The Language Hoax: Why the World Looks the Same in Any Language By John H. McWhorter (Oxford, 208 pages, $19.95) Chinese has an extraordinary number of verbs meaning “carry.” If I carry something on a ...

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world,” observed philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein in 1922. We might ask, accordingly, how does language shape reality, arbitrating human experience of ...

You spend almost all of your waking hours—and even some of your non-waking hours—using language. Even when you’re not talking with other people, you’re still running a monologue in your head much of ...

The Pirahã community of the Amazon, whose language lacks words for exact numbers beyond two, struggle with tasks requiring precise quantity tracking. As Peter Gordon (2004) showed, acquiring number ...

Co-authored with Sayuri Hayakawa, Ph.D. As Japan's Emperor Akihito stepped down from the Chrysanthemum Throne in the country's first abdication in 200 years, Naruhito officially became the new Emperor ...

In the 1970s, a group of deaf Nicaraguan schoolchildren invented a new language. The kids were the first to enrol in Nicaragua’s new wave of special education schools. At first, they struggled with ...

If you’ve been paying attention to how Russian President Vladimir Putin talks about the war in Ukraine, you may have noticed a pattern. Putin often uses words to mean exactly the opposite of what they ...

Oleksandra Osypenko does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organization that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations ...