What’s in a swear? The world’s filthiest words typically refer to something vulgar or taboo, for one. But there’s something else swears across the world’s languages have in common. They’re all missing ...

We begin our discussion of phonetics, the study of speech sounds. The letters in a word don’t always match the sounds they represent, and people can pronounce words in different ways. We begin our ...

Consonants are the rest of the letters in the alphabet: b, c, d, f, g, h, j, k, l, m, n, p, q, r, s, t, v, w, x, y and z The letter 'y' is a bit different, because ...

Speech consists of a continuous stream of acoustic signals, yet humans can segment words from each other with astonishing precision and speed. To find out how this is possible, a team of linguists has ...

English bursts with consonants. We have words that string one after another, like angst, diphthong and catchphrase. But other languages keep more vowels and open sounds. And that variability might be ...

The answer partly depends on whether we are talking about the sounds or letters of vowels and consonants. By mentioning “alphabetic languages”, the questioner is presumably asking why most versions of ...