George Bernard Shaw once described the Americans and British as “two peoples separated by a common language,” underscoring that we are especially prone to misunderstandings when we think we are ...

If a sound change has lexically diffused without completing its course, one finds that among the lexical items qualified for the change, some have already changed (c), others have remained unchanged ...

The identification of cognates has attracted the attention of researchers working in the area of Natural Language Processing, but the identification of false friends is still an under-researched area.

"'Delicatessen' is a loanword, I think you call them," said my friend Claus. "You know, words you Americans basically stole from us and use as your own." Recently I had the opportunity to go to ...

Aug. 27 -- WEDNESDAY, Aug. 26 (HealthDay News) -- Bilingual people are unable to completely switch off their second language, even when reading in their native language, new research suggests.

Imagine that you’re flying Turkish Air. The beverage cart bumps down the aisle. A flight attendant holds up that little carafe and asks, kah-vay? You travel a lot. Now you’re flying Finnair. The ...

It must be a conspiracy – the way language tries to confuse us, that is. The plot thickens; the conspiracy gets worse. It turns out that there are look-alikes that are even trickier than false friends ...

Not a lot of things last over a thousand years; even fewer last over 10,000. Yet a British research team has put together a list of what they called “ultraconserved words,” or words that have remained ...

The words used the most in everyday language are the ones evolving at the slowest rate, say two new studies published in Nature. In one paper, researchers at Harvard University focused on the ...

A particular Act in Indian law defines these two relatively unfamiliar words. * “agnate” – one person is said to be an agnate of another if the two are related by blood or adoption wholly through ...