English has borrowed words from over 350 other languages.

Jazz improvisation activates the prefrontal cortex's language areas — musicians effectively 'speak' through their instruments.

Emoji are increasingly studied as a form of paralanguage — they provide emotional context to text.

Profanity activates a different part of the brain than regular language — it's processed more emotionally.

The alphabet is a Greek invention — the Greeks added vowels to the Phoenician consonant alphabet around 800 BC.

The word 'set' has the most definitions in the English language — over 430 in some dictionaries.

There are roughly 7,000 languages, but about 23 languages account for over half the world's speakers.

Babies can distinguish phonemes from any language at birth but lose this ability by 12 months.

Sign languages are full natural languages with their own grammar and syntax, not just manual versions of spoken language.