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There are as many as 800 languages spoken in New York City, and nowhere in the world has more than Queens, according to the Endangered Language Alliance (ELA). You can see many of the languages in the article's map, which is featured in " Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas " by Rebecca Solnit and Joshua Jelly-Schapiro. The five miles from Astoria to Forest Hills have a dense progression of languages: Greek, Filipino, Urdu, Indonesian, Russian, Japanese, Lithuanian, and others, including more obscure ones like Chavacano, Waray-Waray, Minangkabau, and Bukharian.

In this vibrant borough of Queens, NY, a street called Roosevelt Avenue cuts a cross-section through some of the most ethnically diverse neighborhoods on Earth. Spanish, Bengali, Punjabi, Mixtec, Seke, and Kuranko are among the hundreds of languages spoken here.

The king and queen of Spain flew to the former colony of Puerto Rico to help launch on Tuesday what is considered the world's most important event involving the Spanish language. The royal couple joined more than 200 writers, academics and experts who traveled to the U.S. territory to...

It appears the queen's English ain't wot it used to be. A scientific study of Queen Elizabeth II's accent has found her vowels moving steadily downmarket. The study published in Nature magazine found there was a drift in the queen's accent toward one "characteristic of speakers who are...

Language is not static but dynamic, constantly evolving to suit the fashions of the time and this results in shifts in pronunciation and pitch. In the UK, for instance, far fewer people talk with "received pronunciation" these days - and even Queen Elizabeth II's voice has lost some of the cut-glass vowels of her youth. This is thought to reflect a more general shake-up in Britain's social hierarchies, leading to a kind of linguistic cross-pollination between the classes that has even reached Her Majesty. Women today speak at a deeper pitch than their mothers or grandmothers would have done, thanks to the changing power dynamics between men and women.

There was a time when the term "mom" (when said in public, anyway) elicited a certain kind of eye roll. Yet these days, "mom" is the highest form of flattery. And you don't even have to be an actual mother to receive it (nor does the mom you're talking about need to be yours). Mom (adj) has become Internetspeak for the absolute coolest.