Much has been said about the remarkable ability humans have to extract meaning from language. That ability is remarkable indeed. In a split second, we perceive a spoken or written word and immediately ...

Language is central to all our lives and is arguably the cultural tool that sets humans apart from any other species. And on some accounts, language is the symbolic behaviour that allowed human ...

Language feels simple when we use it. We talk, we text, we listen, and words seem to appear naturally from thought. But the study of linguistics tells a more complicated story, one where language ...

The technology to decode our thoughts is drawing ever closer. Neuroscientists at the University of Texas have for the first time decoded data from non-invasive brain scans and used them to reconstruct ...

Some time ago, I fell into conversation with a colleague about what we had been reading lately, and the person suggested that I absolutely must give Henry James’s “The Ambassadors” a try. The pandemic ...

In a previous language column, I described some ways in which grammatical and spelling conventions that are typically ...