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What are the world's most common languages? Estimating these most common language populations can be tricky, and there is a range of data available. Quiz yourself: see how many of these most common languages you can name before looking at the list. You might find some languages that surprise you!

English is, unsurprisingly, the most commonly spoken language across the US, and Spanish is second most common in 46 states and the District of Columbia. This infographic shows the most common language in every U.S. state, other than English and Spanish.

TechRadar spoke to Dr Matthew Voice, an Assistant Professor in Applied Linguistics at the UK's University of Warwick, to find out the science behind the struggle to deduce Wordle Puzzle #256. "[In your live blog] you've already talked about _ATCH as a kind of trap. This is an example of an n-gram, i.e. a group of letters of a length (n) that commonly cluster together. So this is an n-gram with a length of four letters: a quadrigram," Professor Voice tells us. "Using [this] Project Gutenberg data, it's interesting to note that _ATCH isn't listed as one of the most common quadrigrams in English overall, but the [same] data considers words of all lengths, rather than just the five letters Wordle is limited to. I don't know of any corpus exclusively composed of common 5 letter words, but it might be the case that _ATCH happens to be particularly productive for that length." "The other thing to mention," Professor Voice adds, "would be that the quadrigram _ATCH is made up of smaller n-grams, like the bigram AT, which is extremely common in English. So we're seeing a lot of common building blocks in one word, which means that sorting individual letters might not be narrowing down people's guesses as much as it would with other words."

In order to fill the shortage of jobs that is to come in Australia, they may have to start learning a new language, but it may not be what you think. The new language that many think is going to be the most common language in the world is computer coding. A program called, Code Camp, has been teaching primary school students, through after school and in school classes, how to write code. They are saying that there will be a shortage of Australians skilled enough to fill these positions.

Chinese New Year, known in China as Spring Festival, has an abundance of unique traditions associated with it. Some of these traditions are more widespread than others. Among the many New Year's customs are a few whose meaning is derived from puns of Mandarin words.

Research by the University of Liverpool has found that the same brain activity is used for language production and making complex tools, supporting the theory that they evolved at the same time. Dr Georg Meyer, from the University Department of Experimental Psychology, said: "This is the first study of the brain to compare complex stone tool-making directly with language. "Our study found correlated blood-flow patterns in the first 10 seconds of undertaking both tasks. This suggests that both tasks depend on common brain areas and is consistent with theories that tool-use and language co-evolved and share common processing networks in the brain."

Ruth Starkman, of Stanford University, examines the five 2013 Common Application Essay prompts, and offers some sage suggestions to jumpstart your writing process.

Mark Montgomery, of Montgomery Educational Consulting, examines the 2013-2014 Common Application Essay Prompts, and succinctly analyzes each prompt in turn, noting some key elements that should be present in a strong response.

Article explores the philosophical battle between those who believe in leveled reading--adjusting the difficulty of text to suit the ability of the reader--and those who emphasize the importance of "challenge" by having all students grapple with the same "complex texts." Leveled reading has become increasingly easier with the advent of technology. New-generation leveling tools like Newsela allow every student to read the same story, albeit at varying levels of complexity. "This facilitates the social learning that happens when students engage in a shared discussion of the text," Cogan-Drew notes. Second, digital reading programs can make leveling more discreet, preventing students from being teased or stigmatized for reading at a lower level. Compared to the large numbers emblazoned on the covers of many leveled-reader print books, the computerized versions call far less attention to the degree of competency of their users. At the same time, students using these programs are often given the option of dialing up or down their reading level themselves, supporting the development of their "metacognition," or awareness of their own cognitive abilities. Defenders of leveled reading and the champions of complex texts may share more common ground than they realize, however. Both agree that to become fluent readers, students must read a lot on their own-and such independent reading calls for not-too-easy, not-too-hard selections that look a lot like leveled reading. Meanwhile, both sides also concur that students should be asked to wrestle at times with more challenging texts-but in the classroom, where teachers are available to offer help and head off discouragement.

"Mothers and fathers used to bring up children: now they parent. Critics used to review plays: now they critique them. Athletes podium, executives flipchart, and almost everybody Googles. What's the driving force behind it? "Looking for short cuts, especially if you have to say something over and over again, is a common motivator," says Groves."

"According to Christopher Johnson, a branding expert who runs the Web site the Name Inspector, "there's a land grab going on" in the information economy, as "companies are trying to snatch up pieces of our cultural commons." He lays much of the blame on the increasing scarcity of available names, whether for trademarks, domain names or Twitter handles." See also Language Log discussion: http://languagelog.ldc.upenn.edu/nll/?p=3055

"The results are bad news for universalists: "most observed functional dependencies between traits are lineage-specific rather than universal tendencies," according to the authors. [...] If universal features can't account for what we observe, what can? Common descent. "Cultural evolution is the primary factor that determines linguistic structure, with the current state of a linguistic system shaping and constraining future states." It's important to emphasize that this study looked at a specific language feature (word order)."

A U of M professor is trying to beat the clock to finish his masterwork: A dictionary of the origins of some of the most misunderstood words in English.... Liberman discovered that about 1,000 common English words -- mooch, nudge, man, girl, boy, frog, oat, witch and skedaddle among them -- seemed to be highly confused or all but untraceable, as if they magically appeared in English, pouf!

There are many ways that we can express our identities. We can alter the way we look, the things we're interested in, the way we dress. But one thing we're pretty much stuck with is our voice. Sure the words coming from our mouths can be tailored to a situation or a desired persona, but the actual sound of our voice is difficult to change. For writer David Thorpe, the sound of his own voice always had him contemplating the same question: "Do I sound gay?" However, his wasn't simply an inquisitive statement; it was an expression of dissatisfaction that he had a gay voice, even though he was openly gay. Using his own struggle with his identity as the common thread, he consults linguists who illuminate the mechanical traits of gay speech and attribute this common characteristic to a strong feminine influence in the early lives of gay men.

Teacher Vidya Tandanki brings children ranging from 9 to 14 into her home three days a week and teaches them Telugu. Telugu, a common tongue in India, is rare to hear from the mouths of second- and third-generation Indian Americans. (Los Angeles Times)

Jennifer Sclafani, an associate teaching professor in Georgetown University's Department of Linguistics, has been studying the way Trump speaks. She notes that the way Trump speaks, he speaks was a commoner rather than a president, who is usually someone that sounds more educated, and more refined than an average American. She has noticed that through hyperboles and directness from his words, he creates a feeling of strength and determination that he can get the job done. Trump also omits the word "well" which makes him come across as a straight talker and not someone that tries to escape a question.

Some metaphors are common in spoken language but are inappropriate in sign, body-part metaphors are possible in sign metaphors but odd/uncommon in spoken metaphor. In spoken language, tone and body position determine when a metaphor is that and not literal. Sign metaphors also have similar markers such as change in facial expression but are more limited in expressing change in tone and body position (as the body is already the main mode of communication). There is a sign for "metaphor" or a way to slightly change the signs for common words in metaphor so that the "listener" knows that the "speaker" means something metaphorically as opposed to literally.

This article describes a study conducted by the Allen Institute of Artificial Intelligence which evaluated AI's capability to actually understand the language it produces. This comes after recent advancements in natural-language processing (NLP) have allowed AI to generate convincing literary works. In the study, researchers posed over 44,000 questions, built off the Winograd Schema Challenge, to an AI system. Essentially, the questions used pairs of sentences with slight differences that flipped the meaning of a pronoun, thus requiring a comprehensive understanding of semantics in order to correctly assign the pronoun. The study found that the AI only had a 60-80% success rate, compared to the human success rate of roughly 94%.