This article is part of our Summer reads series. Visit the full collection for book lists, guest essays and more seasonal distractions. IN 1786 WILLIAM JONES, a British civil servant in Calcutta, told ...

A new study claims to have identified the first speakers of Indo-European language, which gave rise to English, Sanskrit and hundreds of others. By Carl Zimmer In 1786, a British judge named William ...

For more than 150 years ago, the assumption that language is a singular event has hampered progress in explaining its evolution. Another obstacle was the failure to recognize that certain social ...