Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, ...

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and ...

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 ...

At least some birds can learn a pattern once proposed as unique to the grammars of human languages, say researchers. Starlings trained in a lab have learned to distinguish between sounds strung ...