Language feels simple when we use it. We talk, we text, we listen, and words seem to appear naturally from thought. But the ...

What shapes the structure of languages? In a new study, an international team of researchers reports that grammatical structure is highly flexible across languages, shaped by common ancestry, ...

The study of pragmatics and variation in English language use encompasses an examination of how context, speaker intention, and cultural nuances interact to shape communication. It addresses the ...

He laid the foundation for sociolinguistics, and he showed that structures like class and race shaped speech as much as where someone lives. By Clay Risen William Labov, whose innovative research into ...

My research is primarily based in the camp of sociolinguistics with extensions to second- and heritage-language acquisition/development, phonetics/phonology ...

A new study introduces a multilingualism calculator that quantifies how multilingual a person truly is, offering a clearer alternative to vague labels like “bilingual.” ...

The focus of this section is on strategies to support resettled refugees’ acquisition of the language of the receiving community (often referred to as the target language). Some of the principles and ...

Linguists have long been interested in language variation. What are common or universal patterns across languages? What limits the possible variation between them? Grambank, the world's largest and ...