Learning a second language can teach you to distinguish colors you don’t have in your first language

Welcome to this week’s edition of Discovery Dispatch, a weekly roundup of the latest language-related news, research in linguistics, interesting reads from the week, and newest books and other media dealing with language and linguistics!

🗞️ Current Linguistics

Recently published research in linguistics.

Learning a second language can teach you to distinguish colors you don’t have in your first language

A 2023 study found that the people of a remote Amazonian society called the Tsimane’, who don’t have color terms for ‘blue’ and ‘green’, began to interpret colors in a new way when they learned Spanish as a second language.

How “blue” and “green” appeared in a language that didn’t have words for them

A new study suggests the way a language divides up color space can be influenced by contact with other languages. Tsimane’ people who learned Spanish as a second language began to classify blue and green into using separate words, which their native tongue does not do.

MIT News | Massachusetts Institute of TechnologyAnne Trafton | MIT News

• Malik-Moraleda et al. 2023. Concepts are restructured during language contact: The birth of blue and other color concepts in Tsimane’-Spanish bilinguals. Psychological Science 34(12): 1350–1362. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976231199742.

Further Reading:

Gesture may have been the origin of language

Linguists have long speculated that language may have originated in gesture, as a type of early sign language, before shifting to a spoken medium. Using experimental evidence, a 2022 paper suggests that the meanings of gestures are sufficiently universal to have provided a basis for early language.

Hand Gestures May Have Been the Start of Human Language

Our unique language systems distinguish us from other species, but researchers explore how early hand gestures paved the way for civilization.

Discover MagazineSara Novak

• Fay et al. 2022. Gesture is the primary modality for language creation. Proceedings of the Royal Society B 289(1970). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.2022.0066

Mind-reading AI can turn imagined speech into words

A brain-computer interface has enabled people with paralysis to turn their thoughts directly into words, requiring less effort than older techniques where a physical attempt at speech had to be made.

Mind-reading AI can turn even imagined speech into spoken words

A brain-computer interface has enabled people with paralysis to turn their thoughts directly into words, requiring less effort than older techniques where a physical attempt at speech had to be made

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• Kunz et al. 2025. Inner speech in motor cortex and implications for speech neuroprostheses. Cell 188: 1–16. DOI: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cell.2025.06.015.

📃 This Week’s Reads

Interesting articles I’ve come across this week.

The Language of Deception

Researchers have been trying to determine whether liars—and truth-tellers—have certain linguistic “tells.” Is there such a thing as a linguistic lie detector?

Psychology TodayValerie Fridland Ph.D.

Do People Who Speak Different Languages Think Differently?

McElvenny credits linguist Noam Chomsky (1928–) with revitalizing the idea that we all have the same sort of minds; language does not really change that.

Mind MattersNews

Speaking of Words: Is ASL a Language?

A few years ago a controversy arose at UNH over American Sign Language. For a long time the introductory course in it had two or three sections, but suddenly the sections ballooned to eight or ten.

InDepthNH.orgMichael Ferber

Dear Duolingo: Is laughter the same in every language?

Learn how laughter is typed in languages across the world, and what other forms of digital laughter are used.

Duolingo BlogStefanie Schantl, M.A.

How Louis Braille revolutionized a writing system—despite efforts to stop him

Two hundred years ago, the son of a saddler from a rural French village devised a groundbreaking tactile writing method of raised dots for blind people at the mere age of 15.

History

What Are Constructed Languages? Learn Through Examples - Rosetta Stone

Learn all about constructed languages, their shared traits, and common examples from linguistic history with this in-depth guide.

Rosetta StoneJennifer Gunner

How new words enter our language

From “yeet” to “social distancing,” a linguistics expert breaks down how new words go from unknown to mainstream.

FuturityJen Plummer-Syracuse

What languages are most spoken in Minnesota homes?

Almost 640,000 people in Minnesota speak a language other than English at home. The state demographer says Minnesota’s unique immigrant populations have fostered more linguistic diversity than in many states.

Rachel Hutton

You Know More Finnish Than You Think

Linguistics illuminates the linguistically obscure – or so I’ve always thought. It’s a common theme of my online output that a little bit of historical linguistics goes a long way, maki…

Danny L. Batedannylbate

• Why the origin of the word ‘dog’ remains a mystery (NPR)

📚 Books & Media

New (and old) books and media touching on language and linguistics.

Babel No. 52

The latest issue of Babel: The Language Magazine is out! As always, there are some great articles this quarter, including two on endangered languages and language revitalization:

• Breton’s battleground: Repression and revival
• Māori language: A renaissance at risk?

You can subscribe to Babel here!

Babel Magazine | The magazine for lovers of languages and linguistics

The quarterly language magazine that brings you Babelzine, the cutting-edge linguistic research in an accessible and colourful format.

Babel Magazine | The magazine for lovers of languages and linguisticsStephen Fry

The origin of language: How we learned to speak and why

A new book on the evolution of language is out! The author, Madeline Beekman, professor in biological sciences at the University of Sydney, argues in this book that it was not hunting, fighting, or tool-making that forced early humans to speak, but the inescapable need to care for our children.

🗃️ Resources

Maps, databases, lists, etc. on language and linguistics.

New atlas of languages of the Americas

A brand new database of typological features in the languages of the Americas is now available! As described by the authors:

The aim of ATLAs is to capture areally relevant typological variation across North and South America, together with a baseline sample from the rest of the world. Our sample includes 325 languages worldwide, of which 220 are in the Americas. For each typological domain present in the database, we have attempted to encode as fine-grained features as possible, prioritizing typological depth within a given domain over the inclusion of more domains.

The database is available as a website at https://atlas.evolvinglanguage.ch/, which presents 265 typological variables at the level of languages as a whole. The data is also available on GitHub, and Zenodo. The GitHub repository includes three additional database modules not visible on the website, which exhaustively encode at the construction level the phenomena of (1) nominal possession, (2) morphological alignment, and (3) singular-plural verb stem alternation. Several language-level aggregations of these more detailed constructional databases are presented on the website.

• Web Portal: https://atlas.evolvinglanguage.ch/
• Data: https://github.com/davidainman/atlas-data/
• Research Paper: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41597-025-05169-4

🎒 Back to school with linguistics!

It’s the start of the school year for many universities, so I want to know: Who’s taking a linguistics class this year, and what classes are you taking?

Are you taking your first linguistics class, or taking more? Are you declaring a major? Finishing your degree?

Reply to this email and let me know!