Experts trace the rise of Indo-European languages as the largest family, from ancient migrations to modern dominance.

By contrast, extinct and endangered languages are the preoccupation of Rare Tongues, a quirky study by linguist Lorna Gibb, aimed at all audiences. The origin of the Indo-European language family ...

Proto: How One Ancient Language Went Global by Laura Spinney is an exploration of how hundreds of languages share a single ...

Scholars believe a language used 5,000 years ago on the Asian steppe was the source of many of the world’s modern tongues.

In fact, the season unfolds like a sly symposium on the many meanings of happiness in an age of TED Talks, best-selling manifestoes and podcasts that chirp endlessly about self-optimization and the ...

Hunting the origin of 40 per cent of the languages spoken today is a huge feat, but Laura Spinney's new book makes an ...

Imagine being able to travel back thousands of years, not with a time machine, but through the words our ancestors spoke. It ...

This week’s pick of interesting reads includes a courageous memoir that looks squarely at loss and death, the story of an ...

Albanian is by far the most common language in Albania, with over 98% of the population able to speak and understand the ...

In “Proto,” Laura Spinney details the centurieslong effort to reconstruct Proto-Indo-European (PIE), what linguists believe to be the mother tongue of a diverse constellation of languages from ...

When Curtis Rattray walks on Tahltan land, he often pauses to write in a tattered notepad. He jots down descriptions of the ...