Fear of long words is called hippopotomonstrosesquippedaliophobia.

Creole languages form when children of pidgin speakers create a fully structured native language.

The Rosetta Stone was the key to deciphering Egyptian hieroglyphics because it contained the same decree in three scripts.

Some languages mark grammatical distinctions English lacks — such as whether the speaker knows something directly or by report.

Urdu and Hindi are mutually intelligible in speech but written in completely different scripts.

The Phoenician alphabet had 22 letters — all consonants — and became the ancestor of most Western alphabets.

The Sumerian language died as a spoken tongue around 2000 BC but continued as a liturgical language for centuries.

Noam Chomsky proposed humans have an innate 'universal grammar' — a built-in capacity for language.

The longest palindrome in English is a sentence: 'A man, a plan, a canal: Panama.'