If you enjoyed this article, I’d like to ask for your support. Scientific American has served as an advocate for science and industry for 180 years, and right now may be the most critical moment in ...

Created by Oscar Rodriguez, who sometimes goes by the name "El Marfa," the series honors the Texas borderlands patois commonly called Caló. Oscar grew up speaking this language in Ojinaga and Odessa.

Despite the great diversity of human languages, recurring grammatical patterns (termed ‘universals’) have been found. Using the Grambank database of more than 2,000 languages, spatiophylogenetic ...