The Niger-Congo family is usually credited with around 1,500 languages, more than any other, ahead of Austronesian. It includes Yoruba, Wolof and the roughly 500 Bantu languages such as Swahili, Zulu and Lingala. Linguists still debate the exact boundaries of this vast grouping, but Africa remains a continent of exceptional linguistic diversity.
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.