Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. Whether someone's speech is a language or a dialect is a matter of both linguistics and politics ...

Early this month, Hong Kong’s Education Bureau deleted an article from their website after it exposed a legal grey area inhabited by spoken language and attracted much criticism from locals. The ...

There are, at our best estimate, 7,000 languages in use across the world. That may sound like a linguistic ecosystem in rude ...

There are an incredible number of stereotyped perceptions of China that pervade Western culture, from the myth of the model minority to that of the dragon lady. Breaking these stereotypes is crucial ...

Tourists visiting La Gomera and El Hierro in the Canary Islands can often hear locals communicating over long distances by whistling — not a tune, but the Spanish language. “Good whistlers can ...

YESTERDAY'S post on Cantonese touched a few nerves. A blog post is a very compressed medium, and I said some things briefly that I still stand by but which deserve a bit of elaboration. My calling ...

Corrections & clarifications: An earlier version of this story contained inaccurate or incomplete facts about the history of language. Language is an essential part of human communication, allowing ...

Students studying for exams, competing against each other in areas involving language, and in general, should learn to distinguish between a language and its dialects. While the words are frequently ...