Many linguists have proposed that languages spoken by numerous non-native speakers tend to have simpler grammars. A new study challenges this claim. By analyzing a global sample of 1,314 languages, ...

Cognitive and computer scientists at the University of Toronto, Universitat Pompeu Fabra and the Catalan Institution for Research and Advanced Studies have found child language development and the ...

Despite the vast diversity of human languages, specific grammatical patterns appear again and again. A new study reveals that around a third of the long-proposed "linguistic universals"—patterns ...

Languages around the world differ greatly in how many grammatical distinctions they make. This variation is observable even between closely related languages. The speakers of Swedish, Danish, and ...