BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Much research addresses how and why many of the earth's thousands of languages are disappearing. The question still arises, however, as to why it should matter to the rest of us if, ...

Some Bantu languages spoken in southwestern Zambia and neighboring regions of Botswana, Namibia, and Angola are characterized by the presence of click consonants, whereas their closest linguistic ...

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, Vol. 119, No. 32 (August 9, 2022), pp. 1-9 (9 pages) The Bantu expansion transformed the linguistic, economic, and ...

In many languages across the world, speakers use intonation to focus on relevant information: ‘Father cooked the sauce’. Speakers may also use a specific sentence structure to mark focus: ‘It was ...

“To learn a language is to have one more window from which to look at the world,” reads an old Cantonese adage. Connie (@ShonaGirl_), a young Zimbabwean fundraiser for non-profit organisations and ...

Researchers have investigated the maternally inherited mitochondrial DNA of 500 individuals from southern Africa speaking different Khoisan and Bantu languages. Their results demonstrate that Khoisan ...

The Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies is the leading interdisciplinary journal on Asia, Africa and the Near and Middle East. It carries unparalleled coverage of the languages, ...

Tweet, tuít, or giolc? These were the three iterations of a Gaelic version of the word “tweet” that Twitter’s Irish translators debated in 2012. The agonizing choice between an Anglicized spelling, a ...