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Intuitively, it is tempting to think that a child who has an elder brother or sister will grow up in a stimulating linguistic environment and will develop their language skills faster than the family's firstborn. However, several studies have shown the contrary: the acquisition of language in a child with an elder sibling is reported to be slower than a child who has none.

More than 1000 children have been followed from birth to five and a half years old in the mother-child cohort EDEN.* Their language skills were evaluated at 2, 3 and 5.5 years old by tests measuring several aspects of language, such as vocabulary, syntax and verbal reasoning

Children who have an elder brother had on average a two-month delay in language development compared with children with an elder sister.

"To have faith in a religion, any religion, is to accept at some primary level that its particular language of words and symbols says something true about reality. This doesn't mean that the words and symbols are reality (that's fundamentalism), nor that you will ever master those words and symbols well enough to regard reality as some fixed thing. What it does mean, though, is that you can 'no more be religious in general than [you] can speak language in general' (George Lindbeck), and that the only way to deepen your knowledge and experience of ultimate divinity is to deepen your knowledge and experience of the all-too-temporal symbols and language of a particular religion. Lindbeck would go so far as to say that your religion of origin has such a bone-deep hold on you that, as with a native language, it's your only hope for true religious fluency. I wouldn't go that far, but I would say that one has to submit to symbols and language that may be inadequate in order to have those inadequacies transcended. This is true of poetry, too: I don't think you can spend your whole life questioning whether language can represent reality. At some point, you have to believe that the inadequacies of words you use will be transcended by the faith with which you use them. You have to believe that poetry has some reach into reality itself, or you have to go silent," - Christian Wiman, "Notes on Poetry and Religion," from Ambition and Survival: Becoming a Poet.

What we have learned is that the answer to this question is complicated. To some extent, it's a chicken-and-egg question: Are you unable to think about things you don't have words for, or do you lack words for them because you don't think about them?

Whorf believed that because of this difference, Hopi speakers and English speakers think about events differently, with Hopi speakers focusing more on the source of the information and English speakers focusing more on the time of the event.

There's a language called Guugu Yimithirr (spoken in North Queensland, Australia) that doesn't have words like left and right or front and back. Its speakers always describe locations and directions using the Guugu Yimithirr words for north, south, east, and west. So, they would never say that a boy is standing in front of a house; instead, they'd say he is standing (for example) east of the house. They would also, no doubt, think of the boy as standing east of the house, while a speaker of English would think of him as standing in front of the house.

“Really” I was fine, I told her. But what if I hadn’t been? Would I have wanted to launch into a description of bad medical news at what was supposed to be a fun event? Would I have wanted even to be reminded of a bout with cancer?

False optimism devalued what was going on in my body. People were insensitive not from a lack of compassion but from not knowing what is really helpful.

What he and those he’s counseled have found to be most helpful were not words but actions

In today’s globally connected world, language may still be a barrier to science.

Today, almost every major scientific journal prints in English – even while featuring research from all over the world.

Meanwhile, new research suggests, tens of thousands of reports are being published without English translations.

Welcome to another round of the Language Wars. By now we know the battle lines: As a “descriptivist,” I try to describe language as it is used. As a “prescriptivist,” you focus on how language should be used.

Your excellent guide, “Garner’s Modern American Usage,” shows you to be, in your words, a “descriptive prescriber.” You give not just “right” or “wrong” rulings on usage, but often a 1-5 score, in which a given usage may be a 1 (definitely a mistake), 3 (common, but …) or 5 (perfectly acceptable). This notion of correctness as a scale, not a binary state, makes you different from many prescriptivists.

“There is a set of standard conventions everyone needs for formal writing and speaking. Except under unusual circumstances, you should use the grammar and vocabulary of standard written English for these purposes.”

"The areas of the brain related to language ramped way up when the musical behavior was spontaneous between the two musicians,"

"During the improvised exchanges, the parts of the brain that interpret the meaning of language — semantics — were completely deactivated,"

This could suggest there is a fundamental difference between how the brain processes meaning for music and language.

The stultifying language of economic theory is becoming more and more prevalent outside the worlds of business and policy. We use terms like "human resources" to discuss ... our coworkers. We run cost-benefit analyses when deciding between the pizza and the pasta. We use language that suggests a world that can be scrutinized and organized according to neat inputs and outputs—according, in other words, to systems.

American language, in the discussion of non-economic realms, has been infiltrated by economic metaphors and economic terms."

Economicism, on the other hand, is allowing the language and the frameworks of economics to permeate other fields. The "ism" version of "economics" is, Wieseltier said, "raising economics as a source of wisdom in realms that have nothing to do with economics." 

In one recent study, Dr. Werker and her collaborators showed that babies born to bilingual mothers not only prefer both of those languages over others — but are also able to register that the two languages are different. In addition to this ability to use rhythmic sound to discriminate between languages, Dr. Werker has studied other strategies that infants use as they grow, showing how their brains use different kinds of perception to learn languages, and also to keep them separate.

Over the past decade, Ellen Bialystok, a distinguished research professor of psychology at York University in Toronto, has shown that bilingual children develop crucial skills in addition to their double vocabularies, learning different ways to solve logic problems or to handle multitasking, skills that are often considered part of the brain’s so-called executive function. These higher-level cognitive abilities are localized to the frontal and prefrontal cortex in the brain. “Overwhelmingly, children who are bilingual from early on have precocious development of executive function,” Dr. Bialystok said. Dr. Kuhl calls bilingual babies “more cognitively flexible” than monolingual infants.

Instead of self-confident and self-centered answers, the author humbly asks fundamental questions: What is economics? What is its meaning? Where does this new religion, as it is sometimes called, come from? What are its possibilities and its limitations and borders, if there are any? Why are we so dependent on permanent growing of growth and growth of growing of growth? Where did the idea of progress come from, and where is it leading us? Why are so many economic debates accompanied by obsession and fanaticism?

The majority of our political parties act with a narrow materialistic focus when, in their programs, they present the economy and finance first; only then, somewhere at the end, do we find culture as something pasted on or as a libation for a couple of madmen.

most of them—consciously or unconsciously—accept and spread the Marxist thesis of the economic base and the spiritual superstructure.

When your language routinely obliges you to specify certain types of information, it forces you to be attentive to certain details in the world and to certain aspects of experience that speakers of other languages may not be required to think about all the time. And since such habits of speech are cultivated from the earliest age, it is only natural that they can settle into habits of mind that go beyond language itself, affecting your experiences, perceptions, associations, feelings, memories and orientation in the world.

BUT IS THERE any evidence for this happening in practice?

In recent years, various experiments have shown that grammatical genders can shape the feelings and associations of speakers toward objects around them

There are between 6,000 to 7,000 languages in the world. Yet 96% are spoken by just 3% of the global population. And 85% are endangered,

Along with the spoken words, something else is also at risk: each language’s individual script. When we talk about “endangered languages”, most of us think of the spoken versions first. But our alphabets can tell us huge amounts about the cultures they came from.

Language is innate to all humans, but scripts have to be invented and actively learned. This has happened rarely.

Language is a medium through which we pass on most knowledge. You could ask yourself how much you would know if you had no language to gather or express knowledge. Our daily language is heavily influenced by the discourse of the most dominant groups in our communities, even though we may not always be aware of this fact. The language we speak can be used to pass on knowledge and values that exist within our community, but it also influences to some extent how we know. Even though the limitations of the Sapir-Whorf Hypothesis's linguistic determinism have been pointed out, new research (eg by Boroditsky, see below) reveals how the language we speak may shape the way we think

Language is a complex topic, interwoven with issues of identity, rhetoric, and ar

While other animals do have their own codes for communication — to indicate, for instance, the presence of danger, a willingness to mate, or the presence of food — such communications are typically “repetitive instrumental acts” that lack a formal structure of the kind that humans use when they utter sentences

As Homo sapiens, we have the necessary biological tools to utter the complex constructions that constitute language, the vocal apparatus, and a brain structure complex and well-developed enough to create a varied vocabulary and strict sets of rules on how to use it.

Based on analysis of newly released Census Bureau data for 2018, the Center for Immigration Studies finds that 67.3 million residents in the United States now speak a language other than English at home, a number equal to the entire population of France

As a share of the population, 21.9 percent of U.S. residents speak a foreign language at home — more than double the 11 percent in 1980.

In America's five largest cities, just under half (48 percent) of residents now speak a language other than English at home.

Earlier this year, Merriam-Webster made news by designating “they” as its “Word of the Year.” It seemed a fitting cap to a year in which the very structures of language itself were the subject of debate and scrutiny over its real effects on how we live, especially where it concerns the advancement of human rights. Across the globe, people are posing questions about how we use language to describe people and situations, and whether the words we use are inclusive enough of all genders and orientations.

This intense debate is epitomized in the Spanish-speaking world, where a teenage-led movement to eliminate gender from the language has made strides this past year, forcing different generations to have a conversation about what is acceptable in 2019.

“the language form has divided the feminist movement from which it originated. While some within the movement insist on speaking in a way that includes non-binary people, others have resisted, preferring to emphasize the voices of women by using feminine words.”

t was a victory for a subset of French feminists who had argued that the gendered nature of the language promotes sexist outcomes, and that shifting to a gender-neutral version would improve women’s status in society. Educating the next generation in a gender-inclusive way, they claimed, would yield concrete positive changes, like professional environments that are more welcoming to women.

Feminists who believe that these features of the French language put women at a disadvantage disagree about how best to remedy them.

Many linguists I spoke to stressed that changing a language doesn’t guarantee a change in perception; this leads some of them to say that inclusive writing just isn’t worth the trouble. But at least one major school of linguistic thought concludes that language and perception are intimately related.