Of the 20,000 genes in the human genome, few are more fascinating than FOXP2, a gene that underlies the faculty of human speech. All animals have an FOXP2 gene, but the human version's product differs at just 2 of its 740 units from that of chimpanzees, suggesting that this tiny evolutionary fix may hold the key to why people can speak and chimps cannot.

Introduction: There is not one single Chinese language, but many different versions or dialects including Wu, Cantonese and Taiwanese. Northern Chinese, also known as Mandarin, is the mother tongue of about 70% of Chinese speakers and is the accepted written language for all Chinese.

This person can sing with his mouth closed while imitating other Japanese artists. I have no idea what he is saying since I can't understand Japanese, but it's still cool anyway.

The language we call English was first brought to the north sea coasts of England in the 5th and 6th centuries A.D., by seafaring people from Denmark and the northwestern coasts of present-day Germany and the Netherlands. These immigrants spoke a cluster of related dialects falling within the Germanic branch of the Indo-European language family.

Researchers have found they can go far in predicting which children with autism will eventually develop language and which will not - based on differences in brain activity when the children are infants and toddlers. The findings represent a potential breakthrough in tailoring future early intervention programs to improve communication and language even before a diagnosis of autism is possible at 18 to 24 months.

A linguist with autism?

http://www.slate.com/blogs/lexicon_valley/2013/09/13/mandarin_chinese_is_english_s_growing_popularity_a_threat_to_china_s_national.html

This is a follow up of the Ted talk we watched a few days ago about China.