Using advanced imaging to visualize brain areas used for understanding language in native Japanese speakers, a new study finds that the pitch-accent in words pronounced in standard Japanese activates ...

All language-learners face the difficulties of regional variations or dialects. Usually, it takes the form of an odd word or turn of phrase or a peculiar pronunciation. For most languages, ...

A great deal of emphasis has been placed recently on the fact that the approaches to second language teaching and second dialect teaching are so similar that the instructor of standard English can ...

The ability of children to speak any two dialects -- two closely related varieties of the same language -- may confer the same cognitive advantages as those reported for multilingual children who ...

What’s the difference between a language and a dialect? Is there some kind of technical distinction, the way there is between a quasar and a pulsar, or between a rabbit and a hare? Faced with the ...

The vast majority of people, if asked what language is spoken in China, would say: That’s a no-brainer: Chinese, of course! Some might know enough to differentiate between Mandarin Chinese and ...

Some dialect variations can be limited to one village. Slovakia is a small country, but the variety in its language is great. Indeed, much of the nation's history concerns the struggle to identify, ...

Sign up for Forwarding the News, our essential morning briefing with trusted, nonpartisan news and analysis, curated by Senior Writer Benyamin Cohen. In last week’s ...

The story of languages is, by and large, one of extinction. Some estimate that in a hundred years only a few hundred languages will survive, as urbanization, globalization, and international media ...