Language is an essential part of human communication, allowing people to express ideas, emotions, imagination and much more. But even while speaking the same language, no two people sound exactly ...

You have to go back 4,000 years, colleagues said, to find someone as fluent in Sumerian as Miguel Civil. A Catalonian-born professor with a purported photographic memory, he spent decades studying ...

Researchers have unearthed an ivory comb from 1700 BCE inscribed with a plea to eradicate lice. The finding provides direct evidence for the use of the Canaanite alphabet in daily activities some 3700 ...

Ice Age Europeans carved the same 32 symbols across an entire continent. Were they decorating caves—or building the first written language?

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 ...