Spoonerisms can be silly and make you laugh. But linguists see something more: a rare glimpse of how the mind plans speech before we even open our mouths.

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WARNING: If you’re short on time at the moment and have a list of even trivial things to do you should skip to the next article immediately. Only pass the next minute or two reading this essay if you wish to immerse yourself in an insignificant — possibly even a meaningless topic of interest to […]

Bilingual participants had brains appearing six years younger, while those speaking four languages showed brains that were roughly 13 years younger.

BEIRUT — Lebanese architect, historian and author Dr. Amine Jules Iskandar, president of the Maronite Union-Tur Levnon (Mount Lebanon), is calling for a renewed commitment to the Syriac language, arguing that its preservation is inseparable from safeguarding Lebanon’s historical identity, Christian heritage and cultural continuity. Speaking in an interview with Dixit, a program featuring conversations …

By the sixteenth century, Europeans had begun to notice similarities between European, Indian, and Iranic languages. An English Jesuit missionary, Thomas Stephens, in 1583 pointed out the similarities…

I love busting out a French subjunctive in pursuit of better restaurant service, so it’s a joy to discover there’s a neuroscientific upside to being multilingual, says Guardian columnist Rhiannon Lucy Cosslett

There are about 7,000 languages spoken around the world — and they all have different sounds, vocabularies and structures. But do they shape the way we think? Cognitive scientist Lera Boroditsky shares examples of language — from an Aboriginal community in Australia that uses cardinal directions instead of left and right to the multiple words for blue in Russian — that suggest the answer is a resounding yes. “The beauty of linguistic diversity is that it reveals to us just how ingenious and how flexible the human mind is,” Boroditsky says. “Human minds have invented not one cognitive universe, but 7,000.”