number of stereotyped perceptions of China that pervade Western culture, from the myth of the model minority to that of the dragon lady. Breaking these stereotypes is crucial ...

There are, at our best estimate, 7,000 languages in use across the world. That may sound like a linguistic ecosystem in rude ...

Corrections & clarifications: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate or incomplete facts about the history of language. Language is an essential part of human communication, allowing ...

Tourists visiting La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling — not a tune, but the Spanish language. “Good whistlers can ...

Computer scientist Pascale Fung can imagine a rosy future in which polyglot AI helpers like ChatGPT bridge language barriers. In that world, Indonesian store owners fluent only in local dialects might ...

Persian is spoken today primarily in Iran, but was historically a more widely understood language in an area ranging from the Middle East to India. Significant populations of speakers in other Persian ...