Ethnologue lists just over 7,100 living languages, around 2,300 of them in Asia and more than 2,000 in Africa. Europe has only about 300, barely 4% of the total. The figure keeps shifting: languages die out, others are described for the first time, and the line between language and dialect remains blurry.
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.