On 19 July 2023, President Cyril Ramaphosa signed the constitutional amendment making South African Sign Language the country's 12th official language, alongside English, Afrikaans, Zulu, Xhosa and seven others. A landmark for the country's Deaf community. New Zealand had led the way in 2006, when a law made its own sign language one of the country's official languages.
In Kuşköy, a mountain village in northern Turkey, people talk across valleys by whistling Turkish. A 2015 study showed that whistled Turkish draws on both hemispheres fairly evenly, whereas spoken Turkish relies mostly on the left. The physical form of the signal, it turns out, matters to the brain.
Speech has no gaps between words. In 1996, researchers played 8-month-old babies a continuous stream of made-up syllables for just two minutes. The infants picked out the 'words' by tracking which syllables tend to follow one another. That's probability calculation, done without a calculator or any visible effort.